23 Quotes by Robert R. Reilly

Orthodoxy has arrogated to itself the task of guiding the destiny of Muslims. But their prescription for society is an invitation to catastrophe and possibly to a new Dark Age for Muslims.

This is imperative for the East as well as the West. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).

Obviously, al-Ghazali rejected the Mu‘tazilite position that there is no faith without reason, or that faith requires rational assent, since for him reason is “blind.

The number of books translated in the Muslim world is five times less than of those translated in Greece. In fact, in the past one thousand years, since the reign of al-Ma’mun, the Arab community has translated only 10,000 books, or roughly the number that Spain translates in one year.

Those wishing to influence the Islamic world through public diplomacy and the media should take heed of Lawrence Freedman’s admonition: “Opinions are shaped not so much by the information received but the constructs through which that information is interpreted and understood.”30 Unless and until the Sunni world reembraces philosophy, it is difficult to imagine through what “constructs” it could receive the promotion of equal human rights in a favorable way.

The joint commissioner of the Mumbai police, Rakesh Maria, said of the captured terrorist Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the only surviving perpetrator of the 2008 mass murder in Mumbai, India, “He was led to believe that he was doing something holy.

For radical Islamists, as we have seen, democracy itself is a blasphemous act of impiety and must be destroyed.

As Fouad Ajami observed, the inability to relate cause to effect is pandemic in the Islamic world.

finding ways of wedding [Islam’s traditional] protective role with modern democratic and economic institutions is a challenge that has not yet been met.