Those eager to make a new beginning must accept beforehand that the traditional mind will lead them to nowhere.

Since then Sunni Islam has adopted the official position that no new interpretations of the law can be entertained, and that what seemed right in twelfth-century Cairo or Baghdad must seem right today.

There are two fundamental ways to close the mind. One is to deny reason’s capability of knowing anything. The other is to dismiss reality as unknowable.

Al-Ghazali immodestly claims that, to prepare for the enterprise, he mastered the sum total of relevant knowledge: “There is no philosopher whose system I have not fathomed, nor theologian the intricacies of whose doctrine I have not followed out. Sufism has no secrets into which I have not penetrated.” He is the master of all.

The past glories of Islamic civilization show that it was once ableto progress. That progress was based upon a different set of ideas,antithetical to those of the Islamists, who would have been consideredheretical then.

In a line worthy of Robespierre, Sayyid Qutb said that a “just dictatorship” would “grant political liberties to the virtuous alone.”26 Hassan al-Banna, whose bedside reading was al-Ghazali, also regarded the Soviet Union under Stalin as a model of a successful one party system.

It understood the crisis as a rebuke from Allahbecause Muslims had not followed His way. Just as success is a validation of faith, failure is a personal rebuke. Did not Allah promise, “You shall be uppermost if you are believers” (3:139)? The corollary to this must be that, if you are not uppermost, you must not be believers.

In Taliban-controlled portions of Pakistan, “Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled.” Like car insurance, vaccinations are a form of presumption. Only with the expulsion of the Taliban from the Swat Valley in the late summer of 2009 was the Pakistani government able to resume vaccinations.

The entire edifice of individual rights derived from the natural state of the individual or through a secular ethical or political theory is alien to the structure of Islamic reasoning.

With scathing sarcasm, Abdelwahab Meddeb, the Tunisian reformist, said of Islamist terrorists, “No criminal is more despicable than one who not only fails to feel any guilt after [committing] his crime, but also harbors the illusion that this [crime] will bring him . . . divine reward. This conversion of bad into good not only spares him guilt, but also turns an unhappy person into a happy soul.