Robert Reilly

Summary: The Closing of the Muslim Mind tells the extraordinarily dramatic story of the struggle within Islam over the relationship between God and reason—in other words over who God is—and of the dreadful effects of embracing a conception of God without reason. The deformed theology that resulted from this produced a dysfunctional culture. It has also produced a spiritual pathology that seeks success in death. Reilly attempts to relate not so much how the decline of the Muslim world happened, but why it happened; what its devastating consequences have been, and how the Muslim mind might possibly be reopened (as suggested by Muslims themselves), an endeavor fraught with repercussions for the West, as well as for the Islamic world.

Robert Reilly is senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He has taught at the National Defense University, and served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006). He participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 as Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of information. Before that, he was director of the Voice of America, where he had worked the prior decade. Mr. Reilly has served in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President (1983-1985), and in the U.S. Information Agency both in DC and abroad. In the private sector, he spent more than seven years with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, as both national director and then president. He attended Georgetown University and the Claremont Graduate University. He has published widely on foreign policy, “war of ideas” issues, Islam, and classical music. His latest book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, has been published by ISI Press.