The closing of the Muslim mind - Essay Example

Basically, the Muslims closed the doors to explore the world a millennium ago hence lagged behind Christian based countries in terms of scientific inquiries, technology advancement and economic development. The closing of the mind began to occur between the 9th and 10th centuries. This was a crucial era in the Islam world because the West countries introduced their cultures. The Muslim did not embrace this cultures hence the closure. The closure of the Muslim mind occurred in two ways. The first was to deny the people the capability of knowing anything new while the second was dismissing reality and unrecognizing it.

For example, in the Sunni Islam, both concepts were employed in one Ash’arite theological school. Consequently, the gap between men’s reasoning capacity and reality widened which was the source of Sunni Islam’s woes. Reilly states the history of Islam can be understood in four main phases: the Islamic (7th -13th centuries), the Ottoman (1453-1918), the nationalist (1918-1991) and post-nationalist (1991- to date as it is the current Islam flourishing (Reilly, 2010). The Ottoman and nationalist saw great success in expanding the Muslim world while Islamic and post-nationalist eras saw great conflict and decline.

However, the Islamic era did achieve narrow success through schools such as Mu’tazilite who encouraged free will in the Muslim world. Those responsible Earlier in the year 750, the Mu’tazilite school established by advocators of free will, established solid grounds to reason and philosophy. There were interactions between the Muslim who attended Mu’tazilite and Christian theologians showing interest to join the two faiths. The Mu’tazilite had established successfully the developed school of Islamic theology.

They insisted that the human mind was free to interpret revelation and choose which relevant religion to follow. This entailed the views of God, the universe and humanity’s place within the world. They hugely concentrated on the human mind to use the voice of reason in developing an understanding between the universe and God. Their concepts were based on eliminating the processes of dehellenisation and intellectual ossification. Dehellenisation process involved the refusal to reason and ignoring facts while intellectual ossification involved traditional beliefs and behavior as opposed to modernity and technology use.

However, the success was short lived when Ash’arite challenged the Mu’tazilite doctrine in court which led to their expulsion from court. Those found to be holding the Mu’tazilite doctrine were found to have committed a crime punishable by death. Through this, the Ash’arites had achieved their revenge on the Mu’tazilites for their previous poor treatment. The Mu’tazilites were removed from all government positions. The Ash’arites opposed views of God, the universe and humanity. By the end of the 10th century, booksellers and copyrights were prohibited from trading in literally works of theology, disputation and philosophy which were associated with the Mu’tazilites.

As such, the processes of dehellenisation and intellectual ossification were restarted once more. Reilly states that in the 12th century, the anti-rationalist and conservative institutions were close to destroying the Mu’tazilite influence thus ending the most serious attempts of combining reason with Islam as a religion. As a result, the works of Mu’tazilite were destroyed by Ash’arites eventually leading to the closure of the Muslim mind.