The closing of the Muslim mind Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The closing of the Islamic question - Essay ExampleBasically, the Muslims closed the doors to explore the adult male 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 changearite theological school. Consequently, the gap between mens reasoning capacity and reality widened which was the source of Sunni Islams woes. Reilly states the history of Islam provide 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 power saw great victory 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 Mutazilite who encouraged free will in the Muslim world. Those responsible Earlier in the year 750, the Mutazilite school naturalised by advocators of free will, established solid grounds to reason and philosophy. There were interactions between the Muslim who attended Mutazilite and Christian theologians showing interest to join the two faiths. The Mutazilite 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 foundation and hum anitys 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 abidance. Dehellenisation process involved the refusal to reason and ignoring facts while intellectual ossification involved traditional beliefs and behavior as opposed to modernness and technology use. However, the success was short lived when Asharite challenged the Mutazilite doctrine in court which led to their expulsion from court. Those found to be holding the Mutazilite doctrine were found to catch committed a crime punishable by death. Through this, the Asharites had achieved their revenge on the Mutazilites for their previous poor treatment. The Mutazilites were removed from all government positions. The Asharites opposed views of God, the universe and humanity. By the end of the 10th century, booksellers and copyrights we re prohibited from trading in literally works of theology, disputation and philosophy which were associated with the Mutazilites. 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 Mutazilite influence thus ending the most serious attempts of combining reason with Islam as a religion. As a result, the works of Mutazilite were destroyed by Asharites eventually leading to the closure of the Muslim mind.