Patrick Ford's recent discussion of the "libertarian problem" observed how resistance to the neoconservatives had produced an unusual alliance on the Right between such divergent elements as "hedonistic anarchists and medieval Catholics." Patrick expressed skepticism of whether the libertarian-traditionalist alliance can be a durable one, given the sharp differences to be found among the respective philosophical foundations of the two camps. Traditionalist objections to libertarianism are usually rooted in what is often described as libertarianism's "atomistic individualism" whereby an ideologically constructed conception of "abstract liberty" is elevated over and above more concrete and immediately tangible matters of culture, history, tradition, community, family, religion, and so forth. Libertarians are accused of deifying the economy as an end unto itself, rather than as a means to the end of meeting human needs and irrespective of the impact of economic forces on non-material values. The traditionalists will say that while libertarians may deny the innate equality of individuals, libertarians implicitly endorse an egalitarian ethos regarding human groups such as nations, cultures, religions, regions, races, and genders. Libertarian economism simply regards these things as interchangeable commodities, and no more significant than different brands of deodorant or fast food. In other words, libertarians are simply liberals who reject the welfare state, according to the traditionalist critique. For this reason, many libertarians see mass immigration from the Third World into the West as no big deal, as human cultures and ethnic populations are interchangeable, with economics and political ideology being what really matters.

Why is the Muslim world in the condition it is? Why do Muslims do such odd and inhuman things? Why does Spain translate more books in a year than the Arabs in a thousand years, Pakistan edit physics textbooks to get rid of references to causality, and the Arab world remain at the bottom of every measure of development for countries outside sub-Saharan Africa?

Robert R. Reilly, in his forthcoming book of that title, says it's all because of The Closing of the Muslim Mind. According to its subtitle, his book, to be published by ISI, tries to explain "how intellectual suicide created the modern Islamist." As such it's a clear and informative account that emphasizes basic issues and quotes lots of primary sources. (Like all accounts, it's imperfect, but more on that later.)

According to Reilly, the closing is longstanding. It began in earnest with the overthrow of the Mutazilites by the Asharites in the Abbasid caliphate around 848 A.D., and was pretty much completed by the 12th century. The Mutazilites were theologians who read the Greeks and liked what they saw, so they made reason primary in understanding everything, including God. The Asharites, in contrast, believed in God as absolute will, so that His uniqueness and unity meant that His arbitrary decision determines everything. If you said that reason determines God's actions you were denying His supreme freedom and omnipotence, and if you said that something that wasn't God (like human decision or the essential nature of things) had any effect on anything you were a polytheist.