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Two Book Recommendations

by Dan Haley
2/11/2012

You know how every once in a great while you read a book that impacts on a fundamental level the way you think about one of 'the big things,' and thereafter becomes a mental touchstone each time that particular topic comes up? I tripped over two such books in succession recently, both coming at the same 'big thing' - the on-going struggle against fanatic Islamism - from different angles.
 


People whose opinions I respect have been urging me to read Lone Survivor since it came out in 2007. I finally picked it up last week. "It will absolutely wreck you," one friend advised me - and he was right. I don't care who you are - have the tissues near by.

 

Lone Survivor is written in the first person by Marcus Luttrell, Navy SEAL and - you got it - lone survivor of Operation Red Wings, the 2005 counterinsurgency raid in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan.  This resulted in the single largest loss of SEALs in the history of that storied brotherhood, including the other three members of Luttrell's team. I cannot begin to do justice to the bravery, sacrifice and heroism that is described in the book's pages, so I won't try. All I can say is: read it. Please read it. Especially if you think you have an opinion, any opinion, about the U.S. Armed Forces and what its volunteer members put themselves through on our behalf in some of the most god-awful places on earth.

 

There are a few different dimensions to Lone Survivor. There is the story, of course: a brief description of Luttrell's yearning from earliest childhood to match himself up to the very best - the very toughest - that the U.S. Military has to offer; the unbelievable training; the initial deployment; the horrific ambush and firefight and the unfathomable valor of Luttrell and his teammates.  Finally there are the days and nights that Luttrell spent on the Godforsaken side of a mountain on the other side of the world - hunted by the Taliban.  He was sheltered and protected by primitive villagers who put their own lives and families at profound risk. They adhered to a centuries-old tradition by which they were obligated (having resolved to take Luttrell into their care) to protect him to the death. The story is incredible, and that word does not come close to doing it. (They are making a movie of course. You should read the book first.)

 Then there is the book's political dimension. That isn't a big part of the book, but it is a huge part of the story if that makes any sense. It is no exaggeration to say that a battlefield decision by Luttrell and his team was informed by concerns about negative media reaction back home.  This led directly to the firefight that killed 3/4 of the team and the entire rapid reaction force sent in to reinforce them.  The incoming helicopter was shot down as it prepared to deploy additional SEALs. Unsurprisingly, Luttrell has some opinions about the liberal media and how they tend to portray people like him and his fallen friends, and he is not shy about expressing them.

There is this toward the end of the book, though, written as Luttrell marvels at the overwhelming outpouring of gratitude and respect across the country as the bodies of his teammates came home:

It was all just people trying to pay their last respects. The same everywhere. And I am left feeling that no matter how much the drip-drip-drip of hostility toward us is perpetuated by the liberal press, the American people simply do not believe it. They are rightly proud of the armed forces of the United States of America. They innately understand what we do. And no amount of poison about our alleged brutality, disregard of the Geneva Convention, and abuse of human rights of terrorists is going to change what most people think.

 

I'd like to think Marcus Luttrell is right. I hope he is. I know that he'll become a little bit more right every time someone reads his book.

 

 


 

 

If Lone Survivor relates a quintessentially up-close and personal experience of radical Islamism, then Robert Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mindsteps back about 25,000 feet for a philosophical, academic perspective on the same radicalism.

 

Have you ever watched a news account of some Islamist atrocity and asked yourself how so many people living in or at least in proximity to the modern world can possible rationalize the horrific acts of brutality and murder supposedly committed in the name of religion? The Closing of the Muslim Mind begins to answer that question, with an in-depth analysis of a theological schism that took place in the Islamic world nearly a thousand years ago. The unbroken threads that tie that schism to events taking place right now, today, are stunning in their clarity once teased out from history's tangle.

The book is complex, and at times reads like a philosophy treatise, but in by its end Reilly's thesis is as clear as it is incontrovertible: approximately a millennium ago, Islam's leaders engaged in a theological debate, resolved ultimately only after much bloodshed, over whether there is a role for reason in Islam. And those who argued that there is no such role won. The implications of that outcome are as stark as they are far-reaching: huge numbers of Muslims, spanning generation upon generation, are raised to believe that there is no such thing as reason, no such thing as cause and effect, no such thing as a fact. Every single thing that happens in the world, according to this school of thought, every single instant of existence, is a direct result of a conscious decision by God. If I hold out a rock and let it go, it drops not because of gravity, but because God wills it to drop. If the rock were to rise instead, we should neither be surprised nor question why; to do so would be to question the will of God. And it goes without saying that such a belief system has no room for notions of individual will.

The practical effects of that theological decision are obvious today: without cause and effect, there can be no science. The notion of discovery is inimical to a belief system based on constant divine intervention; to inquire into the hows and the whys of the world is to presume to know, or to predict, the will of God. As Reilly puts it, "[I]f divine intervention is used to explain natural phenomena, then rational explanations of them or inquiries into them become forms of impiety, if not blasphemy." This, right here, is why vast swaths of the Muslim world have quite literally stood still, by multiple measures, for centuries. It is why so few patents emanate from the Muslim world, why there are so few books written, why the notion of scientific inquiry (and therefore progress) is virtually unheard of.

Reilly's examination quickly illustrates how belief in the absence of reason and of human will leads inevitably to elimination of the concepts of right and wrong, or of good and evil. If something happens, then it happens because God wills it to happen. There is no "good" and no "right" independent of that. If it happens, then it is good because God willed it to happen. It is not difficult to follow this thread of un-reason to its logical end-point: mass murder cannot be "evil" because if it happens then God willed it to happen, and if God willed it, then...

Here's a practical example from the book that struck me as particularly illustrative of the broader point:

Those involved in training Middle Eastern military forces have encountered a lackadaisical attitude to weapon maintenance and sharp-shooting. If God wants the bullet to hit the target, it will, and if He does not, it will not. It has little to do with human agency or skills obtained by discipline and practice.

 

Though to practice sharp-shooting would be of obvious benefit to the embattled jihadi, the devout will not practice because to practice is to reject the notion that each and every occurrence is a result of God's will. "If God wants the bullet to hit the target, it will..." If God wants the vest to explode and kill dozens of bystanders, it will.

I am certain that a good number of potential readers who would benefit from Reilly's in-depth analysis turn away from the book because of its title, which misleadingly (to my mind) suggests an anti-Muslim polemic. This book is not that in any sense. Neither is it a condemnation of Islam. There are a great many Muslims in the world, particularly the Western world, who reject the absolute repudiation of reason (and a great many who in turn deem them apostates for doing so). Much as left-wing apologists for terrorist atrocities like to pretend otherwise, there is a real and fundamental distinction between Islam and radical Islamism.

Rather, The Closing of the Muslim Mind is a well-researched, well-sourced, and thoroughly convincing examination of the continuing and perhaps amplifying ramifications of that bloody decision nearly a thousand years ago to banish reason from fundamentalist Muslim theology. If the Middle East and the innumerable political, military, religious and philosophical issues that emanate from that part of the world interest you, then this book is a must-read