Robert R. Reilly’s eye-opening book masterfully explains the frightening behavior coming out of the Islamic world. Terrorism, he shows, is only one manifestation of the spiritual pathology of Islamism.

Reilly uncovers the root of our contemporary crisis: a pivotal struggle waged within the Muslim world nearly a millennium ago. In a heated battle over the role of reason, the side of irrationality won. The deformed theology that resulted, Reilly reveals, produced the spiritual pathology of Islamism, and a deeply dysfunctional culture.

The Closing of the Muslim Mindsolves such puzzles as:

· why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development

· why scientific inquiry is nearly dead in the Islamic world

· why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years

· why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon

Delving deeper than previous polemics and simplistic analyses, The Closing of the Muslim Mindprovides the answers the West has so desperately needed in confronting the Islamist crisis.