Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Iranian Islamic Scholar and Professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University

"Man can be defined as a being born to transcend himself. And the meaning of human life resides in man’s seeking to become what he was, is and will be eternally in God... Man is the eye through which God knows Himself in His creation, through which God sees and reflects upon His own Splendor. The supreme goal of life is the attainment of this state of awareness of being the eye of which God is the light."

"A complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers."

"Beauty is at once a royal path to God and an impediment to reaching God if it is taken as a god in itself."

"Each decade absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade."

"Each revelation is in fact the manifestation of an archetype which represents some aspect of the Divine Nature. Each religion manifests on earth the reflection of an archetype at whose heart reside the Divinity itself. The total reality of each tradition, let us say Christianity or Islam, as it exists meta-historically and also as it unfolds throughout its destined historical life, is none other than what is contained in that archetype ... Religions do not die since their archetype resides in the immutable domain and they are all possibilities in the Divine Intellect."

"Even from a purely empirical, scientific point of view, these [traditional] virtues must be seen as being of great value, seeing that they have made it possible for human beings to live for thousands of years in the world without destroying the natural environment as we are currently doing. These traditional virtues that allowed countless generations to live in equilibrium with the world around them were at the same time conceived as ways of perfecting the soul, as steps in the perfection of human existence. These virtues provided the means for living at peace with the environment. They also allowed man to experience what it means to be human and to fulfill his destiny here on earth?asceticism is [now] considered to be a vice, not a virtue. It is not taught in our schools as a virtue; it is taught as a vice, preventing us from realizing ourselves, as if our ?selves? were simply the extension of our physicality. This idea of self-realization is, of course, central to Oriental and certain Occidental traditions. But it has become debased in the worst way possible and transformed into the basis for modern consumerism, which can be seen in its most virulent form in America?now fast conquering Europe, and doing a good job of reaching India, China, Indonesia, etc. (within the next decade we will have several billion new consumers in such countries thirsting for artificial things which they have lived without for the last few thousand years). And what this will do to the earth God alone knows. It is beyond belief and conjecture what will happen if present trends continue. So what is it that can rein in the passions, either gradually or suddenly? Nothing but religion for the vast majority of people who, believing in God and the afterlife, still fear the consequences of their evil actions in their lives in this world. If it were to be told to them that pollution and destruction of the environment is a sin in the theological sense of the term they would think twice before indulging in it."

"Fish begin to stink from the head, not the tail. Think of the heads of state and governments who make bad decisions based on faulty policies as the heads of the fish, but remember, it is the tail that propels one through the water."

"For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world."

"As soon as nature became an ?it?, there was bound to be this [crisis]."

"From its genesis twelve hundred years ago to today, Islamic philosophy (al-hikmah; al-falsafah) has been one of the major intellectual traditions within the Islamic world, and it has influenced and been influenced by many other intellectual perspectives, including Scholastic theology (kalam) and doctrinal Sufism (al-ma'rifah or al-tasawwuf al-'ilmi) and theoretical gnosis ('irfan-i nazari)."

"From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation."

"From the Renaissance until today, Christianity, and also to some extent Judaism, in the West have had to carry out a constant battle against ideologies, philosophies, institutions and practices which are secular in nature and which challenge the authority of religion and in fact its very validity and legitimacy. These challenges to religion have varied from political ideas which are based on secularism to the denial of the religious foundation of morality and the philosophical denial of the reality of God and of the afterlife or of revelation and sacred scripture. The history of the West has been marked during the last few centuries by a constant battle between the forces of religion and secularism and in fact the gaining of the upper hand by secularism and consequently the denial of the reality of religion and its pertinence to various domains of life."

"Furthermore, in the 13th/19th century philosophy began to see itself as a complete replacement for religion as one can see in the rise of the very idea of ideology at that time, a term used widely today even by Muslims who rarely realize the essentially secular and anti-religious character of the very concept of ideology which has gradually come to replace traditional religion in so many circles."

"Has so many beautiful verses [of poetry] on this subject. It is part and parcel of our culture. In fact, in order to become completely industrialized, the champions of industrialization and modernization are destroying that culture. We are negating much of our heritage."

"I have chosen both the words spiritual and religious? because the present usage of the word religion in many quarters often leaves out precisely the spiritual element. Those people who are looking for the inner dimension of religious experience and of religious truth are seeking for another word to supplement the word religion. It is tragic that this is so, but it is nevertheless a fact?From my point of view, which is always of course a traditional one, there is no spirituality without religion. There is no way of reaching the spirit without choosing a path which God has chosen for us, and that means religion (religio). Therefore, the reason I am using both words is not for the sake of expediency, but to emphasize that I mean to include a reality which encompasses both spirituality and religion, in the current understanding of these terms, although traditionally the term religion would suffice, since in its full sense it includes all that is understood by spirituality today."

"If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist."

"If we try to destroy nature, nature will always have the final say. Nature has direct contact with God; it is not responsible to us. It is we who are responsible for its protection, because of the function that God has given us. He has given us intelligence, free will, and other powers which we must use rightly, always remembering that we are His vicegerents. We are not our own man; we are God?s man. And in the same way that God makes the sun rise and set every day, we must try to preserve the harmony of nature instead of destroying it."

"In order for [the Muslim world] to come out of its current position of weakness, Muslims have to go against their own traditional culture?a culture that was imbued with the love of nature, in a spiritual sense."

"In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be? to speak of Shari?ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one?s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply the laws of the Palestine two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep the Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago."

"In the Islamic world itself also there is a great crisis in the modern established universities precisely because the systems from the West have been transplanted into that world without a close integration between the humanities, which should be drawn totally from Islamic sources, the religious disciplines and the sciences which have been imported from the West."

"In the Muslim world? people are still tied to their faith, but as far as nature is concerned, they have lost the traditional understanding of it, and are just aping what is happening in the West."

"In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being."

"In traditional societies, nature was seen as one?s wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute."

"Inability to know something does not mean it does not exist"

"Islamic science is related profoundly to the Islamic world view. It is rooted deeply in knowledge based upon the unity of Allah or al-tawhid and a view of the universe in which Allah?s Wisdom and Will rule and in which all things are interrelated reflecting unity on the cosmic level. In contrast, Western science is based on considering the natural world as a reality which is separate from both Allah and the higher levels of being. At best, Allah is accepted as the creator of the world, as a mason who has built a house which now stand on its own. His intrusion into the running of the world and His continuous sustenance of it are not accepted in the modern scientific world view."

"It is easy for Muslims and Christians, or for that matter Hindus, Confucians, or Buddhists, to point to episodes of war in the history of other religions. The history of all societies, whether religious or secular, is replete with such examples, because human beings contain in their fallen state the seeds of strife and contention and take recourse in aggression and war, using for their cause whatever idea or ideology has the power to move people ... When we return to the teachings that are at the heart of all authentic religions, however, we see that the role of each religion is to seek to bring about peace and to accentuate those religious teachings that emphasize both heavenly and earthly accord, harmony, and peace."

"It is for Muslim scholars to study the whole history of Islamic science completely and not only the chapters and periods which influenced Western science. It is also for Muslim scholars to present the tradition of Islamic science from the point of view of Islam itself and not from the point of view of the scientism, rationalism and positivism which have dominated the history of science in the West since the establishment of the discipline in the early part of the 20th century in Europe and America."

"It is necessary to go beyond the polemical position of the medieval theologians who lived in a homogeneous ... universe and who could afford to ignore the universality of revelation and the reality of religion in diverse forms. One cannot read the Bhagavad-Gita seriously in this day and age without becoming aware of the religious character of this text. Nor could anyone in good conscience call it pagan ramblings. Therefore, the doctrines of the other religions which are now available in the form of sacred scripture, open metaphysical exposition, theological formulation, or inspired literature of one kind or another, convey a metaphysical, theological, and religious significance which must be taken seriously by men and women of good faith."

"Man, in the traditional sense of the term corresponding to ins?n in Arabic or homo in Greek and not solely the male, is seen in Islam not as a sinful being to whom the message of Heaven is sent to heal the wound of the original sin, but as a being who still carries his primordial nature (al-fitrah) within himself, although he has forgotten that nature now buried deep under layers of negligence."

"Modern science was born through the Scientific Revolution in the 11th/17th century at a time when, as we saw earlier, European philosophy had itself rebelled against revelation and the religious world view. The background of modern science is a particular philosophical outlook which sees the parameters of the physical world, that is, space, time, matter and energy to be realities that are independent of higher orders of being and cut off from the power of God, at least during the unfolding of the history of the cosmos. It views the physical world as being primarily the subject of mathematicization and quantification and, in a sense, absolutizes the mathematical study of nature relegating the non-quantifiable aspects of physical existence to irrelevance."

"Much has been said about the new adventures of man in the twentieth century, the age known for the use of atomic power and flight into space. However, I personally believe that there is in truth only one new experience of real significance which confronts twentieth century man, one which his ancestors did not face. That experience is not one of discovering new continents and even planets, but one of journeying from one religious universe to another ... a new situation whose main features and characteristics cannot be neglected by any intelligent person interested in the phenomena of religion or belonging to the world of faith."

"Mu?ammad is a man, but not like other men. Rather, he is a ruby and other men are like stones."

"Now rituals, from the point of view of religion, are God-made. I am not using the term ritual as seen from the secular point of view, as if one were putting on one?s gown and going to some commencement exercise or some other humanly created action, often called a ?ritual? in everyday discourse today. I am using it in the religious sense. According to all traditional religions, rituals descend from Heaven?these rites, by virtue of their re-enactment on earth, link the earth with the higher levels of reality. A rite always links us with the vertical axis of existence, and by virtue of that, links us also with the principles of nature. This truth holds not only for the primal religions, where certain acts are carried out in nature itself?let us say the African religions or the Aboriginal religion of Australia, or the religions of the Native American Indians?but also in the Abrahamic world, in the Hindu world, and in the Iranian religions. Whether one is using particular natural forms such as a tree or a rock or a cave or something like that, or man-made objects of sacred and liturgical art related to rites carried out inside a church, synagogue, mosque, or Hindu temple, it does not make any difference. The same truth is to be found in all these cases. From a metaphysical point of view a ritual always re-establishes balance with the cosmic order."

"Now, if the rest of the world wants to industrialize at the expense of the natural world as did the West, if you want to turn the Amazon jungle into what the Europeans did to the forests of Europe centuries ago (when the lung of the earth was still functioning) the ecological balance?will be destroyed."

"O Lord, have Mercy and Compassion, for if Thou dost not have Mercy, who will have mercy? The heartfelt prayer of this simple pilgrim epitomizes the quintessential Islamic attitude toward God as the source of compassion and mercy. No matter what one has done in life, one should never lose hope in His Compassion and Mercy, for as the Quran states, And who despaireth of the Mercy of his Lord save those who go astray (15:56), and Do not despair of God?s Mercy (39:53)."

"One wonders who knows more about the coyote, the zoologist who is able to study its external habit and dissect its cadaver or the Indian medicine man who identifies himself with the spirit of the coyote?"

"Paradoxically, the insistence of Islam upon God as the One and the Absolute has had as its concomitant the acceptance of a multiplicity of prophets and revelations, and no sacred scripture is more universalist in its understanding of religion than the Quran, whose perspective concerning the universality of revelation may be called 'vertical triumphalism.' In contrast, in Christianity, because of the emphasis on the triune God, God the one is seen more in terms of the relationality of the three Hypostases, what one might call 'Divine Relativity'; the vision of the manifestation of the Divine then became confined to the unique Son and Incarnation, in whom the light of all previous prophets was absorbed. In Christianity the vision is that of the Triune God and a unique message of salvation and savior, hence extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the church), whereas in Islam there is the One God and many prophets. Here is to be found the major difference between how Muslims have viewed Jews and Christians over the centuries and how Christians have regarded Jews and Muslims as well as followers of other religions."

"Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity."

"Secular humanism changed the views of people about all things from a theomorphic to a homomorphic or homocentric point of view."

"Since God is the creator of all things, there is no legitimate domain of life to which His Will or His Laws (antecedently stated to mean Qur?anic Shari?ah) do not apply."

"The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance."

"The battle was lost as soon as the Hands of God were cut off from nature."

"The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age."

"The compartmentalization of knowledge, which is one of the characteristics of the mental and intellectual scene of the modern world, is not only reflected in modern education but is also caused by it."

"The decadence which did occur in the Islamic world belongs to a much later period of Islamic history than is usually claimed. This fact would be fully substantiated if the integral history of Islamic science and civilization were to be written one day. Unfortunately to this day such a detailed history does not exist and moreover much of the scholarly work that has been done in this field has been carried out by Western scholars who have been naturally primarily interested in those aspects of the Islamic sciences that have influenced the West. It remains the task of Muslims scholars and scientists to look upon the whole of this scientific tradition from the point of view of Islam and the inner dynamics of Islamic history itself."

"The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering."

"The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified."

"The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the knowledge of the heart."

"The life of Islamic philosophy did not terminate with Ibn Rushd nearly eight hundred years ago, as thought by Western scholarship for several centuries. Rather, its activities continued strongly during the later centuries, particularly in Persia and other eastern lands of Islam, and it was revived in Egypt during the last century."

"The pollution of the environment is kind of an eleventh hour externalization of the pollution within us."