Insight Editions · No. 133
In Search of the Sacred
A Conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on His Life and Thought
Seyyed Hossein Nasr · With Ramin Jahanbegloo
Seyyed Hossein Nasr recounts his life and thought, from his education in Iran and America to his defense of Islamic tradition, sacred art, and Sufism.
A study guide to In Search of the Sacred by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, with Ramin Jahanbegloo. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Overview
What the book is
Diagrams mark mechanisms already in the chapters.
Chapter Map
Follow the part order. Jump by theme only after one full pass.
Argument Map
Chapter Map
| Part | Topics | Core question |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | Jahanbegloo's portrait; Terry Moore's profile | Who is Nasr and why does he matter? |
| One | Ancestors, father, mother, Tehran, 1941 | What kind of home formed him? |
| Two | Peddie, M.I.T., crisis, traditionalists, Harvard | How did a physicist become a metaphysician? |
| Three | Tehran University, masters, Corbin, Academy, Aryamehr, 1978 | Can tradition be revived inside modern institutions? |
| Four | Exile, identity, Persian culture, spiritual life | What does it mean to be rooted and universal? |
| Part | Topics | Core question |
|---|---|---|
| Five | Esoterism, tradition, Descartes, environment, the sacred | What is tradition, and what does it offer? |
| Six | Modernism, globalization, Western images of Islam | Must religion adapt to the times? |
| Seven | Traditional, sacred and Islamic art; beauty | Why is beauty a need, not a luxury? |
| Eight | Sufism, 'irfan, Shi'ism, origins, dialogue | Where can religions truly meet? |
| Nine | Secularization of the West; sacred and secular law | Does church-state separation fit Islam? |
- This is a conversation, so ideas recur. Watch three threads: tradition versus modernism, the sacred, and the unity of religions above their forms.
- Jahanbegloo often pushes back (critical reason, Disney World, Arkoun, democracy). Nasr's answers to objections are the most useful passages.
- The figures and dates are Nasr's own, from around 2001 to 2008; read them as his testimony, not as current data.
- Arabic and Persian terms are given in simplified spelling without diacritics.
Introduction: Two Portraits of Nasr
The Spiritual and Intellectual Journey (Ramin Jahanbegloo)
The interviewer opens with a Chesterton line: a great man must believe both in the truth of his message and in its acceptability. Jahanbegloo argues that Nasr has both, and that his critique of modernity is a vision rooted in tradition, not a call for regression.
For Nasr the traditional world rested on an overwhelming sense of the Sacred and the Absolute; modernity is the dissolution of that awareness, Weber's "disenchantment of the world". Like the Perennialist founders, Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon, Nasr gives tradition a rigorous meaning: the whole structure of thought that articulates what myth and symbol embody, a living and "ceaselessly renewed insight", with an esoteric dimension in every tradition that reaches to God and sees all things in God.
| Shared | Different |
|---|---|
| Multileveled structure of Reality; "quintessential esoterism"; the transcendent unity of religions | Nasr's point of departure is Islam, not Advaita Vedanta; he identifies closely with one tradition and was an active member of Iranian society before 1979 |
| Eckhart's rule: "If you want the kernel, you need to break the husk" | His universalism is read through Ibn Arabi and Rumi rather than Hindu sources |
Jahanbegloo lists the strands that make Nasr's work "an organic whole":
- Comparative religion: a quest for the "essential elements of communiality" among faiths and a reply to relativism.
- Sacred art: Islamic art and science are both born of a wedding between the Quranic spirit and inherited Persian and Byzantine techniques, and both rest on unity (tawhid).
- Islam in a positive light, despite atrocities committed in its name, with the spiritual principles of every tradition applied to the modern crisis.
- Ecology: Western civilization moved from nature as sacred to nature as machine; the reductionist view of modern science has worsened, "if not actually caused", the devastation.
- Dialogue as spiritual responsibility. At the UN in 2004 Nasr said: "It is very easy to learn intolerance and unlearn tolerance, but difficult to unlearn intolerance." Dialogue does not mean diluting one's faith; its aim is the transcendent unity that lies within religions "without denying their forms".
Nasr compares civilization to a living organism: it adapts, yet its core and roots resist historical change and produce new manifestations that fit its essential reality. With Gandhi and Tagore, he refuses to equate civilization with technological progress.
Who Is Seyyed Hossein Nasr? (Terry Moore)
The second introduction is an overview of Nasr's achievements, organized around one image: Nasr as a bridge.
- 2000: Volume 28 of the Library of Living Philosophers devoted to Nasr (company: Einstein, Sartre, Russell, Whitehead)
- 1981: Gifford Lectures, published as Knowledge and the Sacred, his magnum opus. Huston Smith: rare for the top honour in philosophy and in theology to go to one person
- 50+ books and 500+ articles written or edited
- 1997: Templeton award for best US course in science and religion
Tradition versus tradition
Moore draws Nasr's distinction between tradition as folkways (customs passed down, valued for linking us to ancestors) and Tradition with a capital T, our link to the Sacred. Nasr's definition: "the Sacred is the Eternal Absolute Truth as It manifests Itself in our world. It is the appearance of the Eternal in time, the Center in the periphery."
Even non-materialists live in two worlds, fact/matter/science and meaning/spirit/religion, and cannot join them: believers rooted in science are embarrassed by theology, theologians are wary of science, and each side's remarks on the other feel like afterthoughts. Nasr heals this by bringing Tradition into "now".
The bridges, one by one
| Field | Contribution Moore credits | Key works |
|---|---|---|
| Islamic philosophy | Treated as living philosophy, not history of ideas; revived Mulla Sadra and Suhrawardi in English; turned Izutsu toward Islamic philosophy | Three Muslim Sages; History of Islamic Philosophy (chief ed.); Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present |
| Western philosophy | Put the Guenon-Schuon critique of modernity into academic language rigorous enough for Cartesian-trained philosophers | Knowledge and the Sacred |
| Perennialism | Applied it to domains the founders neglected, cosmology and environment; first traditionalist with wide impact in the Islamic world; created a new intelligentsia that is neither isolated 'ulama' nor rootless modernists | Students: Chittick, Osman Bakar and others |
| Environment | With Carson's Silent Spring (1962), the start of the environmental movement; diagnosed spiritual roots; only cure is recovering nature as sacred | The Encounter of Man and Nature (1968); Religion and the Order of Nature (Cadbury Lectures) |
| Islam and the West | Respectful and uncompromising spokesman; critique is always a call back to one's own tradition, so never an outsider; keynote at UN conference on Islamophobia (2004) | The Heart of Islam (2002); ed. Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon; journal Sophia |
| Traditional Islam | Guides Muslims living in the West; redirected Tehran University from French philosophy to Islamic and Eastern thought; revived Islamic cosmology | Traditional Islam in the Modern World; A Young Muslim's Guide; Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines |
| Science and religion | Only US course treating science and religion across all traditions; fights religion's "inferiority complex"; severe critic of scientism inside Islam | The Need for a Sacred Science; Science and Civilization in Islam |
| Islamic art | Gave artisans a contemporary language for sacred geometry; helped preserve Iranian towns; role in the Prince of Wales's School of Traditional Arts and the 1976 World of Islam Festival | Islamic Art and Spirituality (1987), "a bible" in Iran |
| Sufism | First authentically Sufi voice accepted in Western academia; showed Sufism is Islamic in origin and a path of realization, not just a doctrine | Sufi Essays; The Garden of Truth |
| Relations between religions | Took Schuon's "transcendent unity of religions" out of "new age" literature into academic study; brought truth back into religious studies | "The Perennial Philosophy and the Study of Religion" (for W. C. Smith) |
Part One: Childhood in Tehran (1933-1945)
Nasr opens with the Basmala and a claim that shapes the whole book: his childhood left "a permanent mark upon me not only emotionally, but also intellectually". Born in 1933 into a family of scholars and physicians, he grew up in a household where the great conflict of modern Iran, tradition against modernity, was argued at the dinner table.
Ancestors: Two Inheritances
| Mother's side | Father's side |
|---|---|
| Great-grandfather Shaykh Fadl Allah Nuri, a leading religious scholar during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, was put to death. The trauma marked the family: many stayed pious, others turned against Islam, among them his grandson Nur al-Din Kianouri, later head of the Iranian Communist (Tudeh) party and Nasr's mother's first cousin. | Father Seyyed Valiollah Nasr, physician (like his father), scholar of Persian and philosopher. The only person in modern Iran to be dean of Tehran University's Medical School, Law School and Faculty of Arts, and chancellor of the Teachers' College. Member of the first parliament; helped write the Constitution. |
The result was a strong religious inheritance and a psychological trauma about religion in the same family. His father's circle included the political elite, many of them well-read scholars: Muhammad 'Ali Forughi (prime minister), Muhtashim al-Saltanah Isfandiyari (head of parliament).
Four Childhood Memories
- Persian poetry: from age three or four, nights reading Sa'di, Hafiz, Rumi and Firdawsi, later Nizami and 'Attar. At eight or nine he beat Prime Minister Forughi in a verse-exchange contest (musha'irah), knowing thousands of verses by heart. His father's weekly literary sessions spent hours on a few lines.
- Piety and Sufism: father, grandfather and great-grandfather belonged to the Sufi tradition. Their universality was part of his upbringing (he dislikes the word "tolerance" as too weak).
- Philosophy: at seven or eight he asked his father, "if there were to be no earth and no sky, where would we be?" At ten he read Persian translations of Maeterlinck, Pascal and Descartes from his father's French library.
- Discipline: rigorous intellectual and moral training; he came first in Iran in the sixth-grade national exam.
Among his father's close friends: Hadi Ha'iri, the greatest master of the Mathnawi of his day (even Foruzanfar consulted him), and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim 'Assar, later Nasr's teacher of Islamic philosophy. With his father they formed a spiritual and intellectual triumvirate.
His Father: Knowledge and Ethics
Most of his father's writings were never published. In 1958 Nasr assembled essays into a book titled Danish wa Akhlaq (Knowledge and Ethics), the two poles his uncle Seyyed Ali Nasr (a father of modern Iranian theatre) said his father always stressed. A box of manuscripts given to a historian the year before the Revolution was lost.
His father married late (he was in his early sixties when Nasr was born) and still studied for hours every night, a "perennial student".
A pneumatic child
Traditional and Modern Education: A Synthesis
Many call his father "the Father of Modern Education in Iran": he ran the educational system from the late Qajar period through Reza Shah's reign, preferring the role of general secretary to that of minister so the system could stay stable while ministers came and went. His aim was to integrate modern learning into the traditional Islamic pattern, not to create the tradition/modernity dichotomy that has haunted Muslim and Asian cultures since the Qajars, "the core problem of the 20th and now 21st centuries for Muslim countries".
The home was pious but had "doors opened towards the West": Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice at ten or eleven), Victor Hugo, both Dumas, with an orientation to the French rather than English world. His father held the synthesis inside himself through a metaphysical vision (one essay treats darkness as a profound symbol), but died before passing it on.
- Love of Persian culture: religious, literary and philosophical tradition.
- Avid interest in Western science, philosophy and literature.
- Serenity: an "angelic smile", no inner conflict, unlike contemporaries whose souls are torn between tradition and modernism.
Leaving Iran
In autumn 1945, aged twelve and a half, Nasr was sent to America. His mother made the decision against the wider family's wishes, so that he would not be present at his father's death; their uncle Emad Kia, Iranian consul in New York and childless, became his guardian. Intellectually, Nasr says, he left Iran at the level of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.
His Mother and Her Family
His mother, Zia Ashraf, was learned, wrote beautifully, knew much poetry, and was both conservative (ethics, love of Islam and Persian culture) and rebellious: the first woman in her family to cut her long hair, for which her aunts, Nuri's daughters, would not speak to her. Nasr later opposed her "feminist" assertiveness and kept her from running for parliament under the Pahlavis, not wanting her entangled in politics.
Her father, Aqa Ziyaoddin Kia, tried to succeed his hanged father as a religious authority, was stoned in public, took off clerical dress and became a respected judge, scarred by the event. At his house every Friday, the boy watched religious debates between his grandfather (more modernist) and his father. "This debate and conflict was present in my family."
Three Worlds in One House
| Circle | Who |
|---|---|
| Political elite | About 70 percent of prime ministers and ministers of the era were his father's friends: Forughi, Davar, Hekmat, Mer'at, Qawam al-Saltaneh |
| Traditional scholars | 'Assar, Ha'iri, Sayyid Muhammad Abduh (a founder of Iranian civil law), Mudarris, Bahar, Foruzanfar, Huma'i, Nafisi |
| Leftists back from France | Kianouri (who debated Marx weekly with his father), Eskandari, Keshavarz |
Asked whether the modernity/tradition debate still follows him, Nasr says yes, but not as an unresolved question: it was resolved for him at M.I.T. before he was twenty, though it remains central to every serious intellectual, Eastern or Western.
Religious Practice and Relationship with God
His father had prayed and fasted when younger and later prayed inwardly; his mother had stopped the canonical prayers (namaz) but made pilgrimages to Shah 'Abd al-'Azim and Qom, taking him along. When he began praying regularly at twenty in America, she said: "Hossein, it is impossible for me to be your mother and to see you praying every day and not doing so myself." She never missed a prayer again over some fifty years.
His earliest dream: falling from a height and caught by large, luminous angels who promised never to let him fall; he says he has never had a bad nightmare since. Dreams of God's Presence were never anthropomorphic, always "light and presence".
As a child he fasted half-days in Ramadan imitating the servants (in many upper-class homes only the servants fasted), memorized Quranic verses like Persian poetry, and loved Quranic chanting, which he calls the highest form of sacred music.
Memories of Tehran
The first seven years were spent on Sheibani Street off Shahabad Avenue, in a narrow, quasi-medieval quarter: a traditional house with an exterior (his father's clinic and male guests) and an interior courtyard, and a tiled, mirrored saqqa-khanah fountain nearby.
Tehran was green, a city of gardens, with clear air and Mount Damavand visible every morning. Westernized Iranians came back embarrassed that it was "just a big garden"; Nasr calls this "the stupidity of this modernist mentality" that later destroyed traditional cities. In 1940, at his mother's insistence, the family moved to a modern house off Shahreza Avenue designed by Kianouri. Life became anonymous: no more intimacy with neighbours and shopkeepers. Several moves followed.
School, Solitude and Technology
Home teaching put him into third grade at five (pulled back to second). He attended several schools, including the Jamshid Jam Zoroastrian school, kept mostly to himself, liked solitude and nature, and practised the Persian courtesy of adab. At three he played the fox in La Fontaine's fable at Iran's only kindergarten, mispronounced a word to comic effect, and appeared on a journal's front page.
Cars arrived (a government Mercedes for his father; his grandfather's Russian car that had to be pushed). Cinema was thought slightly beneath good families; he loved Tarzan, Ali Baba, Valentino's The Sheik, The Three Musketeers, and Westerns, though "always on the side of the Indians".
Heroes
- Religious: the Prophet, Imam 'Ali, Imam Husayn, who remain so.
- Literary: Rostam; he had read the whole Shah-namah before ten, and Rostam and Sohrab is its greatest tragedy.
- Political: a nebulous pro-German mood (Rommel admired for chivalry); above all Reza Shah.
- Moral: Gandhi, whose picture his father showed him: "This is how one should be... One should not seek power."
At Reza Shah's weekly Parwarish-i afkar ("development of mind") lectures, the boy sat a metre behind the king. Everyone feared Reza Shah "except my father, because my father did not want anything from him".
Nasr credits Reza Shah with fostering a deep pre-1941 patriotism but faults him for harsh, abrupt unveiling policies (Iran should have been like Egypt, leaving dress to choice), for following Ataturk, "catastrophic for Islam in Turkey", and for land grabbing.
The Allied Invasion (1941)
Aged nine (eight by some counts), he came down to breakfast to hear that Iran had been invaded and began to cry. Reza Shah went into exile; the family feared a Russian takeover. He watched Russian soldiers parade on Shahreza Avenue, "a terrible humiliation". A servant died of typhus; family wore camphor against lice. His young aunt Badri died of meningitis after the American base refused penicillin, yet the family held no grudge: Iranians trusted Americans more than the old colonial powers, Russia and Britain.
Part Two: America, From Peddie to Harvard (1945-1958)
Going to America
A twelve-year-old travels alone for two months across a continent just out of war. The journey, Nasr says, left "an indelible effect upon me, especially in increasing my self-confidence."
| Stage | What happened |
|---|---|
| Tehran to Kermanshah | Four-seat, single-propeller plane from Mehrabad, "just a dusty field"; his first flight |
| Baghdad | Stays in the "Thousand and One Nights" house of Aqa-ye Hakim, a great turbaned 'alim; pilgrimage to Kadhimayn |
| Desert to Damascus | Overnight on the British-run Nairn bus |
| Palestine | By shared taxi to Haifa, still under British rule, struck by the green orchards; train down the coast |
| Cairo | Several weeks at Shepheard's Hotel; first escalator and department store, "my first experience of the West". King Faruq dined, drank and gambled there on Thursdays and drove to Friday prayers the next morning. A stranger, an Egyptian gentleman, adopted the lone boy, showed him the pyramids and Islamic Cairo, and found him a ticket ahead of waiting dignitaries. |
| Alexandria to New York | Swedish liner Gripsholm, zig-zagging past Thessalonica, Naples, Marseilles, Gibraltar, with mine drills; arrives 17 December 1945 |
The first sight of New York's skyscrapers was "both scary and exciting". His uncle took him up the Empire State, Chrysler and Rockefeller towers, and Nasr felt "a sort of awe at the power that this city possessed". He liked New York at first, later reacted against its chaotic pace and avoided it for years.
The Peddie School Years (1946-1950)
On the advice of Lafayette College's president, he entered the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, mid-year and provisionally, in eighth grade. His roommate and others bullied him and his English was weak; at the end of the year he scored 70 in English. A teacher suggested repeating the grade; he begged not to. When he graduated as valedictorian, the same teacher said: "My God, if I had held you back one more year what would have happened?"
- Mastery of English through a strong program and personal attention.
- Athletics: varsity soccer, squash and tennis; later captain of the M.I.T. squash team and one of the best squash players in Boston at twenty. He still plays tennis.
- Intellectual rigour: top marks in mathematics, physics, chemistry; called a mathematical "genius". Admitted to M.I.T., Caltech and Cornell, he chose M.I.T. "to discover the nature of things in a philosophical sense".
Losing and regaining Persian
1946 to 1950 was the time he was furthest from Persian; he forgot much memorized poetry. When he moved to Boston, his mother came with his brother Mehran and set up a household in Arlington where everyone had to speak Persian: rugs, curtains, music, cuisine. By twenty his Persian was good again. Without that and his father's early training, he says, he could never have become a known Persian prose writer or dean of Tehran University's Faculty of Letters.
Isolation and his father's death
His father died a few months after he arrived; the family hid the news during the school year. Nasr reports out-of-body and other strange experiences at the moment of the death. His uncle Emad Kia became a father figure.
Contact with Christianity
Peddie was Baptist; attendance was compulsory. For four and a half years Nasr went to Sunday service and vespers, one of only two Muslims (with an Afghan prince).
The M.I.T. Years (1950-1954)
M.I.T. was austere, rigorous and surrounded by industrial ugliness: you could tell the wind's direction by whether you smelled soap, chocolate or rubber. For a self-described "aesthetician in the Platonic sense", for whom beauty and truth are inseparable, this was a shock. The physics department admitted 96 or 97 top students; about half graduated. Nasr avoided being a "nerd", took extra humanities, loved Western classical music, and earned a 4.9 out of 5 in his first year. Then the most important intellectual crisis of his life began.
Intellectual Crisis: Physics or Metaphysics?
| Event | Effect |
|---|---|
| Giorgio De Santillana, M.I.T. philosopher-historian of science, critic of modern thought, master of the languages of Europe | Opened Western metaphysics to him; taught Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Hegel and the Greeks "with a vision other than the ordinary", Corbin's "anti-history of anti-philosophy". Asked why Nasr did not just become an engineer, he confessed he had hidden in history of science to avoid the crisis of philosophy of science. |
| Bertrand Russell, in a small seminar after a public lecture | Said flatly that modern physics has nothing to do with the nature of things, only mathematical structures that "save the appearances" (an anti-realist, Poincare position). "The straw that broke the camel's back." |
| Months of soul-searching | Faith intact, but his worldview "turned inside out"; sleepless nights, existential anguish despite success, looks, sport and family |
| Rene Guenon: De Santillana taught an evening seminar on Indian philosophy "from the horse's mouth" using Guenon's Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines and Man and His Becoming | "The whole world shook under my feet." Guenon's critique of the modern world was "absolutely true". |
Nasr also admits a hidden pride he had to fight: everyone expected greatness, he had been taken to meet Einstein at Princeton, and leaving physics meant deflating his ego. "It was really a spiritual and not only an intellectual question."
Leaving physics
In his sophomore year, at eighteen or nineteen, he told his adviser. Without looking up the man said "Yes, Hossein!", then: "You would have been a great physicist, but the world needs good people in other fields as well." Many of his teachers had worked with Oppenheimer and Fermi on the bomb; several died young of cancer. Oppenheimer himself, often at M.I.T., quoted Indian themes but remained "a terribly tormented person". Nasr knew he did not want to become like him, but a negative example was not enough.
Discovering the Traditionalists
Through Guenon he met the widow of Ananda Coomaraswamy, who lived between Harvard and M.I.T. with his library. For four or five years he had open access to "the richest traditionalist library in the Western world", and in return made the first complete catalogue of Coomaraswamy's writings. He later introduced Coomaraswamy to Iran, where no one knew him in 1958.
He seriously considered abandoning the West for a Pacific island. What stopped him was his father's rule that one finishes what one starts. He completed the physics degree with honours (his average "fell" to 4.5), took enough mathematics for a double major, and from 1953 rode the Massachusetts Avenue bus to sit in on Harvard courses: art history with Benjamin Rowland (Coomaraswamy's student) and D. T. Suzuki's Zen lectures.
The Harvard Years (1954-1958)
- George Sarton, authority on Islamic science, died of a heart attack soon after Nasr began.
- I. B. Cohen: taught method in history of science, but knew little Islamic science.
- Harry Wolfson: scholar of Jewish and Islamic philosophy; Nasr first introduced him to Iran.
- Sir Hamilton Gibb: arrived from Oxford after resigning over Suez; called Nasr "the most brilliant student I have ever had".
- A. D. Nock: Hellenist, co-editor of the Hermetic texts with Festugiere.
Nasr found the history of science captured by the positivism of Sarton and Mach, with Duhem marginalized, so he devised his own method for Islamic science. His Arabic grew in three phases: childhood, Harvard, and later traditional masters in Iran. He read French well (through Guenon and Schuon), learned German for Hegel and the Ph.D., and some Italian, Spanish, Greek and Latin for roots of terms.
Widener, the Fogg and New England
The Widener Library he calls the best research library in the world; he knew its shelves "from Pythagoras to Ibn Sina" and later did almost all research for Knowledge and the Sacred there. The Fogg Museum's Persian, Indian, Chinese and Japanese art was "a psychological and spiritual refuge" from M.I.T.'s labs.
Encounters at Harvard
Werner Jaeger (Paideia), the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, the medievalist Taylor, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson (a lifelong friend), the Iranologist Richard Frye (for whom he was teaching assistant), and Paul Tillich.
Nasr's Reading Map
As a "purist" he went to primary sources first: Eckhart cover to cover (Pfeiffer's translation and some archaic German), French Catholic thinkers (Gilson, Maritain, Claudel, Mauriac, the Islamicists Gardet and Anawati), Koyre, Dawson; on India Dasgupta and Radhakrishnan; on China Granet, Needham and Fung Yu-lan.
Augustine attracted him until he found the Persian ishraqi (illuminationist) tradition, "even more metaphysically complete". Boethius's Consolation still speaks to him; he struggled through Erigena's De Divisione Naturae in Latin. In the Renaissance, Ficino remains his favourite. Of the moderns, De Santillana told him Leibniz was "the most important metaphysical work of the 17th century". Hegel interested him until he saw it as a temporalization of the Absolute.
Heidegger
Nasr thinks Heidegger tried to "jump" to Being without God and did not arrive; Mulla Sadra's philosophy of wujud is a deeper Existenzphilosophie. He values Heidegger's critique of technology and writing on poetry, regrets his political sidelining in America, and agrees with him (and Rorty) that the process begun in the Renaissance has ended, though not philosophy itself. His friend Dariush Shayegan, once his protege, went the other way, from tradition to Heidegger.
Part Three: Iran, Teaching and the Masters (1958-1979)
Return to Iran
In summer 1958 Nasr turned down a Harvard junior fellowship and an M.I.T. assistant professorship. "There was not even a debate in my mind." Rediscovering tradition had only strengthened his sense that he belonged in Iran.
Re-entry was easy culturally, hard practically. He married within months, partly to escape his mother's nightly round of family gatherings; he won a draft deferment as eldest son and provider; and he taught night courses to supplement a low salary rather than take outside work. He was never farangi ma'ab (Westernized).
Architecture and Sacred Space
In a living tradition, when a Seljuq city gave way to a Timurid one, the new was as beautiful as the old. Today a Qajar lane is replaced by a boulevard of trucks, pollution and summer heat. Persian wind-catchers and narrow streets that kept the night's cool were energy-saving inventions now bulldozed "just when we are facing the crisis of global warming". There are hopeful restorations (San'a, Fez, Yazd, Kashan), but "the bulldozer remains one of the greatest enemies of the human spirit." For twenty-one years in Iran he worked to protect the urban fabric (baft-e shahr).
| Gothic cathedral | Mosque |
|---|---|
| Space moving upward toward Heaven | Space that reposes upon itself, recapitulating virgin nature: desert, mountain, forest |
| Aspiration | Peace beyond the agitation of city life |
Tehran University: A Jihad of Ideas
The Faculty of Letters held about 95 percent of Iran's famous writers and thinkers outside the 'ulama', and its philosophy, psychology and sociology departments were dominated by 19th-century French (Comtean) positivism: Drs. Sadighi, Siassi and Mahdavi, personal friends who disliked his ideas. Without M.I.T. and Harvard degrees and command of English, French and Arabic, he says, "I would have been crushed."
- Islamic philosophy at the centre: a new required course, falsafah va ma'arif-e eslami, taught for twenty years and copied elsewhere; Islamic philosophy (taught by 'Assar, then Sha'rani) made the matrix rather than a side subject.
- A doctoral seminar with Henry Corbin on comparative philosophy, for about two decades.
- Balance against French dominance: brought Manuchehr Bozorgmehr to teach Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy and Dariush Shayegan for Indian philosophy.
- Neutrality between Francophone and Anglophone factions, so that they would cancel out and the Persian element survive. He was the only one fluent enough in both not to be accused of partisanship.
Famous Students
Over fifty years (three as a Harvard instructor, twenty-one in Iran, about thirty in America) Nasr trained several generations.
| Phase | Notable students |
|---|---|
| Tehran, early (only Ph.D. program in philosophy in Iran, with Mahdavi and Khonsari) | Purhosayni, Reza Davari, Dawudi (probably killed early in the Revolution), Mujtabavi (later dean); Mohsen Jahangiri (Ibn Arabi scholar) |
| Tehran, later | William Chittick ("most outstanding"), Sachiko Murata, Jean During (Persian music), Nasrollah Pourjavadi, Gholamreza A'vani (best Persian student), Gholam-Reza Haddad Adel (later speaker of parliament), Mozaffar Bakhtiar, Moroccan 'Abd al-Latif Sa'dani, Pakistani and Indian Persianists |
| Temple, 1979-1984 (largest US religion Ph.D. program, with Isma'il al-Faruqi) | Osman Bakar (Malaysia), Zailan Moris, Baharuddin Ahmad, Mohsin Ibrahim (Islamic bioethics), Mehdi Aminrazavi (Suhrawardi), Gisela Webb, Nikky Singh |
| George Washington, 1984- | Ibrahim Kalin, David Dakake, Joseph Lumbard, Caner Dagli, and others; often sent on to Princeton, Yale or Chicago after the master's |
Haddad Adel, a physics student in Shiraz, changed his life after hearing Nasr lecture on Mulla Sadra; Nasr regrets that politics later kept him from philosophy.
Teaching
Theory of education
| Modern | Traditional (Islamic, Hindu) |
|---|---|
| Cerebral; history in the morning, basketball in the afternoon, unrelated | Integral: mind, soul, body and morals together, like Tai Chi or Yoga |
| Amoral: cannot agree on morals, leaves them to parents | Teacher as father or mother; a Benares pundit will not teach the Vedas to a thief |
| Science for science's sake; applications left to the greedy and powerful | Knowledge for wisdom's sake, for the perfection of the human being |
| Segmented institutions; a separate discipline of "education" (Dewey) | Open madrasas; merchants drop in; lifelong learning, paideia |
School shootings, he warns, are "just the tip of the iceberg": we still live on the moral capital of a time when education was not amoral, and that legacy will run out. De Santillana's maxim, "science starts where utility stops", is true in the modern context but insufficient. "Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave," said the Prophet; for Nasr this is literal.
Studies with Traditional Masters
Harvard had taught him the methods of Western scholarship, but Wolfson and Gilson's Islamic philosophy was "not really complete and sufficient". He had read Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital and refused to believe Islamic philosophy ended with Averroes. So the new professor became a student again.
| Master | What they studied | Nasr's portrait |
|---|---|---|
| Sayyid Muhammad Kazim 'Assar | Mornings at Sepahsalar madrasa: Sabziwari's Sharh-i manzumah. Afternoons three times a week in Zho'l-Majd Tabataba'i's garden: Jami's Ashi''at al-lama'at on 'Iraqi's Lama'at | His father's friend; faithful to oral tradition. "Like seeking water in the middle of the desert, and here I had found that water." |
| 'Allamah Tabataba'i | Twenty years (1958 to autumn 1978): Mulla Sadra's Asfar, the Tao Te Ching (translated into Persian with Shayegan), the Persian Upanishads (Sirr-i akbar), the Gospels; a whole summer alone on Hafiz in Darakeh | Philosopher, Quran commentator (Tafsir al-mizan), gnostic of high order. On Hafiz: ordinary interpretations "were like gravel... as if the walls were speaking with him." |
| Sayyid Abu'l-Hasan Qazwini | Five years on the Asfar from the lithograph, read as if memorized, then word-by-word commentary (taqrir) | Teacher of Ashtiyani and of Khomeini; jurist, marja', mathematician, astronomer, physician; like Nasir al-Din Tusi |
| Mahdi Ilahi Qumsha'i | Jili's al-Insan al-kamil | Poet-mystic who turned every text to Divine Love |
| Jawad Muslih | Tusi's commentary on Ibn Sina's Isharat | More rationalist; translator of Mulla Sadra |
When Khomeini, his former pupil, began the 1963 uprising, Qazwini remarked wryly that "affairs have fallen into the hands of the young."
The Tabataba'i-Corbin circle
Every autumn Corbin came from Paris with questions then debated in France; Tabataba'i answered and discussion followed. Nasr was the chief translator (after Isa Sepahbodi, later helped by Shayegan); Motahhari, Ashtiyani, Foruzanfar and future 'ulama' such as Makarim Shirazi attended. Nasr calls it discourse "on a level that had not taken place since the Middle Ages."
- He nagged Tabataba'i for years to replace Sabziwari's difficult 19th-century textbook. One day the 'Allamah pulled a manuscript from his sleeve: "here is the book you kept asking me to write." Bidayat al-hikmah and Nihayat al-hikmah are now taught widely in Qom.
- At Kenneth Cragg's request for Colgate University, Nasr had Tabataba'i write three books: Shi'ite Islam (Nasr's translation, long the only authoritative English book on Twelver Shi'ism), The Qur'an in Islam (Nasr's translation lost in the Revolution) and an anthology of the Imams' sayings (translated by Chittick).
Tabataba'i praised Nasr's Persian essay on Islam and the religions of the world, which introduced the perennial philosophy publicly in Iran, but asked him to write "the other side": Islam in relation to the other religions.
Tabataba'i used to ask Nasr to tell Motahhari to stop lecturing everywhere and finish his philosophy. Nasr saw Motahhari as gifted but torn between tradition and modernism; he never finished his commentary on the Usul.
Henry Corbin
The director of the French Institute for Iranian Studies became Nasr's closest Western collaborator for twenty years. Nasr is precise about the relationship: he learned much from Corbin's scholarship, but "as far as my philosophical position is concerned, I was not influenced by Corbin. In fact, we complemented each other."
They met in autumn 1958. Corbin read Nasr's thesis in manuscript and wanted it for Princeton's Bollingen Series, until Harvard claimed it. Early friction came from Corbin's hostility to Guenon; after Corbin attacked Titus Burckhardt personally at the Institut Franco-Iranien, Nasr walked out, and Stella Corbin phoned to apologize. Thereafter both avoided the subject.
| Agreed | Disagreed |
|---|---|
| Critique of Orientalism and modern philosophy for ignoring higher levels of reality, above all the imaginal world (Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1956) | Orthodoxy. For Nasr it means correct doctrine, outward and also intellectual, metaphysical and esoteric. Corbin, hurt by Catholic authorities when young, became Protestant and called himself "heterodox", though what he described was the heart of Shi'ite orthodoxy |
| Need to revive Islamic philosophy in Iran itself | Whether Mulla Sadra had a human master (Corbin: no, guided by the Imam alone) |
A teaching team
Corbin read and commented in French; Nasr translated into Persian and added his own commentary. Corbin was nearly deaf, his diction and terminology hard to follow. After the inaugural session the dean, Ali Akbar Siassi, a master of French, asked how Nasr had understood anything. Nasr: "Corbin speaks in French, the angels understand him, then they transmit it to me in Persian."
Joint projects
- Suhrawardi's Persian works: Corbin handed Nasr his manuscripts and asked him to edit the shorter Persian treatises (plus the Arabic Risalat al-abraj). It took ten years; some Persian texts could only be fixed via Arabic versions. The 800-page volume (Nasr's Persian introduction, Corbin's French prolegomena) made titles like The Song of the Griffin and The Red Intellect fashionable among filmmakers and painters.
- Anthology of Philosophers of Iran: Nasr introduced Corbin to Sayyid Jalal al-Din Ashtiyani (going to Mashhad for it); four of seven planned volumes appeared before Corbin's death.
- A large Melanges in Corbin's honour, presented at Tehran University with Prime Minister Hoveyda attending.
- The Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy: on retiring from the Sorbonne, Corbin taught there for his last four years, with Izutsu and Nasr, "the golden age of the Academy".
Nasr claims he turned Corbin toward Mulla Sadra: Corbin did not write on him before 1958, and all three major Western Sadra scholars, Corbin, Izutsu and Fazlur Rahman, all older than Nasr, were introduced to Sadra by him.
Corbin the man
Born Catholic, Corbin turned Protestant when teachers limited his study of mysticism, went from Lutheran theosophy to Suhrawardi, and through him found the Persian Shi'ite world, his spiritual home. He said "nous Shi'ites", made pilgrimage with Nasr to Jamkaran (associated with the Twelfth Imam), loved the Imams like a pious Shi'ite, but never practised Islam formally. Nasr never saw him perform namaz but did see him pray.
Why the West resisted later Islamic philosophy
Indology had philosopher-scholars (Zimmer, Eliade); Islamic studies came mostly through philology, history, and missionaries who wanted to prove Islam false. Russell's History of Western Philosophy gives "Arabic Philosophy" one short chapter, only as a link to the West. Corbin did for later Islamic philosophy what Massignon did for Sufism and Gardet for theology.
| Source | Motive |
|---|---|
| Catholic scholars of "Arabic philosophy" | Disdain for Corbin's leaving Catholicism; trained to think the tradition ended with Averroes |
| Mainstream Western philosophers | A Persian contemporary of Descartes philosophizing about Plato within monotheistic revelation would break the Hegelian absolutization of Western thought and Renaissance Eurocentrism. Studying Ramanuja or Chu Hsi is easier because they are not a rival branch of the same tree. |
| Arab nationalists | Cling to "Arabic philosophy"; call Ibn Sina an Arab, but cannot call Mir Damad one, so they ignore the Persian centuries |
Corbin, Heidegger and Suhrawardi
For Corbin, phenomenology meant kashf al-mahjub, "unveiling the hidden": moving from phenomenon to noumenon, against Kant, close to ta'wil from the outward (zahir) to the inward (batin). He translated Heidegger into French but never became a full Heideggerian.
Was Corbin "the last philosopher of Persia"? No: he was not Persian, and living philosophers continue the tradition, among them Mehdi Ha'eri (whose Knowledge by Presence challenges Russell and Wittgenstein from Suhrawardi's 'ilm-i huduri), Ashtiyani, the two Amulis, Ebrahimi Dinani and A'vani. Corbin is rather the first European "Persian philosopher".
Imamology and spiritual guidance
- Organized Sufi orders, Sunni and Shi'ite: Qadiriyyah, Shadhiliyyah, Ni'matullahiyyah.
- Unnamed circles of a master and disciples, common among Shi'ite 'ulama' after late-Safavid hostility to Sufism (Bahr al-'ulum; Tabataba'i, who had a flesh-and-blood master in Najaf).
- Direct guidance by the Twelfth Imam, possible in Shi'ism by Heaven's grace.
- The Uwaysi way: guidance by Khidr (identified by some with Elias).
Tabataba'i and Corbin
Tabataba'i preferred Mulla Sadra; Corbin, to the end, called Suhrawardi "notre maitre".
| What Tabataba'i sought in Corbin | What Corbin sought in Tabataba'i |
|---|---|
| A sympathetic Western spokesman (porte-parole) for authentic Shi'ism | "An ocean of knowledge": authoritative answers, references, Quranic meanings |
| News of current Western philosophical and theological debates, to give Islamic answers (unlike Qazwini, uninterested in Western ideas) | Dialogue with authentic Shi'ite thought rather than European-trained Persians like Fardid and Mahdavi ("why come to Tehran" for that?); he also met the Shaykhi leader Sarkar-i Aqa |
| Revival of traditional philosophy, which he held true for the whole world | Revival of the tradition of Iran, "mon pays intellectuel", where he felt more at home spiritually than anywhere |
Reviving the Islamic Intellectual Tradition
Joining the Tabataba'i-Corbin dialogue at twenty-five, Nasr learned new philosophy and comparative vocabulary. For weeks in 1963 Corbin consulted him on how to render the title of Mulla Sadra's Kitab al-masha'ir; they settled on Le Livre des penetrations metaphysiques, beautiful rather than literal.
| 1958 | 1978 |
|---|---|
| Two "planets": Tehran University teaching French and German philosophy in Persian (Mahdavi's contribution was insisting on Persian as a language of philosophy) and traditional philosophers in Qom, Mashhad and Tehran madrasas | Islamic philosophy "part of the general intellectual discourse" |
| Western-educated Iranians had not heard of Mir Damad or Mulla Sadra | Two volumes of the Tabataba'i-Corbin dialogues published in Qom; radio and TV talks; dozens of texts |
The Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (1974-1979)
In the early 1970s Nasr became the first Iranian member of the Institut International de Philosophie (at most 100 members, including Ricoeur and Levinas). Its president Raymond Klibansky proposed a meeting in Iran (Nasr hosted it in Mashhad, the first major international philosophy conference in the country) and an academy. The Queen agreed to be patron; oil-boom money made funding easy.
- Name: Shahabi suggested "Royal", like British and Swedish academies; Corbin proposed "Imperial", after the old German Imperial Academy. Independent of government financially and administratively.
- Place: offered any land, Nasr chose to save old Tehran: the house of Loqman al-Molk near Chaharrah-e Pahlavi, restored by Isfahani craftsmen in blue tile with a renovated garden, "an authentic Persian environment".
- No degrees: like Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study; no tuition, no registration, "like the old traditional madrasahs".
- Teachers: Corbin, Izutsu, Mehdi Ha'eri, Motahhari, Nasr; board including secular and religious figures (Mahdavi, Ashtiyani); foreign advisers al-Attas, Panikkar, A. K. Saran, Zolla, Mahadevan.
- Students: Chittick (studying Ibn Arabi with Izutsu), James Morris, Hitoshi Igarashi (later killed in Japan over the Rushdie affair), poets Peter Lamborn Wilson and Peter Russell, Qom seminarians, Western-educated Persian women studying 'erfan.
Aryamehr University: Persianizing Technology
- A department of humanities (Iran's own, not the West's marginalized humanities) staffed by Haddad Adel, Chittick and others; required for all students.
- Courses on technology assessment and its social and environmental impact.
- Research on alternative technologies, especially solar energy, rather than "crumbs from the table of the West".
- A traditional campus in Isfahan (see below).
Strikes, bombs and the use of force
Aryamehr's faculty (about 400 Ph.D.s from M.I.T., Stanford, Berkeley, Imperial College) and students were highly politicized, with a secret Mojahedin-e Khalq cell. Nasr's assets: he was purely academic, scientifically trained, and more religious than his religious critics. On day one he declared he would not sacrifice academic quality.
| Step | What happened |
|---|---|
| Senate | Two days of 16-18 hour meetings to adopt a rule: notice, second notice, and after two weeks strikers lose the term (made workable by the university computer) |
| Prime minister Hoveyda | "You are playing with fire... I will not accept any responsibility." |
| The Shah | "I am glad there is somebody finally who is a university president and who is taking studies at the university seriously." |
| Aftermath | Head of guards Major Nowrouzi threatened, later assassinated; a bomb in Nasr's office exploded half an hour before he arrived, late that day by chance |
Critics reproach a "spiritual man" for using force. Nasr used only the university's own guards and never admitted outside police or soldiers. On his first day he confronted angry students over an unrepaired dining hall, then kept the contractors on campus overnight until the ceiling was fixed. One said he had thought Nasr an 'aref (mystic) but not "a mystic with a sword". Nasr's reply: many great battles in Islamic history had Sufis on horseback.
Vocational Decisions
He refused ministerial office repeatedly: from Prime Minister Ali Amini at twenty-eight, from Hasan Ali Mansur's "Progressive" movement, and several ambassadorships. During the "educational revolution" he dodged presidencies in Mashhad and Shiraz by accepting the deanship in Tehran instead. Refusing everything would have forced him back to Harvard.
Mounting Political Tensions (1978)
Nasr was a trusted link between the court and the 'ulama'. The Shah once sent him to ask Tabataba'i to head a new Islamic university in Mashhad; when the 'Allamah declined, Nasr himself was to lead it, but clerical opposition killed it. With the Queen he organized the first conferences on traditional Islamic architecture (Isfahan) and traditional medicine (Shiraz), and campaigns for Isfahan's old houses and the Zayandeh Rud.
| Step | Detail |
|---|---|
| Unrest in Tabriz | Respected 'ulama', fearing a communist or Mojahedin takeover more than wanting revolution, asked him to be the bridge: "You are the only person whom we trust" |
| Sharif Emami cabinet | The Empress moved Nahavandi into the cabinet and asked Nasr to head her Special Bureau, protocol-wise among the highest posts, critical as the Shah was secretly ill with cancer |
| His condition | A cleansing of the court |
| His hope | Khomeini's return and an accord with the Shah: an "Islamic Royal Regime" like the Safavids, with the 'ulama' having a say in law |
| Also | On the Shah's order he asked Gholam-Hossein Sadighi to become prime minister; Sadighi accepted, then withdrew |
Motahhari and many younger clerics encouraged him; only Tabataba'i was unhappy. "God had other plans." His house, property and library were confiscated, and he began again at forty-five with nothing, "not either bitter or sad", because his conscience allowed no other choice. None of the clerics who sought that accord defended him afterwards.
The Death of 'Allamah Tabataba'i
Part Four: Exile, Identity and Persian Culture
Leaving Iran (January 1979)
Nasr left Iran for a trip of a few days and never returned. The chapter moves from the practical story of exile to his most personal reflections: who he is, what he misses, what Persian culture means, and how he lives the spiritual life.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Early Jan 1979 | The Empress asks him to open a major Persian art exhibition in Tokyo in her place, with a dinner for the Japanese Emperor |
| 6 Jan 1979 | He flies to London with his wife and daughter Laili to find her a school first (hers near parliament had been closed for two months) |
| Days later | Japan postpones the exhibition; the Empress phones: she and the Shah are leaving for Egypt, stay in London |
| Result | A few suitcases of clothes and formal wear; only his son Vali's school fees in a London bank. As a patriot he had kept no money abroad. House, library and accounts later seized; "I just had to start life from zero" |
Why America, not a Muslim country?
Lebanon was at war, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt were unsettled or dangerous for him, and no Muslim country invited him; he might have accepted a Saudi or Kuwaiti post. He preferred Britain, but no position existed in 1979 (later, ironically, Edinburgh, London and Oxford's Spalding Chair all sought him). Queen Sofia of Spain offered a passport and a post, but his Spanish was weak.
Later he turned down Malaysia (al-Attas's institute) and Pakistan, judging that from America his articles "spread all over the Islamic world very rapidly"; from Kuala Lumpur his global impact would have been smaller. He did not want to teach at an American university in the Muslim world, and Cairo's universities could not pay enough to rebuild a life.
Temple and George Washington Universities
M.I.T.'s president Jerome Wiesner tried to help, but there was no full professorship. On those flights he wrote the Gifford Lectures (1981), published as Knowledge and the Sacred. In 1984 he chose a university professorship at George Washington over Yale: the capital, and total freedom from administration, "I had had enough of that kind of activity".
- Turkey: over 20 volumes translated, "a whole library"; no Persian since the Middle Ages has had as many works in Turkish.
- Egypt: annual visits for twenty years; also Morocco.
- Bosnia: known in Sarajevo before the 1990s war.
- Malaysia and Indonesia: Ideals and Realities of Islam translated by Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid.
- Pakistan: a dozen books, though visits fell after 1979.
- Britain and France: Temenos Academy, Al-Furqan Foundation, Sorbonne, UNESCO.
Self-Identity: Muslim, Persian or Global?
Nostalgia for Iran
Westernized Iranians, even at home, loved camembert more than Persian cheese; their exile nostalgia is for a country whose concrete things they did not love. Nasr loved everything Persian. He misses:
- The land: mountains he climbed far from cities.
- The people and language: kept alive at home, "but the ambience is not the same".
- The spiritual presence: pilgrimages to Qom and Mashhad several times a year, Isfahan nearly every week, and old Tehran (the Shahabad house, the Sepahsalar Mosque, the bazaar) with its barakah, not the anonymous modern avenues.
What Is Persian Culture?
Nasr returns to his essay for Roloff Beny's photographic book Persia, Bridge of Turquoise (serialized by the newspaper Ettela'at).
- Continuity and discontinuity: an unbroken sense reaching back to the mythic ages of the Shahnameh, and a profound Islamization over 1,400 years that even non-Muslims live within.
- Refinement joined to a spiritual sensuality: Hafiz can praise ruby lips and Divine Qualities in one breath; the modern West has split sensual from spiritual.
- A crossroads: unlike Egypt, a fortress between deserts, Nile and sea, Iran lies open east, west and north.
- Receptivity and synthesis: the Persian psyche is a twig that bends without breaking, absorbing Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Mongols and ideas from India, China and the Mediterranean, then making something new but distinctly Persian. Islam strengthened this integrating power.
- Resilience: phases of docility and absorption followed by reassertion and selective rejection. Against Iranians who call themselves "wishy-washy", Nasr says this is how the culture survived.
- Radiation: the Persianate synthesis shaped the Ottomans, all India, Central and Southeast Asia, even Islamic China.
- A common paradigm: awareness of transcendence, love of light and illumination "from philosophy to the house we live in", and universality within particularity.
Promethean man and pontifical man
Jahanbegloo suggests tragedy was tied to Athenian democracy. Nasr: only partly; it also marks the dying of Greek religion, whose gods became anthropomorphic and subordinate to moira. Hinduism, its Indo-European sister, kept the hierarchy (Brahman above Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and the gods) and so survives.
Persian joy and sorrow
| Joy (farah, tarab, shadi) | Sorrow (huzn, ghamm) |
|---|---|
| Elaborate tables, cuisine, clothing and jewellery; joy in the arts; not modern, not hedonism | Spiritual nostalgia for our original home; we are strangers in this world (Suhrawardi's Treatise on the Reality of Love and Tale of the Occidental Exile) |
| Without sorrow it would decay into "dephilosophized Epicureanism", as in America's divinized pleasure | Not Tchaikovsky's emotional sadness; Persian music's sadness contains sweetness for those qualified to hear it |
Persians are "hot-blooded", more like Italians than Swedes, so huzn is a needed counterweight. Shi'ism, which spread after the Mongols and became official under the Safavids, accentuated sorrow through the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala: metaphysically, this world's rejection of the light in the Imam. Persians were mostly Sunni for most of their history; the soul's sorrow prepared them to love the Arab Imams. An Egyptian once told Nasr: "We are Shi'ites like you except yours is the Shi'ah of huzn; ours is the Shi'ah of farah." Cairo grew around the shrine of Husayn's head.
Sacralization of daily life
The Shi'ite calendar of feasts and mournings (sofreh offerings, rowzekhani recitations, the ta'ziyah passion play), the daily prayers and the Sacred Law sanctified time. Even Norouz, pre-Islamic, was Islamized, associated with the Imams; crowds still go to Qom and Mashhad at the equinox, as Christianity absorbed pre-Christian feasts.
Architecture and the Modern Iranian City
Desacralization began with 19th-century colonialism and imitation of the West, accelerated under the Pahlavis, and, sadly, grew worse after the 1979 Revolution, which came in Islam's name but ignored Islamic art: Tehran went from 3.5 to 12 million, with skyscrapers and the gardens of Shemiran destroyed. One architect wrote that "the situation is worse now than it was thirty years ago". There are islands of hope: restorations in Kashan, Isfahan and Yazd, and the completed Isfahan park project linking the Maydan to the river.
Can there be sacred art today?
Yes, within limits. Mosques, khanqahs and public institutions should follow traditional principles. In Persia there was no sharp line between sacred and profane building: the Ali Qapu palace, the Shah Mosque and the bazaar share one style. Worse than offices that look like Hamburg are modernist mosque "monstrosities" such as Tehran's Masjed-e al-Jawad. Better to copy old mosques, as Egypt wisely does: Nasser's Russian-built apartment blocks are among the ugliest anywhere, but Egyptian mosques remain beautiful.
Poetry, Persian and Western
Nasr sees no part of present Persian culture separate from Islam: even the spring outing sizdah bedar recalled for him the "emerald carpet" opening of Sa'di's Golestan. What shaped him most was Persian Sufi poetry and the Persian Islamic philosophers.
He calls himself "a humble doodler of poetry"; most Persian philosophers wrote verse (Ibn Sina, Tusi, Mulla Sadra, Mir Damad, Baba Afdal; Nasir-i Khusraw was great at both). Wolfson called his thesis "poetic prose". His poems come "as a gift by the Muses" and are Sufi poems.
| Constant companions | Western poets he read |
|---|---|
| Hafiz ("as I grow older I can live just with Hafiz alone"), Rumi's Diwan-e Shams and Mathnawi, Shabistari's Golshan-e raz; Arabic: Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Ibn al-Farid, Shaykh al-'Alawi | Dante, supreme in the West (a year verse by verse with De Santillana through all four levels of meaning); Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth; Emerson; Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas (both met personally); Goethe's West-Eastern Divan, Rilke, Holderlin, Novalis; St John of the Cross. French poetry moved him less than French prose. |
Rumi is "the most universal poet in all of Islamic civilization" and the best-selling poet in America. Shakespeare, as English spreads in pidgin form, is "the poet of the age". Nasr looks in poetry for wisdom and/or divine love, and good nature poetry; he teaches Wordsworth in courses on Man and the Natural Environment and on Persian Sufi literature East and West.
Sufi poetry in the West
People "want spirituality without the spiritual discipline": satori without thirty years of zazen. Sufism cannot be practised outside Islam; "marketeers of spirituality" sell disciples a Sufism without daily prayers.
Living the Spiritual Life
Quoting Merton ("Spiritual life is not to be known or studied. It is to be lived"), Jahanbegloo suggests Nasr has studied more than lived it. "That is totally false."
Sufi practice is primarily individual: invocation of Divine Names or Quranic litanies, meditation, ethical norms, full Islamic rites. The collective gathering (majlis) supports it but cannot replace it. Nasr belongs to a Sufi order. The spiritual figures who influenced him most: Shaykh Ahmad al-'Alawi, the Algerian Shadhili master he never met but felt through his writings and grace, and his disciple Frithjof Schuon.
What Is Spirituality?
Part Five: Esoterism, Tradition, Nature and the Sacred
The book now turns from autobiography to doctrine. In one long session Nasr sets out the core of his thought: the inward and outward in religion, why Western Christianity lost its inner dimension, what tradition and modernism mean, why Descartes broke the chain, the environmental crisis, and the meaning of the sacred.
Spirituality: Esoteric and Exoteric
In his introduction to Islamic Spirituality Nasr names two Islamic words for spirituality: ruhaniyyah (Persian ma'nawiyyat), inwardness, and barakah, divine grace.
| Religion | Structure |
|---|---|
| Christianity | Began as an esoteric religion: "My kingdom is not of this world"; Christ "the prophet of inwardness", as Sufis also see him. Becoming an empire's religion unexpectedly, it borrowed Roman, Germanic and common law and imperial structures. Result: an eso-exoterism, the two fused, apart from marginal Christian Hermeticism and Kabbalah |
| Judaism | Distinct: Halakhah (law) and Kabbalah/Hasidism (mystical path) |
| Islam | Distinct: Shari'ah and tariqah (Sufism, also Shi'ite 'erfan); Shi'ism is a partial mixture, with many mystic 'ulama' |
Socially, the exoteric limits must not be transgressed, because not everyone is made for the inward path but everyone needs a social norm. The key is that the door to the inner life stays open for those drawn to it, as it always was in classical Islamic lands.
Religion's Response to Modernism
Religion is reviving among Western intellectuals because the secular 20th century (Hitler, Stalin, the bomb, two world wars) cannot be blamed on religion, though Nasr notes a new aggressive atheism among some scientists. The answer is not surrender but reasserting the perennial wisdom at the heart of every tradition.
Tradition
Will the answers come from the East? Yes, with a qualifier: the eclipsed Western tradition must also revive, but it cannot come back to life without help from the living traditions of the East. This was the project of Guenon, Coomaraswamy and Schuon, who wrote profoundly on Greek and Christian thought. The answers lie in the sophia perennis, which belongs to East and West.
What is tradition?
Nasr prefers "modernism" (a worldview, an "-ism") to "modernity". In Catholic usage traditio is the Church's accumulated teaching; traditionalists use Guenon's sense.
- Truths of sacred origin: revealed from the Divine through the Buddha's illumination, the descent of Hindu avatars, or prophetic revelation.
- Transmission and application of those principles over centuries within the civilization the revelation creates.
In a traditional civilization the "secular" is ultimately unreal. In classical India, bathing was puja, eating was shared with the gods, a love song had religious meaning.
Descartes' break
Could it have been otherwise?
Not the new astronomy but earlier discontinuity caused modern philosophy:
| Period | Event |
|---|---|
| 14th c. | Rise of nominalism; Christian philosophy weakens |
| Late Middle Ages | Esoteric currents persecuted or driven underground; the Templars destroyed; a vacuum left |
| 15th c. | Florentine Academy translates Greek texts directly from Byzantium; Renaissance Platonism outside Christianity, not Augustine's |
| 16th c. | Sextus Empiricus translated; Montaigne's skepticism; systematic doubt |
| 17th c. | Descartes builds on a scene already shattered |
The Primacy of Philosophy over Economics and Politics
Jahanbegloo notes that Nasr rarely discusses the social and economic changes, such as the modern state. Nasr replies that it is not his field, and that he rejects the Marxist premise, held unconsciously even by anti-Marxists, that economics determines thought. Ideas percolate into society and create institutions. Islamic cities had a stronger merchant class than medieval Europe (no European city in 1000 had a bazaar like Isfahan's or Cairo's), yet the bazaari class never championed secular philosophy.
| Caste | European equivalent | Revolt |
|---|---|---|
| Brahmins (spiritual authority) | Papacy | Overturned by the aristocracy, 14th-c. France (Avignon, anti-popes) |
| Kshatriyas (rulers, warriors) | Aristocracy | Toppled by the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution |
| Vaishyas (merchants) | Bourgeoisie | Challenged by the proletariat from the mid-19th c. |
| Shudras (workers) | Proletariat | Triumph in the Russian Revolution |
Spiritual and Temporal Authority
Jahanbegloo: Christianity's doctrine of two authorities, absent in Islam's caliphate, prepared secularization. Nasr agrees in part. The Gospels say nothing about the bazaar or ruling, and law came from Rome, Germany and England. The pope took the old imperial title pontifex but never claimed rule as a caliph did; temporal power went to the Holy Roman Emperor, a line surviving until World War I. While the hierarchy held, there was harmony (even the "divine right of kings" sacralized temporal rule); from Dante's De Monarchia onward the rivalry grew. So the two-source structure made secularization easier in the West.
Muslim and Renaissance Readings of Greek Politics
| Islamic philosophers | Renaissance and after |
|---|---|
| Experience of a vast world from Spain to China; the city-state seemed an epiphenomenon | Italian cities identified with the polis |
| Read Plato's Republic and Laws; Aristotle's Politics unknown in Arabic but the Nicomachean Ethics famous | Selective, secular reading to support humanism and individualism; Greek democracy praised, its slavery ignored |
| Transformed Greek thought: al-Farabi's Perfect State, al-'Amiri (with Persian ideas); jurists like al-Ghazali and al-Mawardi drew on the Quran and the "prophet-king" model of Moses, David, Solomon and Muhammad | Machiavelli and Hobbes sought pure power and ignored Greek metaphysics |
What Tradition Offers the Modern World
Truth is "useful" in the deepest sense, like the sun. Specifically, tradition offers:
- A critique of modernism: since Spengler's Decline of the West and T. S. Eliot, many have tried; tradition alone gives sure principles, drawn from thousands of years of human experience.
- An alternative paradigm: not eclectic borrowing ("a bit here from Hinduism, a little there from Buddhism"), which "will never work", but the perennial philosophy applied to modern sciences, social sciences and the environmental crisis.
- A science of the soul: after the "debacle of Freudianism" and the limits of Jung's agnosticism, psychologists turn to Sufi, Hindu and Buddhist psychology.
- A philosophy of nature: engineering is "cosmetics"; we need a change in what nature means.
The Environmental Crisis
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step; even one changed mind matters. But Nasr expects only a catastrophe to wake people en masse: not necessarily nuclear, but global warming or a Bhopal on a larger scale, and in the West, since few Westerners cared about Bhopal. Chernobyl's deaths were "stretched out", so no one changed. Species vanish during the conversation itself.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 1966 | Rockefeller Lectures, University of Chicago: "The Encounter of Man and Nature" (book Man and Nature), predicting the crisis and calling its cause spiritual |
| Then | English Christian theologians: "Who is this man from the Middle East telling us what to do?" |
| A generation later | "Nearly every serious Christian theologian is interested in this issue"; Green parties in Europe; Al Gore speaks on climate, but few speak of sacrifice and lifestyle change |
Why did environmentalism start in America, the most destructive nation per head? "The cure for a snakebite is found in the serpent's poison": Europe cut its forests a thousand years ago, while Americans see pristine forests and rivers destroyed within years. The undisciplined hippie movement failed politically but strengthened ecological concern. The Third World, picking up "bread crumbs from the table" of industry, will suffer worse. Jahanbegloo is more pessimistic: Coca-Cola, McDonald's and jeans everywhere. Nasr agrees with the trend but sees a countercurrent of awareness.
The Sacred
Tradition and the sacred are inseparable: tradition is always sacred (no man-made tradition, by definition); the sacred is the presence tradition transmits and makes palpable. The sacred is found in revelation, rites, initiatic practice, sacred art, virgin nature and theophanies such as the Quran, the icon and the Buddha image.
Science, knowledge and the sacred
Agnostic scientists call life "sacred", which is meaningless within modern science and mere sentiment; even Einstein's sense of the sacred was for him feeling. For Nasr, to say reality in the metaphysical sense is to say sacred. His title The Need for a Sacred Science was deliberately provocative: English "science" is narrower than French science or German Wissenschaft, so "sacred science" sounds like an oxymoron. One can study nature exactly and logically from the viewpoint of the sacred.
The multiplicity of religions
Part Six: Modernism, Globalization and Western Images of Islam
What Is Modernism?
Can the gap between Islam and modernity be bridged? Nasr's answer turns on a definition. If "modernity" means the circumstances of a given moment, Islam can live in them. If it means modernism, a philosophy that claims universality and rejects all that opposes it, then "there is no possibility of harmony".
| Modernism | Religion (Islam above all) |
|---|---|
| Anthropocentric | Theocentric: ordinary reality derives from Ultimate Reality |
| Man as earthly individual of ultimate value | Man as theomorphic; the immortal soul of highest value |
| Knowledge through senses and reason | Also intellect, spiritual intuition, faith, revelation |
| Humanism | A sacred collectivity and civilization filled with the sacred |
Two questions must be separated: (1) how a religion can function amid constantly changing conditions, and (2) whether to accept the forces causing the change. Many thinkers take modernism as the norm and ask how religions can adapt. Nasr rejects that: modernism rests on an error about who man is and what reality is, "an enormous deception, which is leading us to perdition".
Critiques of modernism
Harvard professors in the 1950s already insisted on distinguishing "contemporary" from "modern". Deep critiques began in the West because Westerners lived inside modernism and saw its cracks.
A Muslim can fly to Paris and learn to live there; religions must guide their followers in new circumstances. But to make change itself the driving principle contradicts both religion and the Western ideal of freedom. Saying "this is the 21st century, not the 13th" deserves the reply "So what?" Americans already treat the 1970s as medieval and feel nostalgia for the 1950s "as if it were the age of Clovis". Nasr calls this "the ultimate suicide of civilization".
Modern Western critical thought
Jahanbegloo argues modernity has two sides: instrumental reason and a self-critical rationality. Nasr: critical thought predates modernity (Ibn Sina and Biruni were highly critical minds), but Kantian critique uses reason to limit reason, which is logically untenable, and it is "the grease that makes it possible for the wheels of modernity to go around". It ends in impasse: Heidegger's "philosophy ends with me", Rorty's "philosophy is just conversation". Schuon's chapter on Kant in Logic and Transcendence is the deeper critique Nasr favours, from the intellect, toward truths that are metarational, not irrational.
Has modernism shaken Muslim confidence?
| Yes | No |
|---|---|
| Some Western-educated Persians, Pakistanis, Indians, Egyptians and Turks lost confidence in their tradition; many more simply adopted Western hedonism without its philosophy. Far fewer than in Japan or China | Blind imitation has declined. A new generation, many of them Nasr's students, know one or two Western languages well and are rooted in their own philosophy |
| 1950s-60s Pakistan Philosophical Congresses: ~90% of papers on Western philosophy; colonial universities (Punjab, Calcutta) taught Locke, Spencer and Mill | Young Pakistani philosophers now treat Islamic philosophy as philosophy, not archaeology; Indonesia and Malaysia, never centres of it, now teach it from within |
Iqbal saw the importance of Islamic philosophy but was not a traditional philosopher and lacked enough Arabic. One exception to the trend: after the collapse of Arab nationalism, secular Arab thinkers, knowing their tradition only through Western eyes, have made Ibn Rushd a rationalist model and "last Islamic philosopher", with government backing in Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. Nasr thinks they lack the substance to carry the day.
Globalization and Diversity
- War on diversity: one flower in the whole garden, however beautiful, impoverishes it; villagers in Java and Sumatra thinking New York's thoughts.
- War on nature: who cuts Borneo's trees? Japanese and American mining fouls water in South America, Indonesia and Africa; Brazilian peasants burned the Amazon, but the World Bank encouraged it.
- War within ourselves: it intensifies passions for possession and domination, so it brings not peace but quantification.
The Quran says God made peoples different, with different laws, "so vie one with another in good works". Diversity of religions, languages, music and cuisine is a blessing; biodiversity and cultural diversity must both be preserved. Within Islam: inclusiveness and inner unity, not exclusivity and outward homogeneity. Arabic should not replace Persian, nor Persian Turkish; no single legal or theological school should erase the others; in Iran, Baluchi, Azeri and Kurdish should not be crushed by nationalism. Each authentic religion is "a beautiful flower in the human garden" that must keep its uniqueness while respecting others.
Muslims throughout the world
Arkoun
Nasr is a friend of Mohammed Arkoun but rejects his perspective: Arkoun speaks "more as a French intellectual who happens to be a Muslim", a secularist applying "higher criticism" to Islamic texts. Nasr agrees Muslims should reject Orientalist social-scientific readings and the feeble apologetics of "Islam is wonderful because Goethe said so" or "because it gave science to the West", common in Pakistan and India after long Western education. But much new Muslim scholarship is authentic, and Arkoun seems to oppose that too.
Western Images of Islam
The Arab conquest and John of Damascus
Christians thought theirs the final revelation; then within half a century Islam took the Christian eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. It was not like the Mongols (Iran did not become Shamanist or Buddhist): a spiritual transformation accompanied the conquest. Muslim armies reached Poitiers, Nasr notes, two hours' drive from Paris. Islam meanwhile called Jews and Christians People of the Book and its law protected their lives and property. Under the Umayyads, John of Damascus published a scathing attack on Islam "under the nose of the caliph" without harm; his book shaped the Western view of Islam as a deviation from Christianity. Rumours made the Prophet an excommunicated Roman bishop.
The Middle Ages
When insecure, Europe saw Islam as a sign of the end and the Prophet as Antichrist. Peter the Venerable's Latin Quran was made to refute Muslims. Yet some Christians studied in Spain, many lived peacefully under Muslim rule in Spain and Sicily (Muslims did not massacre Christians as Christians later expelled Muslims and Jews in 1492), and Europe deeply respected Islamic civilization.
The Renaissance
The colonial period
Orientalism grew from French, British and Dutch colonial needs; some French studies of North African Sufi orders were written by secret police agents. Persian works first reached Europe through British India, where Persian was the Muslims' main language; Sir William Jones translated. A wave of sympathy followed: Goethe (some of whose letters open with the Basmala in Arabic script, and whose West-Eastern Divan is steeped in Hafiz), Rückert, Emerson's poem "Saadi" and the Transcendentalists, called "the Persians of Cambridge", and FitzGerald's Khayyam, which misread him as hedonist and fatalist.
The Romantic era and modern times
Alongside mystical Islam, the Romantics revived Islam as the harsh desert enemy. Missionary biographies repeated medieval slanders of the Prophet (epilepsy, lust), revived since 2001 in extremist Christian circles.
| Approach today | Nasr's assessment |
|---|---|
| Traditionalists | Central and unique |
| Sympathetic Christian and Jewish scholars | Growing understanding |
| Missionaries | Less important than secularists, who have taken up "missionary activity for anti-religious secularism" |
| Social and political scientists | "An army", uninterested in revelation |
| Comparative religion | Little contribution (Eliade admitted the field favoured Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) |
| Muslim scholars writing in Western languages | An important, authentic body of work |
Part Seven: Art, Beauty and the Sacred
Art sits at the centre of Nasr's philosophy because it sat at the centre of his life. As an M.I.T. student he crossed to Harvard to take almost every course of Benjamin Rowland, Coomaraswamy's student and America's leading scholar of Oriental art, while reading in the Coomaraswamy Library and the Fogg Museum's slide collection. Intellectual understanding of traditional art was joined to "existential attachment" to it, and to music, Western and Oriental.
Two Parallel Paths
| Path | What he did |
|---|---|
| Understanding | Guided by Coomaraswamy and Burckhardt (the first Westerner to expound the inner meaning of Islamic art), plus Schuon and the critic Hans Sedlmayr. Islamic thought has no separate treatise on art like Croce's; the philosophy of art lies scattered in Sufi texts and oral tradition. The Mathnawi of Rumi is its most important Persian source; also Awhad al-Din Kirmani |
| Preservation | In Iran (1958-79): organized the first conference on traditional architecture in Isfahan; sat on a secret committee chosen by the Empress to preserve Isfahan; fifteen years on the Supreme Council of Arts and Culture; found students for the last two or three Safavid-style bookbinders; brought Hassan Fathy from Egypt. Helped found the Prince of Wales Institute of Traditional Architecture in London |
What Is Traditional Art?
Traditional art, with sacred art at its heart, uses the artist as an instrument for symbols and ideas "in the Platonic sense" that transcend the individual, executed through traditional techniques. Forms, contours and colours originate not in the artist's psyche but in the spiritual world.
| Traditional | Modern |
|---|---|
| Conveys truth, beauty and universal meaning | "I am trying to express myself" |
| Reflects a Platonic archetype in physical form | Often has no meaning; the artist must explain it |
| Always beautiful, a conduit of the sacred | Need not be beautiful |
| Anti-naturalistic, breaking form from above | Naturalistic, then breaking form from below |
| Joined to life and utility | "Art for art's sake", kept in museums |
The traditional artist's reply to self-expression: "There are another 6 billion people... Why is my self more interesting than the self of the other 6 billion?"
Naturalism and its collapse
Traditional art never copies the external forms of nature (Aquinas says as much). The Chartres figures are elongated; a Chinese butterfly captures "butterflyness"; Timurid and Safavid miniatures have pink mountains and prototypic trees, "trees of paradise reflected here on earth". Decadence begins exactly when figures and space turn naturalistic: Ottoman and Mughal miniatures and later Persian painting, Ming vases, modern Hindu and Buddhist statues. The medieval Vishnus of Nepal show life coming from within the sculpture without naturalism.
Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo were geniuses, but they turned symbolic art humanistic. Raphael's Virgin is "a sweet gentle girl taken from the streets of Florence", whereas the medieval Virgins that Polish pilgrims still visit are iconic. Naturalism peaked in the 17th and 18th centuries and "crumbled under its own weight"; naturalistic forms grow spiritually opaque, which is one reason Islam opposes them. Impressionism (Renoir, Degas, Monet, Van Gogh) briefly drew spiritual qualities from light and colour. Then came Picasso, cubism and surrealism, "which is really subrealism", falling below natural forms rather than transcending them. These differences reflect worldviews, not ethnicity: Persians painting modernistically paint by an imported philosophy.
Form and utility
Traditional civilizations made art for inner perfection and human need, since "we are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe". Art was utility in the deepest sense, not 19th-century utilitarianism: "art was life and life was art". Coomaraswamy: in the modern world the artist is a special kind of man; in the traditional world every man was a special kind of artist. Hence museums: our grandmothers' bath utensils and any 19th-century hand-dyed Persian carpet now belong in them.
Beauty as a basic need
Marxism did harm by equating beauty with luxury ("once your stomach is full, then you can think of beauty"). Poverty in a traditional Indian, Bangladeshi or Moroccan village is still close to nature and beauty; the slums around Paris, Harlem or Anacostia are ugly. In the richest country on earth the poor wear nylon, natural food is for the rich, and a village carpet sells for thousands on Wisconsin Avenue. Handmade quality, once ordinary, is now luxury. "We live below ourselves in ugliness."
Sufis distinguish metaphorical love and beauty from real love and beauty (Awhad al-Din Kirmani). All love is finally love of God; an atheist listening to Bach in rapt silence is seeking the sacred without knowing it. Plato's "Beauty is the splendor of the Truth" is close to Sufism: beauty is "light emanating from the crown of the Sacred".
Religious Art versus Sacred Art
- Sacred art: origin in the Sacred itself, anonymous or tied to an angel or saint; symbolic language beyond the individual. Quranic calligraphy (said to begin with Ali); the Buddha image, born of the Buddha nature in enlightened vision, which "saves"; the icon revealed to Saint Luke; the 11th-century Dance of Shiva.
- Traditional art: the wider art of a traditional civilization, sacred at its centre.
- Religious art: religious subject, individual and psychological execution. Chagall's floating angels, Velázquez's Christ, Raphael's Virgin, Leonardo's Last Supper, the naturalized Krishnas of modern Hindu temples.
Five hundred years ago in Europe there was no gap between sacred and religious art; since the 19th century the gap has spread with modernism everywhere.
Can outsiders understand another sacred art?
Yes and no. No one is fully transformed by, or can ritually use, another universe's sacred art without entering its religion; a Muslim can appreciate an icon but not pray with it. Yet through intelligence "by anticipation" and empathy one can be deeply moved, as some Americans who mastered Persian truly feel Hafiz. Burckhardt's Sacred Art in East and West treats Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian and Islamic art; Chinese readers find his account of Taoist painting "incredible".
Myth and symbol
Sacred art need not be mythological: Hinduism expresses truth through myth, Islam through metaphysical ideas, and both produced vast sacred arts side by side in India. Sacred geometry, as in Islamic art and Native American sand paintings, is another route. The modern mythos versus logos split errs by reducing logos to reason and forgetting the intellect, which relates to both.
Nasr wrote little on mythology because Coomaraswamy, Eliade, Zimmer and Daniélou covered it and because he personally preferred non-mythic metaphysics (Plotinus and Proclus over Olympus, the Gita and Upanishads over the epics). But no society, Islam included, can live without myth; rationalist Muslims who demythologize are secularizing. The Prophet's mi'raj is historical fact, metaphysical reality and myth in the true sense, reenacted by Sufis in every century.
The Sacred in the Modern World
| Sacred original | Modern substitute |
|---|---|
| Climbing the spiritual mountain | Sheer-wall climbing that subjugates the mountain |
| Shamanic and spiritual flight | A ticket from Air France |
| Cathedral on Sunday | The mall, Disney World |
Disney World is a false substitute and therefore spiritually ugly: plastic, balloons, noise. Nasr went only to see Epcot's replicas of Moroccan and Indian architecture. The test: people visited sacred places daily for a lifetime without boredom, but no one could visit Disney World daily. Aquinas felt at home in the cathedral; the medieval Sorbonne was beautiful; tourists now pay to enter Saint Louis's chapel inside the Ministry of Justice.
Is art dying?
Not all art is dying, only traditional and sacred art; anyone can weld junkyard car parts and call it sculpture. Modernism destroys the traditional arts, partly from greed (machine products replace handmade ones); people fly to Bali to see a living handmade tradition. But there is a countermovement.
| Place | What changed |
|---|---|
| Iran | Fifty years ago, rich homes held nothing Persian but carpets. The Empress's patronage, pushed by Nasr, revived stucco, brickwork, textiles, calligraphy; it continues post-Revolution |
| Morocco | King Hassan II built palaces, mosques and libraries employing armies of craftsmen |
| Bazaars | Still 70-80% Chinese plastic junk, but more fine traditional objects in Syria, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco |
| India | Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts founded to preserve traditional arts |
| Japan | Most industrialized yet preserved Zen gardens, temples, music; the Ise shrine rebuilt from scratch periodically |
| China | Marxism denigrated tradition, but the market rewards authentic vases |
| Turkey | Young calligraphers (even women) in banned Ottoman script; new Ottoman-style mosques in Konya and Ankara |
In the West the traditional arts remain far more marginal: handmade pottery in Alexandria, Virginia, against Wal-Mart.
The Meaning of Islamic Art
So Islam's greatest artists sought its inner dimension: nearly all great Persian poets are Sufis (the world reads Rumi, not court panegyrists), as were most great calligraphers and many architects, who handed down an esoteric science "from breast to breast". How did builders without 19th-century physics raise Isfahan domes that survived earthquakes for 700 years, or make the cobalt of the Soltaniyeh and Gawharshad tiles? Through a hidden sacred geometry, as with the cathedral builders.
Appreciating it from outside, and education
Over 90% of Egypt's Western tourists never notice its Islamic art, but thousands trained in their own cathedrals or in Indian or Japanese art "see". Nasr, not a Christian, never visits Paris without contemplating Notre Dame's stained glass. Empathy is both a gift and a cultivation, like a musical ear: Aristotle was musically deaf and so missed the Pythagoreans.
Art belongs at the centre of education but not alone. Latin ars and Greek techne meant making; Persian san'at still covers industry and handicraft. Education must join the aesthetic, intellectual, moral, spiritual and physical (Plato's Republic, Hindu temple dance and yoga). Modernity separates aesthetics from ethics; tradition did not. Many Islamic philosophers from Ibn Sina to Sabziwari were poets, Nasir-i Khusraw and Afdal al-Din Kashani great ones.
Aniconic art
| Iconic: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism | Aniconic: Islam, Judaism |
|---|---|
| Centred on the manifestation of the Divine (Christ, Buddha, the gods) | Centred on the One, the Absolute, which no image in a world of multiplicity can depict |
| Named for the manifestation: Christianity, Buddhism | Never "Mohammedanism" or "Mosaism" |
| Image at the heart | Geometry, arabesque, calligraphy, Quranic psalmody |
To say Islam has no art because painting is not central is like saying "only meat is food". Even Hinduism has aniconic Tantric art. Burckhardt notes the danger of icons: man sees himself in the divine image and anthropomorphizes it further, as in the post-medieval West and Graeco-Roman antiquity.
Master and apprentice: two creativities
- The master has knowledge of metaphysics, cosmology and symbolism and a vision of the imaginal world, bringing its forms down into matter or sound. "Originality is authentic only if it refers to the Origin."
- The apprentice learns forms faithfully; even a comb-maker in the bazaar benefits spiritually through transmission. Repetition is never mechanical: la takrar fi'l-tajalli, "there is no repetition in manifestation". The nasta'liq calligrapher follows exact geometry yet leaves a personal trace, as a pear tree yields pears each year, never the same pear.
Persian art and unity in diversity
Persian art is one of the peaks of Islamic art (Nasr corrects "the peak"), Islamic and Persian at once, as pre-Islamic art was Zoroastrian and Persian, just as Japanese, Sri Lankan and Indian Buddhist art all differ yet are Buddhist. It is the most diversified and most influential, shaping the art of Islamic Asia and the Ottomans; the Persian miniature is "in a class unto itself". But Turkish thuluth and naskh, Iraqi, Egyptian and Maghribi calligraphy, and the mosques of the Maghrib, Egypt, Turkey and India are peaks too: "one should not be a chauvinist".
Part Eight: Sufism and Interreligious Dialogue
What Is Sufism?
Martin Lings called Sufism "a kind of mysticism... concerned above all with the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven". Nasr accepts this if mysticism keeps its root, the Greek muein, "to keep silent": "Whoever is taught the mysteries of God, his mouth has become sealed and his lips sewn." But English "mysticism" now suggests vagueness and carries the colour of the Christian mysticism of love.
Tasawwuf and 'Irfan: a Persian Puzzle
Every integral path has a doctrine and a method. The doctrine of Sufism can be called 'irfan (gnosis, not to be confused with Gnosticism; in Arabic ma'rifah). Early Sufis such as Hujwiri, Kharaqani and Qushayri saw no gap between tasawwuf and 'irfan. The split is Safavid.
| Stage | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1501 | Shah Ismail, head of the Safavid Sufi order, becomes king; Twelver Shi'ism made the state's official school, though most Persians were still Sunni |
| Import of 'ulama' | Arab Shi'ite scholars brought from Jabal 'Amil, Hillah and Bahrain; mostly unsympathetic to Sufism, they competed with the orders for power (and revived Arabic in philosophy) |
| Bandwagon Sufis | With a Sufi king, many joined for worldly gain and ignored the Shari'ah |
| Late Safavid | The Safavid order persecuted rivals, especially the Ni'matullahis, who fled to India; 'ulama' attacked Sufism from the pulpit; ordinary people were taught Sufism was un-Islamic |
| Qajar | Strong comeback (a Qajar prime minister joined an order), but in Qom and Mashhad, inwardly drawn 'ulama' said "I study 'irfan", never "I am a Sufi" |
Contrast Cairo, where an ordinary pious Muslim sees Sufis as upright lovers of God and the Prophet. In Sunni lands this hostility arose only with Salafi and modernist movements.
- Sufi orders: Ni'matullahi, Dhahabi, Khaksar; in Sunni Kurdistan and Baluchistan, Qadiri and Naqshbandi.
- Shi'ite gnosis ('irfan-i shi'i): philosopher-gnostics such as Mulla Sadra and Sabziwari; Aqa Muhammad Reza Qumsha'i, "the Ibn 'Arabi of his day"; later Mirza Ahmad Ashtiyani and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim 'Assar.
- A hidden initiatic chain among the 'ulama', transmitting walayah from master to disciple back to the Prophet, with invocation and meditation but without the name: Bahr al-'Ulum (19th century), 'Allamah Tabataba'i. It continues in Qom and Mashhad. Tabataba'i and Ayatollah Khomeini both wrote on 'irfan.
"You cannot have Sufism without that chain or silsilah."
Sufism Is Not Pacifism
Normally the relation ran the other way: Sufis did not seek sultans; Nasir al-Din Shah, on pilgrimage to Mashhad, stopped to visit Sabziwari.
Sufism, Shi'ism and Sunnism
Is Shi'ism more favourable to Sufism? Nasr separates two levels.
| Sociologically: no | Doctrinally: yes, in one sense |
|---|---|
| Among traditional Sunnis (Salafis aside), love of Sufism is at least as great. In Senegal, wholly Sunni, over half the population has some Sufi affiliation; Egypt and Syria deeply respect Sufism. Only Libya and Saudi Arabia, with extreme governments or Wahhabi opposition, drive it underground | Shi'ism contains esoteric elements within its ordinary structure through the Imam, who carries the Muhammadan Light. In Sunnism esotericism lives in the orders, with exceptions like al-Ghazali, both jurist and Sufi |
In Sunnism "imam" means caliph, an honorific (Imam al-Ghazali) or a founder of a law school, never the bearer of the Muhammadan Light. The Shi'ite Imam is ruler in principle, perfect interpreter of the Law and esoteric guide, like a supreme Sufi master; biological descent from the Prophet is secondary. The Imams up to the eighth are poles of Sunni Sufi orders. Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq founded Ja'fari law, taught Abu Hanifah, and wrote the earliest surviving esoteric Quran commentary. All Sufi orders trace to 'Ali, except the Naqshbandiyyah, which connects to him through Ja'far. At the start Shi'ism and Sufism belonged to one world of Islamic esoterism; 'Ali is both first Imam and Sufi patriarch.
The Source of Sufism
Did Sufism come from Christian monks?
Nasr has repudiated the Orientalist derivation theories (Christian monasticism, Hinduism, Iranian religion, Neoplatonism, "Aryan reaction against a Semitic religion") since von Kremer in the 19th century.
- The logic of conversion: a saint who became holy by reading Plotinus could not make people Christian. Millions became Muslim through Sufism, so it must issue from Islam's heart.
- The Senegal test: when Sufis arrived in the 19th century, a few per cent of Senegalese were Muslim; a century of French-backed Catholic missions later, at independence, 83-84% were Muslim. Sufism derived from Christian monasticism would have made Christians.
- Language versus experience: Neoplatonism lent Sufis, Christians and Jews a language, but realized "tasted" or presential knowledge is a light within, not a concept. A Native American who has climbed his sacred mountain ten times may borrow an English mountaineering book's vocabulary; the book did not make him climb.
Massignon was the first Orientalist to locate Sufism's roots in the Quran, true but incomplete, since it omits the transmitted power. Because Islam is the last plenary revelation it has great synthesizing power; Sufism contains every possibility of esoterism "from the Vedanta to Saint John of the Cross" and absorbed formulations from elsewhere, while its roots and sap stay Islamic. The Prophet loved Christian monks, and in Sufism Christ is "the prophet of inwardness"; in Shi'ite prayers all prophets are named. Influence runs both ways: Sufism shaped the expressions of Indian bhakti, but did not create it, or it would not be Hindu. More than half the Islamic world became Muslim through Sufism.
Interreligious Dialogue
Before modern comparative religion, Muslims who spoke of the universality of revelation were Sufis such as Ibn 'Arabi and Rumi; al-Biruni's India, "the first book on comparative religion", was scientific rather than empathetic. Dialogue is hard today because Christian mysticism has been eclipsed (Thomas Merton is an exception). Guenon and Schuon, champions of the transcendent unity of religions, belonged to the Sufi tradition. Guenon quoted al-tawhidu wahid, "the doctrine of Unity is unique": only one Truth, manifested in every authentic religion, "otherwise God would not be merciful and just".
Why Christianity needed dialogue first
| Christianity threatened by other religions | Other religions threatened by Christianity |
|---|---|
| Secularization since the Renaissance left a half-empty religious space in the West | Missions backed by colonial money and power: "rice bag conversion", vaccinating cows for farmers who showed interest |
| Doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus; the Quran instead promises reward to all with faith and good works | Even after the Revolution killed priests at home, France funded missions in North Africa |
| Eastern religions arrived with intact metaphysics and methods, while no Eckhart, Aquinas or Bonaventure lived in the 20th-century West (Padre Pio an exception) | Confrontation, not dialogue |
| Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism had no armies, schools or hospitals to lure converts; they attracted only by spiritual substance |
A 12th-century Parisian met Islamic ideas from inside a full Christian world and felt no need to look outside. The 19th-century translations of Quran, Upanishads and sutras reached a half-secular West. Then came the Ramakrishna movement, Vivekananda, Romain Rolland, Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi; sacred art in museums; French figures with empathy for Islam (Charles de Foucauld, Émile Dermenghem, Vincent Monteil, who converted); D. T. Suzuki's Zen essays (1927); and after 1945 Alan Watts, Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley. This flowed, diluted, into the New Age of the 1960s. The sequence: Vedanta, then Zen, then Sufism. Westerners read the Gita, never the Laws of Manu: they want the esoteric. Sufism arrived late and was largely spared pseudo-spiritual commerce, until Idries Shah tried to divorce Sufism from Islam.
Christian responses: Aelred Graham's Zen Catholicism, Bede Griffiths in an Indian ashram, and Thomas Merton, perhaps the 20th century's most influential Catholic writer, who studied Zen and Sufism and was on his way to visit Nasr in Iran when he died in Thailand. After Vatican II came Nostra Aetate and the Secretariat for Non-Christians (Cardinals Pignedoli and Arinze).
Why Islam is not theologically threatened
| Encounter | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Buddhism | Eastern Persia was Buddhist, not Zoroastrian; the Barmakids were Buddhist temple keepers; Buddhism reached China through Persia |
| Hinduism | Sindh and Gujarat from the first Islamic century; a thousand years of exchange, Hindu classics in Persian, Islamic classics in Sanskrit; Mir Findiriski's commentary on the Yoga Vasishtha; the Upanishads went from Persian into Latin (Anquetil-Duperron) |
| Shamanism | Turks converted before reaching Iran; Turkic and Mongol shamanic ideas survived |
| Chinese religions | Liu Zhi and Wang Daiyu, Descartes' contemporaries, wrote Islamic thought in Neo-Confucian Chinese |
| African religions | Niger Valley and Sudan |
Ideas travelled from Morocco to China through the Hajj. Still, dialogue is now necessary for Muslims too, because modernism makes knowledge of other religions unavoidable. The presence of other religions confirming one's own is "a kind of divine compensation" for the lost homogeneity of the religious world.
Part Nine: Christianity, Secularism and Sacred Law
Why Modernism Struck Western Christianity First
Why did modernism overtake Christianity more easily than Islam? It did not even touch Eastern Christianity in the same way. Nasr's answer is a genealogy: Western Christianity triumphed over late antiquity without neutralizing it.
Decline from the head
From the 13th century Western theology became externalized and admitted rationalism, held at bay by Aquinas and Bonaventure while the sapiential tradition was strong; Roman statues stood in Rome all through the Middle Ages without inspiring medieval sculptors. In the 14th century nominalism denied Platonic realism and Ockham's razor substituted logic for metaphysics. "The fish begins to stink from its head": corruption began with the intellectual elite while ordinary people stayed pious, even absorbing Druidic and Germanic festivals and the Christmas tree ("there had been no Christmas trees in Palestine") without secularizing. With the weeds no longer held down, the Renaissance became the triumph of decadent late-antique paganism over Christian culture.
- The Avignon captivity weakened the papacy; the papacy itself suppressed mystical currents; worldliness crept into the hierarchy.
- The Reformation is unique in religious history: unlike Mahayana and Theravada, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, or Sunnism and Shi'ism, it was a revolt 1,500 years later, in the Bible's name, against the religion's central authority.
- Catholicism kept defending Western civilization after it secularized; only now is it distancing itself from a civilization that produced Marx, Freud, Sartre and deconstructionism, all Westerners. The Vatican is "a 16th-century Roman palace", not Chartres; intelligent souls at home in Rheims cannot feel at home in Baroque churches. The wedding of intelligence and piety became exceptional in the West.
- Protestantism escaped Renaissance worldliness but destroyed the sacred ambience, opposing mysticism, traditional philosophy and sacred art (religious music, but no Gregorian chant; Bach and Böhme the great exceptions), and allied with capitalism.
- Over a century of wars of religion (the Huguenots and their foes) drove many Europeans from religion altogether.
Secular and Sacred Law
| Civilization | Spiritual and temporal authority |
|---|---|
| Western Christianity | Two authorities and two sources of law, which parted ways |
| Judaism, Islam, Hinduism | One sacred law for all of life |
| Confucian China | The Emperor as bridge between Heaven and Earth, head of both |
| Shinto Japan | Emperor as descendant of the Sun Goddess until MacArthur's constitution |
| Tibetan Buddhism | The Dalai Lama as head of religion and king until 1951; similar in Bhutan and Nepal |
Projecting church-state categories onto others is "a very parochial way of looking at this matter". Persian and Arabic have no classical word for "secular": Arabs coined 'ilmaniyyah, Persians dunyagara'i.
Church and state are Christian categories
Al-din and al-dawlah are not church and state. Islam has no pope, priesthood or hierarchy; the nearest thing to a "church" is the whole ummah. "You and I sitting in this room are as much priests in Islam as any Catholic priest": any Muslim may marry, bury, and recite the Shahadah into a newborn's ear. The 'ulama' are not Brahmins but scholars of the Law, like people who study dentistry. Before 1979, Iran's kings were "the shadow of God on earth", and the 1906 Constitution called royalty a gift from God. Shah Ismail headed both "church" and "state" and founded modern Iranian identity.
| Country | Reality |
|---|---|
| England | The Queen heads the Church of England |
| Sweden | Lutheran state church until recently |
| Germany | State funds the churches |
| France | Strict laïcité, from the anti-Catholic Revolution |
| United States | Separation from anti-Catholic Freemasonry and from persecuted sects (Quakers, Puritans) refusing one dominant church; its culture wars (abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality) are Protestant ethics colliding with secular ideas |
Category errors abound. The American press calls Mubarak's Egypt "secular", yet it cannot change the Shari'ah; even Nasser spoke of Islamic unity. Pakistan, ruled by soldiers, has no separation. Only Turkey approaches separation and is "half paralyzed": laïcisme imposed from above on a devout population that still fills the mosques at noon. India's Hindu-nationalist government and China's Marxist regime encouraging Confucian ethics show this is not just an Islamic phenomenon. Colonialism and Atatürk's abolition of the sultanate destroyed traditional institutions, and "one cannot pull a new institution out of the hat". The Quran fixes inheritance shares precisely but, wisely, prescribes no form of government, only principles. No Muslim government will ban school prayer in the foreseeable future.
Can Religion Be Privatized in Islam?
Synthesis
Key Takeaways
- Nasr's thought grows out of his life: a home where traditional learning, Persian poetry and modern science lived side by side.
- His father taught him that knowledge without ethics is incomplete; his teachers joined 'ilm (knowledge) to tarbiyah (formation).
- At M.I.T. he saw that physics measures reality but cannot say what it is. The crisis led him from physics to metaphysics, not from reason to irrationality.
- The traditionalists (Guenon, Schuon, Coomaraswamy, Burckhardt) gave him certitude. Islamic philosophy and Sufism gave him a living home for it.
- He returned to Iran to renew, not reform (mujaddid, not muslih). His program was to teach Islamic philosophy as philosophy, restore traditional art and architecture, and digest modern science.
- Corbin and the traditional masters, above all 'Allamah Tabataba'i, show the meeting of Western scholarship and Persian wisdom.
- In exile he defines himself as a Persian Islamic thinker, rooted and universal.
- Spirituality has a form (surat) and a meaning (ma'na). The esoteric is reached through the exoteric, never by discarding it.
- Tradition means truths of sacred origin plus their transmission and application over time.
- Modernism is a philosophy, not a period. It puts man in place of God, and its signature is the worship of time.
- "If we have to change with the times, what do the times have to change with?" The spiritual person makes the times.
- Kantian critique is reason limiting itself. True criticism comes from the intellect and points to metarational truths.
- The environmental crisis is spiritual at root: it follows from a desacralized view of nature, so technical fixes alone will fail.
- Globalization means homogenization. Diversity of cultures and religions is a divine blessing, to be kept like biodiversity.
- Islam is the most portable religion: every Muslim is a priest, and the hard part of living it today is psychological.
- Western images of Islam swing between fear and admiration. Today the West has more authentic knowledge of Islam than ever, and more misinformation.
- Traditional art conveys suprahuman archetypes. Modern art expresses the self, first copying nature and then breaking form from below.
- Beauty is a need like bread and air. Making it a luxury impoverishes the poor most of all.
- Sacred art (from the Sacred) differs from religious art (religious subject, individual style).
- Myth is a symbol in motion. Killing myth secularizes the world.
- The modern world cannot destroy the space the sacred once held in the soul, so it fills it with substitutes: the mall, Disney World, extreme climbing.
- Islamic art issues from the Haqiqah, the inner truth, while the Shari'ah sets its conditions. Originality means returning to the Origin.
- Sufism is gnosis joined to love, transmitted through an initiatic chain from the Prophet. It is not borrowed from monks or Neoplatonists.
- Sufism is not pacifism: the warrior-saint fights only for justice and with inner detachment.
- Religions can meet only above their forms, in their esoteric dimension. For Islam that dimension is Sufism.
- Western Christianity secularized first because it had no revealed law for society, and because seeds of antiquity's skepticism survived inside it.
- Church and state are Christian categories. For Muslim societies the real question is who should hold power.
- Privatized religion depends on borrowed ethics. Real democracy in Muslim lands would yield more Islamic governments, not secular ones.
Questions for Reflection
- Nasr separates the conditions of modernity from the philosophy of modernism. Where does that line fall in your own work?
- "What do the times have to change with?" What principles decide which changes you accept?
- Why does Nasr call Kantian critique "the grease" that keeps modernity turning, and what kind of criticism does he want instead?
- Is the environmental crisis mainly technical or spiritual? What would each answer have you do differently?
- Name one object you use daily that is beautiful by tradition and one that is merely useful. What did the second cost you?
- Pick a famous painting. By Nasr's test, is it sacred art or religious art, and why?
- What is the difference between "original" and "new"? Can a faithful copy be creative?
- Nasr argues Sufism cannot come from texts alone. What, in any field, can only be passed on by a living teacher?
- If religions meet only above their forms, what does that mean for everyday interfaith life between neighbours?
- Does "separation of church and state" make sense where there is no church? What better question does Nasr offer?
Frameworks at a Glance
| Framework | Source | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Three human types (Nasr's father) | Part One | Character as the measure of knowledge |
| Mujaddid vs muslih | Part Three | Renewal from within vs reform from outside |
| Form (surat) and meaning (ma'na) | Part Five | Exoteric and esoteric as one whole |
| Two elements of tradition | Part Five | Sacred origin plus transmission |
| Modernism vs religion table | Part Six | Anthropocentric vs theocentric worldview |
| Three wars of globalization | Part Six | On diversity, on nature, within the self |
| Sacred / traditional / religious art | Part Seven | Classifying art by its origin, not its subject |
| Two creativities (master, apprentice) | Part Seven | Originality as return to the Origin |
| Symbol (static) and myth (dynamic) | Part Seven | Why sacred art needs living symbols |
| Three forms of Persian Sufism | Part Eight | Orders, Shi'ite gnosis, hidden chain |
| Three arguments for Sufism's Islamic origin | Part Eight | Conversion logic, Senegal, language vs experience |
| Genealogy of Western secularization | Part Nine | Antique seeds, nominalism, Renaissance, Reformation |
| One vs two authorities | Part Nine | Why church-state categories do not travel |
A closer look
| Strengths | Limits |
|---|---|
| A rare inside view of how a traditionalist thinker was formed, with names, dates and institutions | It is a friendly conversation. Jahanbegloo pushes, but Nasr's account of his own role in prerevolutionary Iran (court ties, the Empress, Aryamehr) is never tested by other sources |
| A coherent critique: one root error (anthropocentrism) explains the environment, art, education and politics | The single-cause story can flatten history. Modern medicine, rights and literacy appear mainly as symptoms |
| The best short case that sacred art differs in kind from religious art | The boundary between "authentic" and "pseudo" religion or art is asserted more than argued |
| A careful dismantling of church-state categories outside the West | The claim that democracy would yield Islamic governments is offered as a hope, not tested. How minorities and dissenters fare is barely discussed |
| Generous on dialogue: unity above forms keeps each religion intact | The esoteric meeting ground is open to few, so the model gives little guidance for ordinary believers who live with neighbours of other faiths |
| Honest about globalization's costs and its gap between rich and poor | Figures (Muslim populations, the gap between rich and poor) date from about 2001 and are not sourced |
Who's Who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Ramin Jahanbegloo | Interviewer; Iranian philosopher trained at the Sorbonne |
| Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon | Founders of the traditionalist school; Nasr's intellectual guides |
| Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt | Masters of the metaphysics of traditional and sacred art |
| Henry Corbin | French scholar of Persian philosophy; Nasr's collaborator |
| 'Allamah Tabataba'i | Nasr's teacher; philosopher and hidden gnostic |
| Martin Lings | Traditionalist author; gave the definition of Sufism discussed in Part Eight |
| Louis Massignon, Annemarie Schimmel | Western scholars of Islam who wrote about it with empathy |
| Hassan Fathy | Egyptian traditional architect whom Nasr brought to Iran |
| Emir 'Abd al-Qadir, Najm al-Din Kubra | Warrior-saints of Sufism |
| Thomas Merton | Catholic monk who died on his way to visit Nasr |
| Mohammed Arkoun | Friend, but a secular critic whose approach Nasr rejects |
Glossary of Key Terms
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| tradition | Truths of sacred origin, together with their transmission and application through time |
| modernism | The worldview that puts man in place of God: humanism, rationalism, empiricism, anthropocentrism |
| perennial philosophy | The one primordial wisdom found at the heart of all authentic religions |
| scientia sacra | Sacred knowledge; metaphysics as realized knowledge of the Real |
| 'irfan / ma'rifah | Gnosis; in Persia, also the name the 'ulama' used for Sufi doctrine after the Safavid period |
| tasawwuf | Sufism, the inner dimension of Islam |
| walayah | Spiritual power and sanctity transmitted from the Prophet through the Sufi chain |
| silsilah | Initiatic chain from master to disciple |
| barakah | Grace or blessing carried by the chain and by sacred things |
| Shari'ah / Haqiqah | The Divine Law / the inner Truth |
| surat / ma'na | Form / meaning |
| mujaddid / muslih | Renewer from within / reformer |
| al-Jamil | "The Beautiful", a Divine Name |
| Muhammadan Light | The prophetic reality, carried in Shi'ism by the Imams |
| mi'raj | The Prophet's night ascent; fact, metaphysical reality and myth |
| la takrar fi'l-tajalli | "There is no repetition in manifestation" |
| al-tawhidu wahid | "The doctrine of Unity is one": only one Truth, manifested in all authentic religions |
| imaginal world | The intermediate world of forms between the physical and the purely intelligible |
| aniconic art | Sacred art without images of the Divine: geometry, arabesque, calligraphy |
| ummah | The Muslim community; the nearest Islamic equivalent of a "church" |
| din / dawlah | Religion / dynasty or government; not the same as church and state |
| 'ilmaniyyah | Modern Arabic coinage for "secularism" |
| Zeitgeist | "Spirit of the times", which Nasr says the West substituted for the Holy Spirit |
| symbolist spirit | Schuon's term for traditional man's ability to see symbols everywhere |
About this book
In Search of the Sacred: A Conversation with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on His Life and Thought by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2010. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions