Quotes from Seyyed Hossein Nasr

It is not true to say that the sun is only incandescent gas, although this is an aspect of its reality. It is also as true to say that the sun is the symbol of the intelligible principle in the Universe and this element is as much an aspect of its ontological reality as the physical features discovered by modem astronomy.

And what ails you that you fight not in the way of God, and for the weak and oppressed—men, women, and children—who cry out, "Our Lord! Bring us forth from this town whose people are oppressors, and appoint for us from Thee a protector, and appoint for us from Thee a helper.

Look at yourself; you are the same person since you were born. During these forty years of your life, all the cells of your body have changed, but you are still you, even though you are liv- ing in time and space. So it is with tradition.

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

A traditional Muslim would see in the bleakness and ugliness of modern industrial society and the ambiance it creates an outward reflection of the darkness within the souls of men who have created this order and who live in it.

It is very easy to learn intolerance and unlearn tolerance, but difficult to unlearn intolerance

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.

Being a theomorphic creature, man is himself a work of art. The human soul when purified and dressed in the garment of spiritual virtues is itself the highest kind of beauty in this world, reflecting directly the Divine Beauty.

The world is order or cosmos rather than chaos, one that is alive as an organism and at the same time governed by law.

The idea of writing the history of philosophy as philosophy began with Hegel's influence in Germany, and then it spread to France and England, and histories of philosophies began to appear everywhere in Europe and America.

I believe that modernism itself is based on an error, an error in the understanding of who man is, an error in under- standing the nature of reality both metacosmic and cosmic. Modernism is based on an enormous deception, which is leading us to perdition and destroying the world.

Yes, each religion has to provide instructions for its followers as to how to live in our present- day world. But to take this change itself as the ''principle'' which should drive us on, as if we were picked up like a horse and driven against our will, that is not only against religion, but also against everything for which the Western ideas of liberty and freedom have stood.

The ambivalent nature of light points if anything to a continuous underlying substance, what traditional cosmology calls the ether, which also exhibits a discontinuous aspect by virtue of its being indistinct. The debate in this domain today, if one glances at the principles involved, is not very much different from that of the followers of hylomorphism and atomism in the Middle Ages and in Antiquity.

Man therefore occupies a particular position in this world. He is at the axis and centre of the cosmic milieu at once the master and custodian of nature. By being taught the names of all things he gains domination over them, but he is given this power only because he is the vicegerent (khalifah) of God on earth and the instrument of His Will. Man is given the right to dominate over nature only by virtue of his theomorphic make-up, not as a rebel against heaven.

Whatever service the works of C. G. Jung may have rendered to make alchemy better known, they are inadequate in that they limit alchemy to a psychology that is devoid of a transcendent and spiritual origin for the symbols that appear to the human psyche.

It is not accidental that the walls of European cities began to be broken about the same time that heliocentric astronomy destroyed the idea of the world as cosmos or 'order' and removed the finite boundary of the Universe.

Traditional art extended itself to the whole of life and left an imprint of beauty upon the everyday existence of human beings rather than being concerned only with paintings that we put in museums and at best visit a few Sundays each year.

Even in the physical world, all that cannot be caught in the modern science is collectively neglected, and its nonexistence "objectively" avowed. It is as if an audience of deaf people at a concert testified together that they did not hear any music and considered the unanimity of their opinion as a proof of its objectivity.

Even in the physical world, all that cannot be caught in the net of modern science is collectively neglected, and its nonexistence "objectively" avowed. It is as if an audience of deaf people at a concert testified together that they did not hear any music and considered the unanimity of their opinion as a proof of its objectivity.

Truly those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the Christians, and the Sabeans—whosoever believes in God and the Last Day and works righteousness shall have their reward with their Lord. No fear shall come upon them, nor shall they grieve.

Without the withering criticism by nominalism, medieval Christian philosophy and theology would not have relinquished their claim to the role of knowledge in discovering the nature of things in light of higher principles; instead, it caused them to leave the field of battle without any defense before the onslaught of secularism, rationalism, and empiricism, which were, as a result, able to gain a remarkably easy victory.

Outside of the har?m, or sacred precinct, in Arabia, it is the duty of the Muslim state, according to the Shar?'ah, to allow the building and maintenance of houses of worship of the "People of the Book," and any order to the contrary is against the tenets of Islamic Law and traditional practice.

It is very interesting to note that in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia, which had never been a center for Islamic philosophy, there are now many gifted, young philosophers, scholars, and teachers who teach Islamic philosophy from the point of view of the Islamic meta- physical and philosophical tradition, which was something unheard of in modern universities in the Islamic world a few decades ago.