AlSerat, Reflections on Islam and Modern Life [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

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Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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Al-Serat
Reflections on
Islam and Modern Life


Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Vol. VI, No. 1


FEW subjects arouse more passion and debate among Muslims today than
the encounter between Islam and modern thought. The subject is of course
vast and embraces fields ranging from politics to sacred art, subjects
whose debate often causes volcanic eruptions of emotions and passions and
vituperations which hardly lead to an objective analysis of causes and a
clear vision of the problems involved. Nor is this debate which consumes
so much of the energies of Muslims and students of Islam helped by the
lack of clear definition of the terms of the debate and an insight into
the actual forces involved. The whole discussion is also paralyzed by a
psychological sense of inferiority and a sense of enfeeblement before the
modern world which prevents most modernized Muslims from making a critical
appraisal of the situation and of stating the truth irrespective of the
fact whether it is fashionable and acceptable to current opinion or not.
Let us then begin be defining what we mean by modern thought.


It is amazing how many hues and shades of meaning have been given
to the terms "modern" ranging from contemporary to simply "innovative",
"creative", or in tune with the march of time. The question of principles
and in fact the truth itself is hardly ever taken into consideration when
modernism is discussed. One hardly ever asks whether this or that idea or
form or institution conforms to some aspect of the truth. The only
question is whether it is modern or not. The lack of clarity, precision
and sharpness of both mental and artistic contours, which characterizes
the modern world itself, seem to plague the contemporary Muslim's
understanding of modernism whether he wishes to adopt its tenets or even
to react against it. The influence of modernism seems to have dimmed that
lucidity and blurred that crystalline transparency which distinguish
traditional Islam in both its intellectual and artistic manifestations. [1]


When we use the term "modern", we mean neither contemporary nor
up-to-date nor successful in the conquest and domination of the natural
world. Rather, for us "modern" means that which is cut off from the
transcendent, from the immutable principles which in reality govern all
things and which are made known to man through revelation in its most
universal sense. Modernism is thus contrasted with tradition
(al-din); the latter implies all that which is of Divine Origin
along with its manifestations and deployments on the human plane while the
former by contrast implies all that is merely human and now ever more
increasingly subhuman, and all that is divorced and cut off from the
Divine Source [2].
Obviously, tradition has always accompanied and in fact characterized
human existence whereas modernism is a very recent phenomenon. As long as
man has lived on earth, he has buried his dead and believed in the after
life and the world of the Spirit. During the "hundreds of thousands" of
years of human life on earth, he has been traditional in outlook and has
not "evolved" as far as his relation with God and nature seen as the
creation and theophany of God are concerned. [3]
Compared to this long history during which man has continuously celebrated
the Divine and performed his function as God's vicegerent
(khalifah) on earth, the period of the domination of modernism
stretching from the Renaissance in Western Europe in the 15th century to
the present day appears as no more than the blinking of an eye. [4] Yet,
it is during this fleeting moment that we live; hence the apparent
dominance of the power of modernism before which so many Muslims retreat
in helplessness or which they join with a superficial sense of happiness
that accompanies the seduction of the world.


A word must also be said about the term "thought" as it appears in the
expression modern thought. The term thought as used in this context is
itself modern rather than traditional. The Arabic term fikr or the
Persian andishah, which are used as its equivalence, hardly appear
with the same meaning in traditional texts. In fact what would correspond
to the traditional understanding of the term would be more the French
pensee as used by a Pascal, a term which can be better rendered as
meditation rather than thought. Both fikr and andishah are
in fact related to meditation and contemplation rather than to a purely
human and therefore non-divine mental activity which the term thought
usually evokes.[5] If
then we nevertheless use the term thought, it is because we are addressing
an audience nurtured on all that this term implies and are using a medium
and language in which it is not possible, without being somewhat contrite,
to employ another term with the same range of meaning embracing many forms
of mental activity but devoid of the limitation in the vertical sense that
the term "thought" possesses in contemporary parlance.


All these forms of mental activity which together comprise modern
thought and which range from science to philosophy, psychology and even
certain aspects of religion itself, possess certain common characteristics
and traits which must be recognized and studied before the Islamic
response to modern thought can be provided. Perhaps the first basic trait
of modern thought to be noted is its anthropomorphic nature. How can a
form of thought which negates any principle higher than man be but
anthropomorphic? It might of course be objected that modern science is
certainly not anthropomorphic but that rather it is the pre-modern
sciences which must be considered as man-centered. Despite appearances,
however, this assertion is mere illusion if one examines closely the
epistemological factor involved. It is true that modern science depicts a
universe in which man as spirit, mind and even, psyche has no place and
the Universe thus appears as "inhuman" and not related to the human state.
But it must not be forgotten that although modern man has created a
science which excludes the reality of man from the general picture of the
Universe, [6] the
criteria and instruments of knowledge which determine this science are
merely and purely human. It is the human reason and the human senses which
determine modern science. The knowledge of even the farthest galaxies are
held in the human mind. This scientific world from which man has been
abstracted is, therefore, nevertheless based on an anthropomorphic
foundation as far as the subjective pole of knowledge, the subject who
knows and determines what science is, is concerned.


In contrast, the traditional sciences were profoundly non
anthropomorphic in the sense that for them the locus and container of
knowledge was not the human mind but ultimately the Divine Intellect. True
science was not based on purely human reason but on the Intellect which
belongs to the supra-human level of reality yet illuminates the human
mind. [7] If
medieval cosmologies placed man at the center of things it is not because
they were humanistic in the Renaissance sense of the term according to
which terrestrial and fallen man was the measure of all things but it was
to enable man to gain a vision of the cosmos as a crypt through which he
must travel and which he must transcend. And certainly one cannot begin a
journey from anywhere except where one is. [8]


If the characteristic of anthropomorphism is thus to be found in modern
science, it is to be seen in an even more obvious fashion in other forms
and aspects of modern thought whether it be psychology, anthropology or
philosophy. Modern thought, of which philosophy is in a sense the father
and progenitor, became profoundly anthropomorphic the moment man was made
the criterion of reality. When Descartes uttered "I think, therefore I am"
(cogito ergo sum), he placed his individual awareness of his own
limited self as the criterion of existence for certainly the "I" in
Descartes assertion was not meant to be the Divine "I" who through Hallaj
exclaimed "I am the Truth" (ana'l-Haqq), the Divine "I" which
according to traditional doctrines alone has the right to say "I". [9] Until
Descartes, it was Pure Being, the Being of God which determined human
existence and the various levels of reality. But with Cartesian
rationalism individual human existence became the criterion of reality and
also the truth. In the mainstream of Western thought, and excluding
certain peripheral developments ontology gave way to epistemology,
epistemology to logic; and finally by way of reaction logic became
confronted with those anti-rational "philosophies" so prevalent today. [10]


What happened in the post-medieval period in the West was that higher
levels of reality became eliminated on both the subjective and the
objective domains. There was nothing higher in man than his reason and
nothing higher in the objective world than what that reason could
comprehend with the help of the normal human senses. This was of course
bound to happen if one remembers the well-known principle of adequation
(the adaequatio of St. Thomas Aquinas) according to which to know
anything there must be an instrument of knowledge adequate and conforming
to the nature of that which is to be known. And since modern man refused
to accept a principle higher than himself, obviously all that issued from
his mind and thought could not but be anthropomorphic.


A second trait of modernism, closely related to anthropomorphism, is
the lack of principles which characterizes the modern world. Human nature
is too unstable, changing and turbulent to be able to serve as the
principle for something. That is why a mode of thinking which is not able
to transcend the human level and which remains anthropomorphic cannot but
be devoid of principles. In the realm of the life of action, namely the
domain of morality (although morality cannot be reduced simply to action)
and, from another point of view, politics and economics, everyone senses
this lack of principles. But one might object that principles do exist as
far as the sciences are concerned. Here again, however, it must be
asserted that neither empiricism nor validification through induction nor
yet reliance upon the data of the senses as confirmed by reason can serve
as principles in the metaphysical sense. They are all valid in their own
level as is the science created by them. But they are divorced from
immutable principles as is modern science which has discovered many things
on a certain level of reality but because of its divorce from higher
principles has brought about disequilibrium through its very discoveries
and inventions. Only mathematics among the modern sciences may be said to
possess certain principles in the metaphysical sense. The reason is that
mathematics remains, despite everything, a Platonic science and its laws
discovered by the human mind continue to reflect metaphysical principles
as reason itself cannot but display the fact that it is a
reflection, even if a dim one, of the Intellect. The discoveries of the
other sciences, to the extent that they conform to some aspect of the
nature of reality, of course possess a symbolic and metaphysical
significance, but that does not mean that these sciences are attached to
metaphysical principles and integrated into a higher form of knowledge.
Such an integration could take place but as a matter of fact it has not.
Modern science, therefore, and its generalizations, like other fruits of
that way of thinking and acting which we have associated with modernism,
suffer from the lack of principles which characterize the modern world, a
lack which is felt to an even greater degree as the history of the modern
world unfolds.


It might be asked what other means of knowledge were available to other
civilizations before the modern period. The answer is quite clear at least
for those Muslims who know the intellectual life of Islam: revelation and
intellectual intuition or vision (dhawq, kashf or
shuhud) [11]. The
Muslim intellectual saw revelation as the primary source of knowledge not
only as the means to learn the laws of morality concerned with the active
life. He was also aware of the possibility for man to purify himself until
the "eye of the heart" ('ayn al-qalb), residing at the center of
his being, would open and enable him to gain the direct vision of the
supernal realities. Finally he accepted the power of reason to know, but
this reason was always attached to and derived sustenance from revelation
on the one hand and intellectual intuition on the other. The few in the
Islamic world who would cut this cord of reliance and declare the
independence of reason from both revelation and intuition were never
accepted into the mainstream of Islamic thought. They remained marginal
figures while in a reverse fashion in the post-medieval West those who
sought to sustain and uphold the reliance of reason upon revelation and
the Intellect remained on the margin while the mainstream of modern
Western thought rejected both revelation and intellectual intuition as
means of knowledge. In modern times even philosophers of religion and
theologians rarely defend the Bible as a source of a sapiental knowledge
which could determine and integrate scientia in the manner of a St.
Bonaventure. The few who look upon the Bible for intellectual guidance are
usually limited by such shallow literal interpretations of the Holy Book
that in their feuds with modern sciences the rationalistic camp comes out
almost inevitably as the victor.


When one ponders over these and other salient features of modernism,
one comes to the conclusion that in order to understand modernism and its
manifestations, it is essential to comprehend the conception of man which
underlies it. One must seek to discover how modern man conceives of
himself and his destiny, how he views the anthropos
vis-a-vis God and the world. Moreover, it is essential to
understand what constitutes the soul and mind of men and women whose
thoughts and ideas have molded and continue to mold the modern world. For
surely if such men as Ghazzali and Rumi or for that matter an Erigena or
Eckhardt were the occupants of the chairs of philosophy in leading
universities in the West another kind of philosophy would issue forth in
this part of the world. A man thinks according to what he is, or as
Aristotle said, knowledge depends upon the mode of the knower. A study of
the modern concept of man as being "free" of Heaven, complete master of
his own destiny, earth-bound but also master of the earth, oblivious to
all eschatological realities which he has replaced with some future state
of perfection in profane historical time, indifferent if not totally
opposed to the world of the Spirit and its demands and lacking a sense of
the sacred will reveal how futile have been and are the efforts of those
modernistic Muslim "reformers" who have sought to harmonize Islam and
modernism in the sense that we have defined it. If we turn even a cursory
glance at the Islamic conception of man, at the homo islamicus, we
shall discover ,the impossibility of harmonizing this conception with that
of modern man. [12]


The homo islamicus is at once the slave of God (al-'abd)
and His vicegerent on earth (khalifatallah fi'l ard). [13] He
is not an animal which happens to speak and think but possesses a soul and
spirit created by God. The homo Islamicus contains within himself
the plant and animal natures as he is the crown of creation (ashraf
al-makhluqat) but he has not evolved from the lower forms of life. Man
has always been man. The Islamic conception of man envisages that man is a
being who lives on earth and has earthly needs but he is not only earthly
and his needs are not limited to the terrestrial. He rules over the earth
but not in his own right, rather as God's vicegerent before all creatures.
He therefore also bears responsibility for the created order before the
Creator and is the channel of grace for God's creatures. The homo
islamicus possesses the power of reason, of ratio which divides
and analyzes, but his mental faculties are not limited to reason. He also
possesses the possibility of inward knowledge, the knowledge of his own
inner being which is in fact the key to the knowledge of God according to
the famous prophetic hadith "He who knows himself knoweth His Lord"
(man 'arafa nafsahu faqad 'arafa rabbahu). He is aware of the fact
that his consciousness does not have an "external, material cause but that
it comes from God and is too profound to be affected by the accident of
death. [14] The
homo islamicus thus remains aware of the eschatological realities,
of the fact that although he lives on this earth, he is here as a
traveller far away from his original abode. He is aware that his guide for
this journey is the message which issues from his home of origin
the Origin, and this message is none other than revelation to which
he remains bound not only in its aspect of law as embodied in the
Shari'ah but also in its aspect of truth and knowledge
(Haqiqah). He is also aware that man's faculties are not bound and
limited to the senses and reason but that to the extent that he is able to
regain the fullness of his being and bring to actuality all the
possibilities God has placed within him, man's mind and reason can become
illuminated by the light of the spiritual and intelligible world to which
the Holy Quran refers as the invisible ('alam al-ghayb).[15]


Obviously such a conception of man differs profoundly from that of
modern man who sees himself as a purely earthly creature, master of
nature, but responsible to no one but himself and no amount of wishy-washy
apologetics can harmonize the two. The Islamic conception of man removes
the possibility of a Promethean revolt against Heaven and brings God into
the minutest aspect of human life. [16] Its
effect is therefore the creation of a civilization, an art, a philosophy
or a whole manner of thinking and seeing things which is completely
non-anthropomorphic but theocentric and which stands opposed to
anthropomorphism which is such a salient feature of modernism. Nothing can
be more shocking to authentic Muslim sensibilities than the Titanic and
Promethean "religious" art of the late Renaissance and the Baroque which
stand directly opposed to the completely non-anthropomorphic art of Islam.
Man in Islam thinks and makes in his function of homo sapien and
homo faber as the 'abd of God and not as a creature who has
rebelled against Heaven. His function remains not the glorification of
himself but of his Lord and his greatest aim is to become "nothing", to
undergo the experience of fana' which would enable him to become
the mirror in which God contemplates the reflections of His own Names and
Qualities and the channel through which the theophanies of His Names and
Qualities are reflected in the world.


Of course what characterizes the Islamic conception of man has profound
similarities with the conception of man in other traditions including
Christianity and we would be the last to deny this point. But modernism is
not Christianity or any other tradition and it is the confrontation
of Islam with modern thought that we have in mind and not its comparison
with Christianity. Otherwise what could be closer to the Islamic teaching
that man is created to seek perfection and final spiritual beatitude
through intellectual and spiritual growth, that man is man only when he
seeks perfection (talib al-kamal) and attempts to go beyond himself
than the scholastic saying Homo non prorie humanus sed superhumanus
est (which means that to be properly human man must be more than
human).


The characteristics of modern thought discussed earlier, namely its
anthropomorphic and by extension secular nature, the lack of principles in
various branches of modern thought and the reductionism which is related
to it and which is most evident in the realm of the sciences are obviously
in total opposition to the tenets of Islamic thought, as the modern
conceception of man, from whom issue these thought patterns is opposed to
the Islamic conception of man. This opposition is clear enough not to need
further elucidation here. [17]
There is one characteristic of modern thought, however, which needs to be
discussed in greater detail as a result of its pervasive nature in the
modern world and its lethal effect upon the religious thought and life of
those Muslims who have been affected by it, namely, the theory of
evolution. [18]


In the West no modern theory or idea has been as detrimental to
religion as the theory of evolution which instead of being taken as a
hypothesis in biology, zoology, or paleontology, parades around as if it
were a proven scientific fact. Furthermore, it has become a fashion of
thinking embracing fields as far apart as astrophysics and the history of
art. Nor has the effect of this manner of thinking been any less negative
on Muslims affected by it than it has been on Christians. Usually
modernized Muslims have tried to come to terms with evolution through all
kinds of unbelievable interpretations of the Holy Quran forgetting that
there is no way possible to harmonize the conception of man (Adam) to whom
God taught all the "names" and whom He placed on earth as His
khalifah and the evolutionist conception which sees man as
"ascended" from the ape. It is strange that except for a few
fundamentalist Muslim thinkers who have rejected the theory of evolution
on purely religious grounds, few Muslims have bothered to see its logical
absurdity and all the scientific evidence brought against it by such men
as L. Bounoure and D. Dewar[19],
despite the ecstatic claims of its general acceptance by various standard
dictionaries and encyclopedias. In fact, as it has been stated so justly
by E. F. Schumacher, "evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction,
even a kind of hoax." [20] Some
Western critics of evolution have gone so far as to claim that its
proponents suffer from psychological disequilibrium [21]
while recently a whole array of arguments drawn from information theory
have been brought against it. [22]


It is not our aim here to analyze and refute in detail the theory of
evolution, although such a refutation by Muslim thinkers is essential from
a scientific as well as metaphysical, logical and religious points of view
as it has been already carried out in the Occident. What is important to
note here is that the evolutionary point of view which refuses to see
permanence anywhere, for which the greater somehow "evolves" from the
"lesser" and which is totally blind to the higher states of being and the
archetypal realities which determine the forms of this world is but a
result of that loss of principles alluded to above. Evolutionism is but a
desperate attempt to fill the vacuum created by man's attempt to cut the
hands of God from His creation and to negate any principle above the
merely human which then falls of necessity to the level of the sub-human.
Once the Transcendent Principle is forgotten, the world becomes a circle
without a center and this experience of the loss of the center remains an
existential reality for anyone who accepts the theses of modernism,
whether he be a Christian or a Muslim.


Closely allied to the idea of evolution is that of progress and
utopianism which both philosophically and politically have shaken the
Western world to its roots during the past two centuries and are now
affecting the Islamic world profoundly. The idea of unilateral progress
has fortunately ceased to be taken seriously by many noted thinkers in the
West today and is gradually being rejected in the Islamic world as an
"idol of the mind" before which the earlier generation of modernized
Muslims prostrated without any hesitation.[23] But
the utopianism which is closely related to the idea of progress bears
further scrutiny and study as a result of the devastating effect it has
had and continues to have on a large segment of the modernized Muslim
"intelligensia".


Utopianism is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:
"impossible ideal schemes for the amelioration of perfection of social
conditions". Although the origin of this term goes back to the well-known
treatise of Sir Thomas More entitled Utopia and written in 1516 in
Latin, the term utopianism as employed today has certain implications
ante-dating the 16th century although the term itself derives from More's
famous work. The Christian doctrine of the incarnation, combined with a
sense of idealism which characterizes Christianity were of course present
before modern times. Utopianism grafted itself upon the caricature of
these characteristics and whether in the form of the humanitarian
socialism or such figures as St. Simon, Charles Fourier or Robert Owen or
the political socialism of Marx and Engels, led to a conception of history
which is a real parody of the Augustinian City of God. The utopianism of
the last centuries, which is one of the important features of modernism,
combined with various forms of Messianism led and still lead to deep
social and political upheavals whose goals and methods cannot but remain
completely alien to the ethos and aims of Islam.[24]
Utopianism seeks to establish a perfect social order through purely human
means. It disregards the presence of evil in the world in the theological
sense and aims at doing without God, as if it were possible to create an
order based on goodness but removed from the source of all goodness.


Islam has also had its descriptions of the perfect stage or society in
works as those of al-Farabi describing the madinat al-fadilah or
the texts of Shaykh Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi referring to the land of
perfection which is called in Persian na kuja-abad, literally the
land of nowhere, utopia. But then, it was always remembered that this land
of perfection is nowhere, that is beyond the earthly abode and therefore
identified with the eighth clime above the seven geographic ones. The
realism present in the Islamic perspective combined with the strong
emphasis of the Holy Quran upon the gradual loss of perfection of the
Islamic community as it moves away from the origin of revelation prevented
the kind of utopianism present in modern European philosophy from growing
upon the soil of Islamic thought. Moreover, the Muslim remained always
aware that if there is to be a perfect state, it could only come into
being through Divine help. Hence, although the idea of the cyclic renewal
of Islam through a "renewer" (mujaddid) has been always alive as
has the wave of Mahdi'sm which sees in the Mahdi the force sent by God to
return Islam to its perfection, Islam has never faced within itself that
type of secular utopianism which underlies so much of the politico-social
aspects of modern thought. It is therefore essential to be aware of the
profound distinction between modern utopianism and Islamic teachings
concerning the mujaddid or renewer of Islamic society or the Mahdi
himself. It is also basic to distinguish between the traditional figure of
the mujaddid and the modern reformers who usually, as a result of
their feeble reaction to modern thought, have hardly brought about the
renewal of Islam.


There is finally one more characteristic of modern thought which is
essential to mention and which is related to all that has been stated
above. This characteristic is the loss of the sense of the sacred. Modern
man can practically be defined as that type of man who has lost the sense
of the sacred, and modern thought is conspicuous in its lack of awareness
of the sacred. Nor could it be otherwise seeing that modern humanism is
inseparable from secularism. But nothing could be further from the Islamic
perspective in which there does not even exist such a concept as the
profane or secular, [25] for
in Islam, as already mentioned, the One penetrates into the very depths of
the world of multiplicity and leaves no domain outside the domain of
tradition. This is to be seen not only in the intellectual aspects of
Islam [26] but
also in a blinding fashion in Islamic art. The Islamic tradition can never
accept a thought pattern which is devoid of the perfume of the sacred and
which replaces the Divine Order by one of a purely human origin and
inspiration. The confrontation of Islam with modern thought cannot take
place on a serious level if the primacy of the sacred in the perspective
of Islam and its lack in modern thought is not taken into consideration.
Islam cannot even carry out a dialogue with the secular by placing it in a
position of legitimacy. It can only take the secular for what it is,
namely the negation and denial of the sacred which ultimately alone
is while the profane or secular only appears to be.


In conclusion, it is necessary to mention that the reductionism which
is one of the characteristics of modern thought has itself affected Islam
in its confrontation with modernism. One of the effects of modernism upon
Islam has been to reduce Islam in the minds of many to only one of its
dimensions, namely the Shari'ah, and to divest it of those
intellectual weapons which alone withstand the assault of modern thought
upon the citadel of Islam. The Shari'ah is of course basic to the
Islamic tradition; it is the ground upon which the religion is based. But
the intellectual challenges posed by modernism in the form of
evolutionism, rationalism, existentialism, agnosticism and the like can
only be answered intellectually and not juridically nor by ignoring or
disregarding them and expecting some kind of magical wedding between the
Shari'ah and modern science and technology. The successful
encounter of Islam with modern thought can only come about when modern
thought is fully understood in both its roots and ramifications and the
whole of the Islamic tradition brought to bear upon the solution of the
enormous problems which modernism poses for Islam. At the center of this
undertaking lies the revival of that wisdom, that hikmah or
Haqiqah, which lies at the heart of the Islamic revelation and
which will remain valid as long as men remain men and bear witness to Him
according to their theomorphic nature and their state of servitude before
the Lord ('ubudiyyah), the state which is the raison d'etre
of human existence.


Notes
Islam is based on intelligence and intelligence is
light as expressed in the hadith, inna'l-'aqla nurun
(Verily intelligence is light). The characteristic expression of Islam
is the courtyard of an Alhambra whose forms are so many crystallizations
of light and whose spaces are defined by the rays of that light which
symbolizes, in this world, the Divine Intellect.
On tradition and modernism as used here and in fact
in all of our writings see F. Schuon, Light on the Ancient
Worlds, trans. Lord Northbourne, London, 1969; and R Guenon, The
Crisis of the Modern World, trans. M. Pallis and R. Nicholson,
London, 1962. If we are forced to re-define these terms here, it is
because despite the considerable amount of writing devoted to the
subject by the outstanding traditional writers such as Guenon, Schuon,
A. K. Coomaraswamy, T. Burckhardt, M. Lings and others, there are still
many readers, especially Muslim ones, for whom the distinction between
tradition and modernism is not clear. They still identify tradition with
customs and modernism with all that is contemporary. Many Western
students of Islam also identify "modern" with "advanced", "developed"
and the like as if the march of time itself guarantees betterment. For
example C. Leiden, a political scientist and student of contemporary
Islam writes, "Equally important is how the term modernization can
itself provide insight into these questions. This is not the first time
in history that societies have undergone confrontation with other
'advanced' societies and have learned to accommodate to them. Every such
confrontation was, in a sense, a clash or contact with modernization."
J. A. Bill and C. Leiden, Politics Middle East, p 63. The author
goes on to cite as example the confrontation of the Romans with the
Greeks and the Arabs with the Byzantine and Persians. However, despite
the decadent nature of late Greek culture, neither the Greeks nor
certainly the theocratic Byzantines and Persians were modern in our
definition of the word according to which this is the first time
that traditional societies confront modernism.
Despite the totally anti-traditional character of the
perspective which dominates modern anthropology, even certain
anthropologists have come to the conclusion that from a metaphysical and
spiritual point of view, man has not evolved one iota since the
Stone Age. If in the early decades of this century this view was
championed by a few scholars such as A. Jeremias and W. Schmidt, in
recent years it has received a more powerful support based on extensive
evidence reflected in the studies of such men as J. Servier and from the
point of view of religious anthropology, M. Eliade.
It must be remembered that even during this
relatively short period of five centuries, the Muslim world has remained
for the most part traditional and did not feel the full impact of
modernism until a century ago. See S. H. Nasr, Islam and the Plight
of Modern Man, London, 1976.
In the famous Persian verse "Invoke until thy
invocation gives rise to meditation (fikr) And gives birth to a
hundred thousand virgin "thoughts" (andishah)." In these verses
the relation of mental activity in a traditional context to spiritual
practice and contemplation is stated clearly.
There have been recent attempts to escape from the
reductionism of classical physic and to introduce both life and even the
psyche as independent elements in the Universe. But the general view of
modern science remains the reductionist one which would reduce spirit to
mind, mind to the external aspects of the psyche, the external aspects
of the psyche to organic behaviour, and organisms to molecular
structures. The man who knows and who has the certitude of his own
consciousness is thus reduced to chemical and physical elements which in
reality are concepts of his own mind imposed upon the natural domain.
See A. Koestler and J. R. Smythies (eds.), Beyond Reductionism,
London, 1959., especially the article of V. E. Frankl, "Reductionism and
Nihilism" where he writes, 'the present danger does not really lie in
the loss of universality on the part of the scientist, but rather in his
pretense and claim of totality .... the true nihilism of today is
reductionism .... Contemporary nihilism no longer brandishes the word
nothingness; today nihilism is camouflaged as nothing-but-ness.
Human phenomena are thus turned into mere epiphenomena." See also the
remarkable work of E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed,
New York, 1977, especially chapter one where this question is
discussed.
See F. Brunner, Science et realite, Paris,
1956, where the author displays clearly the non-anthropomorphic nature
of the traditional sciences based on their reliance upon the Divine
Intellect rather than mere human reason.
Concerning the study of the cosmos as a crypt as far
as Islam is concemed see S. H. Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic
Cosmological Doctrines, London, 1978, chapter 15.
See S. H. Nasr, "Self-awareness and Ultimate
Selfhood," Religious Studies, vol 13, no. 3, Sept. 1977, pp.
319-325.
The classical study of E. Gilson, The Unity of
Philosophical Experience is still valuable in tracing this
development in Western thought.
It was especially Sadr al-Din Shirazi who
elucidated, perhaps more than any other Muslim philosopher, the relation
between the three paths of reason, intuition and revelation open to man
in his quest for the attainment of knowledge. See S. H. Nasr, Sadr
al-Din Shirazi and his Transcendent Theosophy, London, 1978.
There are of course many men and women living in the
modern world who would not accept this description of modern man as far
as it concerns themselves. But such people, whose number in fact grows
every day in the West, are really contemporary rather than modern. The
characteristics which we have mentioned pertain to modernism as such and
not to a particular contemporary individual who may in fact stand
opposed to them. See G. Eaton, The King of the Castle, London,
1977.
On the Islamic conception of man see S. H. Nasr,
"Who is Man, the Perennial Answer of Islam," in J. Needleman (ed.),
The Sword of Gnosis, Baltimore, 1974, pp. 203-17.
Consciousness has no origin in time. No matter how
we try to go back in the examination of our consciousness, we cannot
obviously reach a temporal beginning. At the heart of this consciousness
in fact resides the Infinite Consciousness of God who is at once the
Absolutely Transcendent Reality and the Infinite Self residing at the
center of our being. In general, Sufism has emphasized more the
objective and Hinduism the subjective pole of the One Reality which is
at once pure Object and pure Subject, but the conception of the Divinity
as pure Subject has also been always present in Islam as the reference
in the Holy Quran to God as the Inward (al-batin), the prophetic
hadith already cited and such classical Sufi treatises as the
Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-tayr) reveal. See F. Schuon,
Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, trans. D. M. Matheson,
London, 1953, pp. 95ff.
It is of interest to note that one of the
outstanding treatises of Islamic philosophy dealing with metaphysics and
eschatology is a work by Sadr al-Din Shirazi entitled Mafatih
al-ghayb, literally Keys to the Invisible World.
"In Islam, as we have seen, the Divine ray pierces
directly through all degrees of existence, like an axis or central
pivot, which links them harmoniously and bestows upon each degree what
is suited to it; and we have also seen how the straight ray curves on
its return and becomes a circle that brings everything back to its point
of departure ..." L. Schaya, "Contemplation and Action in Judaism and
Islam," in Y. Ibish and I. Marculescu (eds.), Contemplation and
Action in World Religions, Seattle and London, 1978, p. 173.
Of course the ramification of this opposition and
the details as they pertain to each field are such that they could be
discussed indefinitely. But here we have the principles rather than
their applications in mind. We have discussed some of these issues in
detail in our Islam and the Plight of Modern Man.
"... in the modern world more cases of loss of
religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution as their
immediate cause than to anything else .... for the more logically
minded, there is no option but to choose between the two, that is,
between the doctrine of the fall of man and the 'doctrine' of the rise
of man, and to reject altogether the one not chosen ...." M. Lings,
review of D. Dewar, The Transformist Illusion; in Studies in
Comparative Religion, vol. 4, no. 1, 1970, p. 59 One might also
explain the rapid spread of the theory of evolution as a pseudo-religion
in the West by saying that to some extent at last it came to fill a
vacuum already created by a weakening of faith. But as far as Islam is
concerned, its effect has been to corrode and weaken an already existing
faith as it was for those Christians who still possessed strong
religious faith when the theory of evolution spread in the late 19th
century and in fact up to this day.
See L. Bournoure, Determinisme et finalite,
double loi de la vie, Paris, 1957; ibid., Recherche d'une
doctrine de la vie. Vrai savants et faux prophetes, Paris, 1964; and
D. Dewar, The Transformist Illusion, Newfreesboro (Tenn.), 1957.
We have also dealt with this question in our Man and Nature,
London, 1977.
Schumacher, Guide for the Perplexed, p. 114.
"It is far better to believe that the earth is a disk supported by a
tortoise and flanked by four elephants than to believe, in the name of
'evolutionism', in the coming of some 'superhuman' monster. "A literal
interpretation of cosmological symbols is, if not positively useful, at
any rate harmless, whereas the scientific error such as evolutionism -
is neither literally nor symbolically true; the repercussions of its
falsity are beyond calculation." F. Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives
and Human Facts, p. 112.
"If we present, for the sake of argument, the theory
of evolution is a most scientific formulation, we have to say something
like this: 'At a certain moment of time the temperature of the Earth was
such that it became most favourable for the aggregation of carbon atoms
and oxygen with the nitrogen-hydrogen combination, and that from random
occurences of large clusters molecules occurred which were most
favourably structured for the coming about of life, and from that point
it went on through vast stretches of time, until through processes of
natural selection a being finally occurred which is capable of choosing
love over hate and justice over injustice, of writing poetry like that
of Dante, composing music like that of Mozart, and making drawings like
those of Leonardo.' Of course, such a view of cosmogenesis is crazy. And
I do not at all mean crazy in the sense of slangy invective but rather
in the technical meaning of psychotic. Indeed such a view has much in
common with certain aspects of schizophrenic thinking." K. Stern, The
Flight from Woman, New York, 1965, p. 290. The author is a
well-known psychiatrist who has reached this conclusion not from
traditional foundations but from the premises of various contemporary
schools of thought.
See especially the works of Wilbur Smith.
We have discussed the idea of progress and its
reputation in our Islam and the Plight of Modern Man. See also M.
Jameelah, Islam and Modernism, Lahore, 1968. For an eloquent
refutation of the notion of progress see M. Lings, Ancient Beliefs
and Modern Superstitions, 1967; also Lord Northbourne, Looking
Back on Progress, London, 1968.
On the deeper roots of utopianism in the West see J.
Servier, Histoire de L'utopie, Paris, 1967.
This is proven by the lack of such a term in
classical Arabic or Persian.
We have dealt with the sacred quality of all aspects
of Islamic learning even science in our Science and Civilization in
Islam, Cambridge (U.S.A.), 1968; also Islamic Science - An
Illustrated Study, London, 1976.



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