Chapter Eight - Seyyed Hossein Nasr: An Islamic Romantic?

Summary

Very few contemporary Islamic thinkers have exhibited such a paradoxical relation with the modern West as does Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In most of his works the notions, conditions and phenomena associated with the modern West have occupied a central position. In fact, one may say that his concerns with Islam and Islamic issues are secondary and in response to his intellectual and personal preoccupation with what he considers to be the disastrous conditions of the post-Renaissance world. Modern humans, in Nasr's view, having sold their souls, in the manner of Faust, to gain control over nature, are facing not only “ecocide” but ultimately suicide. The solution to this predicament, Nasr has been arguing since he started his career in the 1960s, is what he often calls “traditional Islam,” or more accurately a particular interpretation of Islamic heritage which he believes is not much different from other traditional outlooks such as Hinduism, Buddhism and traditional Native American religions.

As such, it is not surprising that Nasr's appeal has been geared more toward the Westerners and the westernized Muslims who have been either educated in the West or have had a high level of Western education and exposure to Western culture in their homelands. Ironically, Nasr believes that Westerners, having a first-hand experience of modernity, have developed a higher discernment of its “calamitous” rule to appreciate the message of Islam that he has extracted for them. Accordingly, Nasr has set two primary goals for himself. First, it is from Eastern metaphysics, that is Nasr's reading of it, that the Westerners must relearn how to prevent the domination of nature from turning into self-destruction. Secondly, perceiving a great danger posed to the “citadel of Islam” by the modern world, Nasr has undertaken to shoulder the task of inoculating the Islamic world against the threat of modernity.

As a result, it would be a grave error to place Nasr in the category of contemporary Islamists, or what in popular parlance is often referred to as a fundamentalist, despite some of his fervent views on Islam as a total way of life.