RISTalks: Dr. Seyyed Hossein Nasr - "Changing the Present, Dreaming the Future"

smelled ar-rahman ar-raheem it's late at night perhaps not easy for you to concentrate having hard to attend many lectures of great value throughout the day but citta mia has been allotted for me to speak to you tonight and so I do it's a great pleasure to be able to accept the invitation of this group after several years when I could not come and I pray for that they will have the greatest success this very difficult moment of the history of Muslim people's and of the world to disseminate the authentic knowledge of Islam and things Islamic I've been asked to speak this evening about the issue of man nature and environmental crisis especially from the Islamic point of view the subject which have been concerned since my undergraduate years at MIT studying physics which a long long time ago seems like centuries ago and I've been involved in all the different movements during the last 50 years but it's called the environmental crisis and on both sad as a Muslim unhappy sad that the Islamic world turned his attention to this matter so late unhappy that I have finally at least in some areas some corners of Islamic world and among the intelligentsia Muslims outside of the stomach world fortunately some people now are paying attention to this matter let me say at the outset not to be fooled by what one hears by politicians on radio and television that as soon as there's an economic shortage the environment is of no consequence global warming is just a dream the pollution of our waters and our rivers our mountains and our air is simply the work of a few leftists who do not know what is really going on and that what is imported as jobs this is all totally fallacious based upon his suicidal view of the nature of human existence on this earth the relation between man and nature is in a very profound crisis the crisis is universal in the sense that no one can evade it when pollutants enter the air in New York the land in Morocco and when radioactivity begins in Japan gradually it's effective seen in Indonesia as we see right before our eyes these days after the tsunami was a universal matter in the sense that even those who were totally innocent and had nothing to do with the destruction of the environment which is the result of the industrialization process and the rise of the modern world and which what cannot be put at the feet of traditional religions as some have tried to do even those who are totally innocent suffer for it as much as those who have the greatest share in destroying the great creation that God has given us expending us to be its custodians and also this issue is of the greatest urgency we talk about a lot of things and usually in the tenth or eleventh line of our concerns comes the concern for the environment I have occasion often time to speak to audiences Muslim and non-muslim throughout the world they asked me to speak on philosophy under Sharia on mysticism and this and that the ordinary concern of most human beings is not as yet attuned to what is ready is most essential may be the condition of our life on earth and how we're going to survive as human beings this is one of the great tragedies of our world that is there are certain forces because with shortsightedness which try to prevent us for understanding the urgency not only universality but the urgency of the environmental crisis it's more important than anything else including the economic a crisis that is now affecting the world and which is very much in fact related deeper down to what we have done to nature and continues to do in the name of economic progress that God of shaitaan which was born in the 19th century and still somewhat with us now very quickly it's important for especially Muslim audience like this to remember that we don't have to learn everything from the West we don't have to wait until somebody in the West says there's an environmental crisis to say oh yes there's an environmental crisis because some Englishman or American or Frenchman said so we have to get to a point where we can see things for ourselves that we have done through most of our illustrious history and not be in this stead of inferiority complex in which we find ourselves the environmental crisis is a very good case at point the awareness of the environmental crisis began with in the 1950s it began with their what appeared to be an innocent book by an American Naturalist who used to wander around the beautiful woods they have still surviving in the United States is very interesting that after the Europeans invaded the United States for 40,000 years the natives of North America I kept the American continent so beautiful that where they lived on our national parks for white men and women which is a very interesting point to consider how different they lived in relation to nature and which was wandering and seeing all the streams being polluted a woman called Rachel Carson I wrote silent Springs and that was followed shortly thereafter and it finished me very sad by my own book man and nature which was the raw for a series lectures at the Redeemers of Chicago in the 1960s and which was the most disregard of all my books in the Slavic world for decades until it was translated Turkish and now it's in all the different Islamic languages and this goes to show you that even for yours truly who was living at that time in Iran who wrote the great deal is writing the read oftentimes in other countries is the one thing that nobody was really very much interested in in the Islamic world and a lot of effort since then has been used in the West to create the awareness of Lavar in the cry so this in certain circles but not in others as I mentioned and in the last two decades somewhat in the Slavic world that this is certain places but as we see things go on as usual and the reason is that the environmental crisis is not going to be over unless there is a profound paradigm shift or what modern man considers himself and the world to be it means the death to what we think we are and a birth to what we already are and that is a very difficult thing to do and that is why every resistance is met at a time when many people in the West are thinking what to do the Islamic world along most of the stomach world along with much of the rest of the non-western world including the Hindu world and the Buddhist world are making the same mistakes which word about the environmental crisis and the West to start with with the result that today a city like Toronto is probably less polluted than Cairo or Tehran that's not to say much but it is as that's the reason for it but I want and instead of just discussing that international and global consequences of the global of the environment across eternity civilly to the Islamic world first of all the stomach world is heir to a civilization which produced one of the greatest scientific traditions in world history that which had a very long tradition of dealing with the world of nature in a rational and scientific way it cannot therefore be compared to some primal societies what is the excuse that the people didn't have any science or anything like i defied the clung to something more profound but i will not get into that the stomach world is one which produced a great deal of science it produced the first major sedentary populations in the world it is said that the first city in the world which had a million people in it was not in China but not before us on my own home country in Iran the city of Nishapur and this is quite remarkable that Islamic civilization was used to sedentary life was used to sedentary life before the modern world all they had of course a nomadic population it had a major intellectual tradition that people who wrote philosophically scientifically mystically legally directly about the status of nature and human beings relationship to it why is it that that there was this delayed reaction why is it then when even after my book on La Rochelle Carson came out in 1984 when the Club of Rome report came out on limits to growth which bought a lot of people in the West because the West identified civilization with growth this word which is used every other sentence by politicians of any party that wants to get elected in the West growth development - all of these words which are extremely dangerous words in the president context they're much more dangerous than arsenic if we really realize what we meant what is the implication of these words why is it that the Islamic world paid no attention I was in Tehran when the club of rome first the first report came out on how unhappy the people who were running the country were because they liked those in other Islamic countries their program was essentially modernization and to modernize one did not could not be bothered with any Probst achill on the path to modernization and so this long hiatus of delay it's very very interesting that for a long long time in the Islamic world whatever form of government existed whether it were a revolutionary republic or a monarchy or Islamic governments or lay government all the way from the Slovak Republic of Iran to the Saudi monarchy to Qaddafi's Libya before it was destroyed there was a shared one thing in common one thing all in common namely total indifference to the importance of what they were doing to the natural environment I always say jokingly don't say that the Islamic world is not United the Islamic world is united and one thing isn't destroyed in destruction of nature perfect unity in this matter alas alas that is it is in destruction not only of God's creation but ultimately of ourselves especially that since most of the Slavic world lives in areas which are ecologically very sensitive they're brittle where they're not much water where plants are very very important where deforestation is much more infective than in the middle of Siberia or in North in Norway and nevertheless we see before us what is taking place look at the contrast look at the contrast between traditional Islamic cities towns and villages and present-day Islamic cities towns and villages there are no traditional Islamic cities left completely but only partially cities such as Fez the old part of some are all part of cities the yazd and his fajans and other persian cities this is something land of the old sedentary structures or you can still see what it look like what it was but we are a lot of traditional towns and especially smaller villages that I have not been totally destroyed they were all based on a harmony between themselves and the natural environment the city of New York could not survive five thousand years than even five hundred years in equilibrium with the environment around it even 50 years without external elements being inoculated into its veins all the time whereas an Afghan village before the tragedies that befell Afghanistan could have survived another fifty thousand years without any further disagree brim with the environment around it this all tradition Islamic cities were built in remarkable equilibrium with their environment the use of water the use of air the use of space the use of light they still survive in a small units look at the sultan hassan mosque in cairo look at some of them marcin Isfahan how air is circulated or the so-called bought gears the wind catchers we have in southern Persia and the Persian Gulf in many of the arab emirates they've copied it with the air is caught and brought into the building and out on how ecologically sane these structures wave were they did not try to unpause opposed nature like these glass boxes in which we live which have to use the maximum energy in the summer to cool off and in the winter to heat up totally opposed to the harmony that exists at traditionally in the Islamic world between the even the sedentary populations under sedentary structures and the world of nature the last word has not as it been said about this and a lot more study has to be made there are a number of architects in the Islamic world going back to the great Egyptian architecture son Fatih and some his students at the hospital Omar for others the great architects Egyptian architects who were trying to recreate the traditional village and town structure which were in harmony with the not your world but now that we see a hundred storey building next to the sea of Mecca what can one say where are we going where are we going as a Muslim nothing in the world malamar F is necessary building that by its very presence is in opposition to the laws of God's creation if you only paid attention to it and this is only one is instance among many know in order to understand what has happened let me just go back a little bit religiously and philosophically and remind ourselves of this fact that Islamic world throughout its history survived through a harmony between the sedentary and the nomadic people the nomads were always the preservers of nature and it's they he rejuvenate the life of the sedentary people and prevented the sedentary expansion to become urban sprawl as we have in the modern world the fact that the car of today and the Mamluk IRA are very different was partly due not completely but partly due for the presence of the nomadic elements which in control the deserts and more than Egypt in North Africa where they still survive and in Persia and Central Asia many many other places this takes us back to this story which is in the Bible and we have a also an Islamic sources of course the story of Cain and Abel I be Lamar Beale one brother is the father of the sedentary people and the other is the father of nomadic people and finally he who is the father of the sedentary people kills his brother who symbolizes the nomadic people which means that ultimately the sedentary people destroyed the nomadic people and that's exactly what we see before our eyes and the destruction of this dramatic element Islamic world has a lot to do with the destruction of the environment I mean still right before our eyes in countries like Arabia where the nomadic element were settled only 3040 years ago and in other places in Iran and North Africa and other places is a very very important story to remember in a sense God foresaw what would happen in history of the humanity that had created but had also given us the instructions to be able not to destroy the earth I believe that the Asscher are the indication the surat al-baqara chapter 2 of the quran which refers to those who corrupt the earth alma sedona fallarbor which historically has usually been taken for oppressors or people who use too much interest interest in our usury and this kind of thing has a much more profound significance for us today and that is those who destroy the earth by polluting it with those who bring about facade not only by making money and killing people but killing nature itself the harm that they do is a thousand times worse than were the most oppressor in human history did then all the heads the tamerlane cut off and made minerals out of it when he attacked some around or extremely from some herb and attacked Hermon or other places all of the cruel disabler cruelty of the mongols is nothing compared to the facade that we are creating on the earth I mean this or onic lesson album of sedona from arabic must be understood by us muslims as also a message from god not to be am upset most said is not only a person who does not eat up the money of the a team of the orphan and does not do wrong things economically it's also one who respects the who walk their duty writes of God's creation everything according to Islam has his who has its rights everything of course the highest being God's rights who wove Allah but every creature has its own rights which we have no right to destroy and true top walk and not committing facade is precisely to observe the rights of all creatures not only human beings we're not the only creatures on earth and this room left a very important point which a lot of modern Islamic thought has neglected mesmerized by Western thinking but the materialism that's prevalent in the West by modern science which has now become a second God for Muslims from say la la hey la la but there really are worshipping modern science and scientist which is crept into the Islamic world into every form of government from my own country Iran to Pakistan to Egypt all these incredible books coming out showing the diversity of the Quran proves quantum mechanics this other verse proves what pastor said about germs is total conscious excuse me total nonsense because science changes all the time and the Puranas the Word of God that does not change in this atmosphere something very very important has been forgotten and what has been forgotten is that the Quran was not only revealed to men and even only to men and jinn but to all of creation the poor on addresses creation God takes creatures even Tino was a tune an olive as witness what does it mean that God takes on all of us witness we don't think when all of us a consciousness we live in a world in which consciousness and life have been taken away from creation by modern science and so we are all hypocrites in a certain sense the accident worldview the quran has another view of nature everything is alive everything is God's witness it's true that the Sun and the moon revolve around in the heavens and you calculated their orbit mathematically but the poor ants about some civil family yes Jordanna if you do not see that movement as sujood then we're not really Muslim Muslim seriously and we're faced with this great crisis but the Quran contains a complete cosmology a philosophy of nature in which nature participates participates not only in our life not only serves us but also participates in our spiritual life and elements of nature with witness the witness and testify against us on the day of judgment we know that we know from the Quran from the hadith that all of our Jawara all of our organs will independent of our consciousness and I will testify as to what we did under they have judgment if we are good Muslims would believe in Islam there's so many hadith and eyes of the Quran is very hard to reject that and say all of this is just metaphorical I'm not one of those people who accept this but metaphorical Ness I believe in the symbolic symbolic cast of the Quran but not as metaphorical these are truths which are very very significant and all of nature is alive ok I can never refrain from quoting one of the most beautiful poems in all Islamic literature the little knowledge that I have a poem by Jalal add-in Rumi that says thou shalt coded for you in Persian I'm a Persian I cannot speak with our alesis including one person home he says Kowski hast ISA bunny - tea house aha party hvar - tea if only the world of existence had tongues then it could lift the veil from all the mysteries of God this is the Islamic understanding of nature this is what we have to resuscitate and revive never forgetting that not only the verses of the Quran but the phenomena of nature are called ayat not only phenomena of nature but the phenomena within our soul so the quran says and Noorie whom are yet enough you are fairly wealthy unfelt say him upon the who should show them the ayat the signs of God upon the horizons and within ourselves until it becomes revealed unto them and who al Haq that is the truth so we have three IATA the verse of the quran the phenomena of nature and our inner reality I must always be aware of this triangle all of which is created by God all of which is interrelated the Quran is not only the source of a legal aspect of human life of course it is it is not only the source of our ethics of course it is but most of all and is the source of the knowledge of reality the Quran is a book about the nature of reality but the capital R which is God Allah Allah and higher lower levels of morality which God is greater and therefore the message of the world of nature furthermore the Quran has taught us in several instances we are God's khalifatullah energy under fill' are the khalifat and of course referring to senator buddha assalamu refers to all human beings where the ha'la'tha of god what is beautiful you have god voice jared of god a khalifa is a person who performs certain functions in place of the person for whom he is the ha'la'tha obviously now God was the creator of the world you cannot believe it Allah there are the power of creation so we're not khalifatul law as alcoholic but not gods don't create of the world he's also sustainer of the world he's the protector of things his office or maja faith and is also Allah coalition mohit he encompasses all things his presence everywhere as khalifatullah our duty is not only to conquer nature and destroy it everybody talks with Muslim modernist about that's clear that's clear conquering nature God allows us to perform dominion over nature provided by remember a belief at Allah God also has dominion over nature but he also protects nature he protects the life of the little ant if God acted with nature the way we've been doing for the past 200 years between a world around her children to live in it's as simple as that it's remarkable how God protects his own creation and so the function a protector is a function that we have as God khalifatullah one of the functions that we have and the protection of nature is therefore a religious duty and this was marked a very important issue the Sharia driven law of Islam of course much of it is concerned with transactions relation with human beings much of it is concerned but worship with Allah dot but in both our adults under Muhammad the two parts of the Sharia which are the fundamental part of the dividing the Sharia let's all together is one of course there are references not only to the human state but to the nonhuman the pollution of running water is a sin it's not only a bad act environment is sin according to Islamic law cutting a fruit tree the profit for badet when he was a logons during several of the magazine and they were very very clear indications that Muslims should not cut fruit trees that's why in Medina when land got expensive and some the Saudis wanted to sell their land they were not allowed to cut the old beautiful palm trees some which have been planted but said gnarly they say so they let it let them die out by an eye-watering and to me this says occurred in Medina a few years ago when all the beautiful gardens were just columns of dry palms but the shariat reason was that that you were forbidden to cut the tree so they killed it another way that's something else but to not kill the tree not to kill other animals without reason there are all kinds of injections even the creation but now we called National Parks the hibachi that the Prophet ordered to be created around the eye area of Makkah and Madina which even a wildlife were not to be molested these all existed according to the Sharia the Sharia is not only for Islamic Society of human beings it's for not only human beings for all the creatures around human beings it's an Islamic society in which the Shari are Israeli promulgated not only involves your relation to your wife and your neighbor and your father and your mother and in the bazaar it also involve your relationship with your cow on your horse on your tree and the street and the air you breathe and the water you drink and so forth and so on so those of us who keep talking about the Sharia and then go destroying God's creation what kind of hypocrisy is this how are we going to answer God on the day of judgment you must understand this this is what God demands of us and then my time is running out on I'm one of those people who hates to be late I try to a Muslim in every way except in being late part of the Sharia traditional Islamic civilization created remarkable philosophies of nature meaning of nature how to deal with nature this is something which I have little bit of expertise in I'm supposed to know something about Islamic science it's absolutely incredible how Islam develops a science that is science but in a basis of the flaws of nature which is totally different for what there is today today when you're a scientist the hand of God is irrelevant you may be personally a good Catholic or an atheist it makes no difference whatsoever your physics to chemistry whereas in Islam the study of nature was always related to a philosophy of nature in which the role of God was central and our role in relation to being God's halifa always was also very very important we have lost a great deal our traditional architecture of our city planning we have lost a great deal about traditional agriculture and parallel with those practical things we've lost a great deal of our knowledge metaphysical and philosophical knowledge of nature which really needs to be resuscitated there is such a thing an Islamic philosophy of the environment and ecology and even Islamic economics about which people speak so much today much much of it is based on the false premise of accepting the modern technology and methods of production as being the only way of looking at the material world and trying to create an Islamic economics on the basis of that that's what it is only by the question of usually nothing else of significance is even discussed but authentic Islamic economics is does not separate itself from ecology it's not like in the modern world to see that economics or ecology one or the other everybody talks about that that is not at all the case let me finish by saying a few words about the future since there's a conference which emphasizes that I always say when I'm invited to lecture that I hate futurology fortunately all few geologists have come out to be wrong futures in the hands of God when you look at look at the book of a future shock of Toffler things like that where are they was book that's sold by the millions we should be humbled before God's power but nevertheless God has given us intelligence to plan he wants us to plan and who's our cinema Kareem and us are sought to plan but he is the best of those who use both planning and Mac Andrews to guide us but I believe that if in Charlotte there will be a future and I'm very hopeful for the stomach world there will be I think we're going through a very very difficult period but in contrast to many people if some cosmic event does not occur I see much better days for the Islamic world I mean the day of a slavery of our governments to some foreign office is over and sooner or later that book would be closed that book will be closed in Charlotte but there's a future there are some things that we have to do first of all is no way at all to think about the relation between man and nature and an Islamic way of dealing with this relationship without a profound critique of Western science and technology and overcoming his scientism which are cholera has taken over much of the Islamic world one has to be very brave to do this very very brave because one is attacked from the left and the right the north and the south when I was a very strong backbone when I first began to speak about Islamic science fifty years ago I was very strongly criticized by all sides from traditional allama to modernize Muslim coming out of the Sorbonne fifty years later everybody talks about Islamic science that one has to have the patience and the fortitude but there needs to be an Islamic critique of modern science and technologies view of nature otherwise everything else is just silly read poetry not even good poetry I mean Arabic appearances share but share is a very precious thing it was good secondly we need to reformulate in a language that are young and understand those young people who are here and those who are not here the Islamic teachings concerning nature there are no literature's I say in the plural there are richer in the description of nature than classical Arabic and Persian poetry unfortunately I don't know whether it is from a language is what enough to know their poetry but on also in Turkish Yunus Emre the remarkable Turkish poet the rest of his poems more recent or doing Bengali but suddenly these two languages are know little about Persian and Arabic remarkably rich our young need to read these poems we need to know them their way through art to express the deepest relationship between the world of nature we have to revive although many people oppose me on this Islamic science and technology so how can we revive Islamic technologists that horse-drawn carriage or something like that it's much more profound than that mosque will find that there are many places including agriculture where Islamic technology can be revived which can do a great deal of good irrigation I recalls Romanian identity which I will not go and if we're going to add ever adopt Western science not as an alien cancer but as a part of our body we have to revive Islamic science as the foundation through which then to be able to integrate Western science now not to simply produce Western scientists who are Muslim names that's quite something else they're not part of Islamic civilization that's something else we have to formulate not only an Islamic ethics of nature but metaphysics of nature no ethics is actually ever effective without a view of the nature of reality which means metaphysics to be ethical while considering all animals to be machines because somebody in high school told me so that's very superficial maybe there needs to be a new understanding may division cosmology of nature and finally concerned with the environment has to become a central concern of Muslims I know only two or three of the greater allama of Islam but official functions who were aware of this Idol Asia are Metcalfe Dorota Grand Mufti of Syria metal Ali was a remarkable man really remarkable man and there are some other Shahadah JAMA the Grand Mufti of Egypt I'm not saying there is none a few people in Iran wanted to go in Pakistan I don't want to name everybody now but for most of our Oh Lamar this is not even part of the discussion the government orders them to talk about ethics on Fridays in order not to talk about political things that's easy to say not to steal money from your neighbor or donor that's very good but we need people to preach to the vast majority of Muslims about the religious duty of Muslims towards the environment it's a duty towards God it's a duty towards ourselves it's a duty to our children and grandchildren we all want to have a lovely grandchildren running around live but we live in such a way as if there were to be no world for them to live in I will conclude by saying that I pray for all of you the little that we do each one of us does even the 20,000 people here the little step taken is a great deal we need to awaken the Islamic world to its great treasures to awaken them to their duty towards the world of nature awaken them to the spiritual significance of nature and I guarantee you God has created the world in such a way that nature will have the last word thank you

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Keywords: ris, islam, seyyed hossein nasr, seyyed, hossein, nasr, talks, ristalks, ris talks, muhammad, inspiration, motivation, toronto, reviving the islamic spirit, conference, convention, islamic conference, youth

Id: CnwR5rhtgqQ

Length: 39min 39sec (2379 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2012