Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Prophet of Peace
By Gray Henry Blakemore
S
eyyed Hossein Nasr was one of the earliest responders to an endangered planet, having sensed that something was amiss in the early 1950s, when he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. At this time, the beltway around Boston was being built, separating the city from the countryside. Nasr perceived in this the beginning of the end of an easy rapport between urban dwellers and the land that provided their sustenance and, at times, their place of peace. What Nasr saw in Boston was taking place throughout the Westernized world. Nature was being edged out of consciousness by “progress,” fueled by engineering and technology responsible only to science, Nature’s perceived Master. Nasr began speaking publicly about this rupture between human beings and Nature in the late 1950s to audiences in Iran and at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. From the outset, he saw the capitulation to progress as evidence of a spiritual failure, specifically a violation of Islamic principles of balance between human and Earth life. These principles serve as a foundation for justice, acknowledging the rights and limits of human beings, but also respectful of the integrity of Nature’s
sacred life systems. Streams, air, and soil, for example, have a right to protection from defilement. These principles are expressed in the Qur’an and in multiple other Islamic sources, notably the philosophical texts of Sufism, scientific works dealing with the relationship of human beings and the natural environment, and art, designed to express the harmony between human and natural life. 0 Continued on next page
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