Traditional Islamic Environmentalism

Abstract

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) is one of the most important living mysticphilosopherstoday. His consistent and clairvoyant critique of the materialism,secularism, and anthropocentricism of modernity for the last fifty yearshas been a wake-up call to many across the religious divide. Thus it is onlyfitting that the teachings on environment of a thinker who saw well beforemost of us the signs of our ominous times, one who wrote against the futilityof technological fixes and the need to reject modern metaphysics, shouldbe the subject of a dedicated monograph. The present book by Tarik M.Quadir is based on his PhD dissertation, which aims to present Nasr’s contentionson the subject over his long and productive career in one coherentnarrative. Being “the first person ever to write extensively about the philosophicaland religious dimension of the crisis” (emphasis in the original),Nasr’s critiques and specific suggestions are scattered in various writingsand interviews. The book at hand seeks to be the go-to volume for “the response[to the ecological crisis] that he envisions for any human civilization”(pp. 4-6).Nasr, educated in the United States since the age of thirteen, attended MITand Harvard. Having taught in Iran, the United Kingdom, the United States,and elsewhere, he finally settled at the George Washington University. Arenowned scholar and author of nearly fifty books and many more articles,his teachings are a blend of Shi‘ism, Sufism, and, most of all, the perennialist,anti-modernist philosophy of René Guénon (1886-1951) and Frithjof Schuon(1907-98). Nasr’s response to the environmental cataclysm is derived fromhis perennialist philosophy and is based on the spiritual reality of nature andits relevance to human purpose as defined by religion, and not merely on thebasis of consideration for physical survival, which permeates nearly the entiretyof environmentalist activism today.Quadir reviews a swath of literature by various authors, including activists,scholars, and scientists, who warn of the end of our world as we knowit and the limits of growth. From scientific projections to confessions of failureby leading environmentalists, several alarming and alarmist books are addedto the list every month. Nasr argues that many mainstream environmentalistsrecognize that not only is business as usual (i.e., capitalist growth) unsustainable,...