E-Book Content
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THE HEART OF
ISLAM Enduring Values for Humanity SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR
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Dedicated to the Sacred and Enduring Presence of Shaykh Ah.mad ibn Mus.t.afa¯ al-Sha¯dhilı¯ al-‘Alawı¯
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Contents PerfectBound e-book exclusive: Civilizational Dialogue and the Islamic World Preface One
One God, Many Prophets
vii 1
The Unity of Truth and the Multiplicity of Revelations
Two
The Spectrum of Islam
55
Sunnism, Shı¯‘ism, and Sufism and Traditional, Modernist, and “Fundamentalist” Interpretations of Islam Today
Three
Divine and Human Laws
113
Four
The Vision of Community and Society
157
Five
Compassion and Love, Peace and Beauty
201
Six
Divine and Human Justice
237
Peace and the Question of War
Seven
Human Responsibilities and Human Rights
Epilogue The Ethical and Spiritual Nature of Human Life, East and West
273 307
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E-book Afterward: Civilizational Dialogue and the Islamic World
Notes
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Bibliography
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About the Author Also by Seyyed Hossein Nasr Cover Map Copyright About the Publisher
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Preface
The past few decades have witnessed a growing interest in Islam in the West, increasing with each global event involving the name of Islam: from the Lebanese civil war to the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to the rise of Islamic movements among Palestinians. This rising interest now stands at unprecedented levels since the tragic events of September 11, 2001. The world is thirsty for information about Islam, especially in America, yet this thirst has generally not been quenched with healthy water. In fact, a torrent of “knowledge” has flooded the media from books to journals, radio, and television, much of which is based on ignorance, misinformation, and even disinformation. Not only has this torrent failed the cause of understanding, it has too frequently rendered the greatest disservice to the Western public in order to further particular ideological and political goals. Of course, distortion of matters Islamic in the West is not new; it has a thousand-year-old history going back to
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THE HEART OF ISLAM
monstrous biographies of the Prophet of Islam written mostly in Latin in France and Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries. This earlier portrayal of Islam as a Christian heresy, however, still showed an intellectual respect for Islamic civilization and thought. During the Renaissance such figures as Petrarch abandoned even this respect in favor of outright disdain. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain figures such as Voltaire tried to use aspects of Islam to attack Christianity, while a number of exceptional figures like Goethe and Emerson held Islamic teachings in great love and esteem. Meanwhile, the new methods of rationalist, historicist, and skeptical scholarship about religion growing out of the so-called Age of Enlightenment (which was in reality an age of the darkening of the soul and eclipse of the intellect) began to apply their methods to the study of Islam in the name of orientalism. Even when they were not serving colonial powers, most of these orientalists stud