The Heart of Islam Quotes

“O Lord, have Mercy and Compassion, for if Thou dost not have Mercy, who will have mercy?” The heartfelt prayer of this simple pilgrim epitomizes the quintessential Islamic attitude toward God as the source of compassion and mercy. No matter what one has done in life, one should never lose hope in His Compassion and Mercy, for as the Quran states, “And who despaireth of the Mercy of his Lord save those who go astray” (15:56), and “Do not despair of God’s Mercy” (39:53).”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Muḥammad is a man, but not like other men. Rather, he is a ruby and other men are like stones.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Beauty is at once a royal path to God and an impediment to reaching God if it is taken as a god in itself.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Man, in the traditional sense of the term corresponding to insān in Arabic or homo in Greek and not solely the male, is seen in Islam not as a sinful being to whom the message of Heaven is sent to heal the wound of the original sin, but as a being who still carries his primordial nature (al-fitrah) within himself, although he has forgotten that nature now buried deep under layers of negligence.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Islamic art in its many forms is of the greatest import for the understanding of the essence of Islam and a central means of transmitting its message to the contemporary world. When one thinks of Islam, one should go beyond the repetitive scenes on television of wars and battles, which unfortunately abound in today’s world, to behold the peace and harmony of Islamic art seen in the great mosques, traditional urban settings and gardens, and the rhythm and geometry of calligraphy and arabesque designs; read in the poems that sing of the love that permeates all of God’s creation and binds creatures to God; and heard in the strains of melodies that echo what we had experienced in that primordial morn preceding creation and our descent into this lowly world. Today more than ever before, the understanding of Islamic art is an indispensable key for the comprehension of Islam itself. Those who are sensitive to the language of traditional art and the beauty of a paradisal order that emanates from it as well as the intellectual principles conveyed through it can learn much from this art.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“The Islamic system must be understood in terms of the premises of the Islamic conception of society, whose goal is to provide a just system and a beneficial environment for the spiritual and religious growth of human beings. From that point of view, minorities in the Islamic world certainly did not fare worse than those in the West, as one can see in a comparison of the history of Judaism in the “Abode of Islam” and its history in Europe. Also during five hundred years of Ottoman domination of Greece, Mt. Athos remained the most vibrant and living center of Orthodox spirituality. As for economic life, it might seem a paradox, but in most Islamic countries the religious minorities are in a better economic situation than the Muslim majority, as one can see in the case of the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“According to the Islamic law of international treaties, Muslims could make treaties of peace and live at peace with countries outside of dār al-islām if they themselves were not threatened by them. The best example of such a situation is the friendly relations the Prophet himself had with then Christian Abyssinians, who had in fact given refuge to some of the Muslims from Mecca shortly after the advent of the Quranic revelation. Many instances of such peaceful coexistence are also to be seen between Muslim and Christian kingdoms in Spain and Hindu and Muslim states in India. In”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“On the contrary, Muslims see all communities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, to have been chosen by God, given their own sacred institutions and rites, and held responsible to Him. The role Muslims have always envisaged for themselves in the arena of human history as the “middle community” does not mean that other human collectivities do not have their own God-ordained roles to play. Nothing is further from Islam’s traditional understanding of itself than being God’s chosen people, unless one expands this claim to say that all ummahs, or communities, are God’s chosen people, each brought into this world to perform a function in accordance with the Divine Wisdom and Will.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Paradoxically, many Western-oriented Islamic countries that are praised in the West for having “secularist” governments do not allow Western-style democratic practices; if they did in the sense of allowing people to really express their preferences, the result would be a much more Islamic government as far as the rule of the Sharī‘ah is concerned. This is because the vast majority of all Muslims, even in the most Westernized and modernized countries, would like to live according to the Sharī‘ah and to have their own freedom and democracy on the basis of their own understanding of these concepts and ideals rather than on how they are understood in the modern and postmodern West.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“The traditional Islamic worldview is totally opposed to the prevalent modern paradigm of the relation between human beings and nature, which has caused unprecedented harm to the natural environment, has led to the loss of many species, and now threatens the very future of human life on earth. Islam sees men and women as God’s vicegerents on earth. Therefore, in the same way that God has power over His creation but is also its sustainer and protector, human beings must also combine power over nature with responsibility for its protection and sustenance. The Quran is replete with references to nature, and the phenomena of nature are referred to as God’s signs and are therefore sacred. In traditional Islamic society human beings lived in remarkable harmony with their natural environment, as can be seen in the urban design of traditional Islamic cities and also in the life in the villages, which, as in other premodern parts of the world, is still based on remarkable harmony with the rhythms of nature and makes full use of what is now called recycling.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere—think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt. Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings. Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amīr ‘Abd al-Qādirs and Imām Shāmils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“It is important to recall here the fact that, in contrast to the claim of those who only look at the quantitative aspects of things and consider the esoteric element of religion to be marginal and peripheral, the esoteric dimension actually lies at the heart of religion and is the source of both its endurance and renewal. We observe this truth not only in Islam, but also in the Kabbalistic and Hasidic traditions in Judaism and various mystical currents in Christianity. In Islam itself, Sufism has been over the centuries the hidden heart that has renewed the religion intellectually, spiritually, and ethically and has played the greatest role in its spread and in its relation with other religions.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“The global nature of the religious knowledge of a learned Muslim sitting in Isfahan in the fourteenth century was very different from that of a scholastic thinker in Paris or Bologna of the same period. On the basis of the Quranic doctrine of religious universality and the vast historical experiences of a global nature, Islamic civilization developed a cosmopolitan and worldwide religious perspective unmatched before the modern period in any other religion. This global vision is still part and parcel of the worldview of traditional Muslims, of those who have not abandoned their universal vision as a result of the onslaught of modernism or reactions to this onslaught in the form of what has come to be called “fundamentalism.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Each decade absolutizes its own fashions of thought and action without the least pause and consideration of the fact that a decade later those very fashions and ideas will be buried in the dustbin of history as one turns to a new decade.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“In the Islamic perspective, the oneness of God has as its consequence not the uniqueness of prophecy, but its multiplicity, since God as the Infinite created a world in which there is multiplicity and this includes, of course, the human order. For Islam, revelation and prophecy are both necessary and universal. Humanity, according to the Quran, was created from a single soul, but then diversified into races and tribes, for, as the Quran states, “He created you [humanity] from a single soul” (39:6). The single origin of humanity implies the profound unity within diversity of human nature, and therefore religion based on the message of Divine Oneness could not have been only meant for or available to a segment of humanity. The multiplicity of races, nations, and tribes necessitates the diversity of revelations. Therefore, the Quran, on the one hand, asserts that “To every people [We have sent] a messenger” (10:48), and, on the other hand, “For each [people] We have appointed a Divine Law and a way. Had God willed, He could have made you one community. But that He may try you by that which He hath given you. So vie with one another in good works. Unto God ye will all return, and He will then inform you concerning that wherein ye differed”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“Outside of the harīm, or sacred precinct, in Arabia, it is the duty of the Muslim state, according to the Sharī‘ah, to allow the building and maintenance of houses of worship of the “People of the Book,” and any order to the contrary is against the tenets of Islamic Law and traditional practice.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

“The Quran says, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), and in most periods of Islamic history there was no forced conversion of the “People of the Book.” In fact, forced conversion is an affront to God and the dignity of the human conscience created by Him. Arabia at the time of the Quranic revelation was an exception. There the pagan Arabs who practiced a most crass form of polytheism were given the choice of either becoming Muslims or battling against them. It was very similar to the choice offered by Christian to European “pagans” once Christianity gained power on that continent. But even in Arabia, the Jews and Christians were not forced to become Muslims.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity