So-called Islamic universities following

Western tradition: Prof. Seyyed

Hossein Nasr
May 27, 2010FatawaDemocracy, George Washington University, islam, Islamic University, madrassa system,
Madrassah, Professor, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Western society Leave a comment

Renowned Iranian born US academic Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr told Sundays Zaman that most of the so-
called Islamic universities in the Muslim world are not Islamic in the sense that they operate within the
framework of a Western worldview.
Their successes are successes of Western science, Nasr said. According to Nasr, as long as Muslim
educational institutions continue to copy Western science without engaging in any endeavor to internalize it, the
Muslim tradition will continue to be destroyed. Professor Nasr is not altogether pessimistic, though. He observes
that a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and scientists is being produced in certain Muslim countries.
Even when they write about Derrida, Heidegger, modern astrophysics or something like that, they try to speak
from a perspective of a Muslim tradition, he said.
Professor Nasr is particularly fond of the intellectual productivity he has witnessed in Turkey and Iran, whereas
Western philosophy seems to be stuck at a dead end.
Nasr was in stanbul to speak at a conference held as part of the UN-backed Alliance of Civilizations initiative,
Sundays Zaman interviewed Nasr, who is regarded as a prime traditionalist, about the Muslim tradition,
intellectual productivity in the East and the West and about the relationship between knowledge and the socio-
cultural milieu it is produced in.
In the preface to The Heart of Islam, you say you wrote all your works to preserve tradition. What does
tradition mean to you and why is its preservation so important?
The English word tradition is used in different ways, including customs, habits and historical transmission, but
for me tradition means a reality of sacred origin which is given to humanity through revelation. Through
preservation and application of that teaching, of that sacred instruction, our civilization was created. The same is
true for the Western civilization. The Christian civilization was created by the coming of Christ. That is the
beginning of the Christian tradition, and then it created the Western civilization with many forms of sacred
Christian architecture, theology, ethics and forms of social structure. In Islam we have the Quranic revelation.
Thats the beginning of the Islamic tradition and then the whole civilization is created with its art, with its social
structure, with its laws and so forth. It is important to preserve this tradition because we believe that it comes
from God, that it is reality.
So you dont support the historicist claims about contextuality of revealed sacred texts?
We reject that completely. God always speaks in the language of the people to whom He addresses His message,
but the sociological understanding of revelation is rejected by us. That is itself a completely anti-traditional idea.
All Muslims for 1,400 years believed that the Quran comes from God, that it is not a product of pre-Islamic
Arabian society or Makkah.
Do you make a distinction between the revelation of the Quran by God into the heart and mind of the
Prophet and its understanding by the Prophet as a historical thing?
No, the Prophet was chosen by God and was protected from making errors. He was also protected by the
Archangel. The Prophets understanding of the Quran is a guarantee for our correct understanding of the Quran.
There is a dependence on Western literature in the Muslim world by means of educational material. How
will we preserve tradition if even on the most basic of issues we are dependant on a foreign tradition?
We will not be able to do so if we continue like this. Everything we do is copying from another civilization.
Obviously it is going to end up by destroying our own civilization, and much of it has already been destroyed in
the last 200 years. Education is a very, very key issue. When the West first began to colonize the Islamic world,
they began with military forces, naval forces in the Mediterranean Sea and then land forces in North Africa.
They soon followed by trying to dominate over the Islamic world by means of education, and since they had
more knowledge of the natural world, natural sciences, many Muslims accepted this, and gradually the Western
educational system spread throughout the Islamic world. I believe that what we have to do is to teach Western
sciences, but not from the Western perspective. We have to recreate our own educational system. Even theology
is being dominated now in certain places by just copying in a very weak way. I say in a very weak way
because Western theology is not strong enough to persist.
How universal is the university? Can we speak of an Islamic university?
There is always a relationship between every form of knowledge and a worldview within which that knowledge
is accepted as knowledge. There is no doubt about that. The worldview in all civilizations before modern times
came from religion. This is true for every civilization. Hindu universities, Chinese universities, Islamic
universities but as Western influence spreads all over the world, we will begin to emulate Western forms of
knowledge, which claim to now be independent of religion. But it was not independent of the Christian
worldview. The secularist paradigm which was created in the 17th century is itself a pseudo-religion in that it is
a view of the nature of reality. There is no abstract knowledge; knowledge is always within the framework of a
worldview, of a way of looking at the nature of reality.
Are there any Islamic universities in the world?
Since the first World Muslim Congress was held in the 1970s in Mecca, they decided to create Islamic
universities throughout the Islamic world, and several have been created in Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and
elsewhere. They are called Islamic universities, but they are not really Islamic universities because they teach the
Shariah, Arabic and Islamic history, but the other subjects are not integrated. In other places, they tried to take
the old madrasa and modernize it, like al-Azhar University. The university itself is an Islamic university, but not
the medical school. The medical school does not teach Islamic medicine. The school of architecture doesnt
produce Muslim architects. They copy Western architecture with a Muslim name. The name is Ahmet instead of
John. But it is possible to have an Islamic university.
How will the Islamic philosophical worldview be revived?
I believe that all important intellectual transformations begin with a few, not with the many. When the modern
scientific worldview came about, at the beginning, at the time of Galileo, there werent more than 20 people in
Europe who understood and accepted what they were saying. The transformation always comes with the few.
Do you see new intellectual minds emerging in the Muslim world?
Definitely! Fifty years ago there were only two types of intellectuals in the Islamic world. One were those
traditional ulama great scholars of Arabic, theology and Islamic law and the other type of intellectuals
were totally Westernized intellectuals, but God does not figure in Western scientific thought. But 50 years later,
now, we have a number of younger intellectuals in Turkey itself, in Malaysia, in Indonesia, in Iran, in Pakistan
mostly in these five countries. Even when they write about Derrida and Heidegger, they try to speak from the
perspective of a Muslim tradition. This is a very, very good sign. We didnt have that 50 years ago. I have a lot
of hopes for the future, and I spent all my life trying to create that. InshaAllah [God-willing] something will
come out of it.
But is there still an intellectual infertility in the Muslim world?
I dont usually see that in the same way. In Iran we have leading and incredible scientists doing all kinds of
things in physics and in nuclear science. The fact that Islam has not made such a big contribution to Western
science is a cultural problem. It is not a scientific problem. We lost our self-confidence, we lost the confidence in
ourselves, we just try to copy the West. There are excellent Turkish heart surgeons or Arab heart surgeons in the
US. But to make it a civilization of your own is something else. That was not done very much because of a lack
of self-confidence.
What about the West? At least speaking about philosophy, it seems the West is passing through a kind of
paralysis also.
The West is now undergoing a very, very severe intellectual crisis. The reason why people are not aware of it is
because of the power of technology and the military might of the West. It is like the end of the Roman Empire.
As long as the Roman legends were leading in Libya, nobody thought that something was wrong. It is a very
similar situation. Western philosophy is now at a dead end. Even Heidegger said, Western philosophy ends with
me. There is a philosophical crisis and a religious crisis as a result of that. After that comes the environmental
crisis, which is not solved unless the West changes completely the way it lives, its worldview, and they dont
want to do it. So they use cosmetics all the time. Look at the Gulf of Mexico now. It is a great tragedy of human
history. Nobody wants to talk about it. So the West is also experiencing a very, very large crisis, and Id say it is
suicide for us to try to blindly copy the West at this stage.
How did the West come to this point?
In a sense, if we speak in Islamic terms, the leaders of the society in the West decided to sacrifice the akhira to
the dunya completely [Nasr is referring to Quran 2:86, which reads: These are the people who buy the life of
this world (ad-dunya) at the price of the Hereafter (al-akhira). ] The great German poet Goethe in Faust
speaks about this. Faust sells his soul to the devil in order to get power and technology. So everything is
sacrificed for material ends and earthly human welfare. But we also have spiritual needs.
Can we update Western democracy into a new system where our spiritual needs are also provided for?
First of all, democracy is a method; it is not a value system. It is a method of government, and it is a question of
having more people participate. Look at the Ottoman world very powerful sultans sat here in stanbul, and
people claim that there was no democracy in the Ottoman state. But who elected all the village elders who ran all
of Anatolia? It wasnt the sultans sitting in Topkap Palace. It was the local people. There was a lot of internal
democracy within the Islamic world even at that time. Now it is possible to develop an Islamic model of
democracy on a more macro level without sacrificing the spiritual values. But it is something that Muslims have
to work on, and we are in a terrible situation when it comes to the field of politics.
During the last 200 years, the power of governance in the Islamic world has increased, not decreased. It
increased step-by-step. As a result, all our institutions have been destroyed. We are now looking for models
based on Western civilization, and they dont always work because those institutions grew out of a particular
civilization. What it needs is creativity and adaptation. Democracy is also not ideal in the West. Money is much
more powerful than the individual. We see this in the US. You cannot even participate in a nomination for a
party unless youre a millionaire to begin with.
Please comment on the idea that original and innovative ideas need freedom to blossom. Looking from
this perspective, how do you evaluate the atmosphere of freedom and democracy in Turkey?
First of all, let me talk about new ideas needing freedom in order to blossom. What happened to the word
truth? Where is truth in this matter? Every new idea is not a good idea. Politically, we dont believe that Karl
Marxs ideas, which were very new, were very good also. They killed tens of thousands of people during the
next 100 years after his death. Truth is the criteria. And in every society, there must be this ambiance in which
ideas are tested and only true ideas survive. Islamic civilization in its golden age created this ambiance.
Otherwise it would not have produced such great philosophers. People debated each other and opposed each
other, but they did not oppose the oneness of God. That was like a sky over everything. But within that, there
was freedom of discussion. We already lost that. That has become more and more restrictive in the last century
with the rise of modernism, which in the name of freedom destroyed the whole atmosphere of the Islamic
ambiance. So you were free only if you expressed Western ideas; otherwise, you would be put in prison.
Now the atmosphere in Turkey is fairly good. I am not saying ideal, but the two countries which have the
greatest field of intellectuals are in Turkey and Iran. Pure philosophy, which is the heart of all scientific
development, is produced more in Iran and Turkey than in the rest of the Islamic countries. I think Turkey and
Iran have the largest number of books coming out which seriously deal with these intellectual matters.