"You Cannot be Fighting Against God While Trying to Have Peace on Earth"

Discussions about Islam and religion in general often focus on the question of modernity. Countless writers discuss the question of whether or not Islam is compatible with modernity or whether religion itself should exist in the modern world. But not all intellectuals grant modernity the axiomatic importance it has received since its advent.

One major figure who has questioned the unquestionable tenets of modernity is Seyyed Hossein Nasr, famous in the East and the West for his deep understanding of the Islamic tradition and world religions. According to Nasr, a university professor of Islamic studies at The George Washington University, the societies of the world ─ be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu or otherwise ─ do not need to find a way to fit religion into the mold of modernity, but instead must rediscover the traditions they have abandoned in their quest for progress.

Professor Nasr, the author of such books as "The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition" and "Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man," recently visited İstanbul to give a lecture on Islam and modernity. Before the event, he spoke with Sunday's Zaman about the modern world, war and the future of religion in the West.

James Kiger: The concept of modernity as distinguished from tradition by the lack of any connection to the transcendent or divine is an important theme in your work. The 20th century saw dramatic scientific, philosophical and cultural changes. What is different about the modernity of the 21st century as compared to the modernity of the 20th century?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: In a sense, nothing. But what has taken place is that it has developed what is called postmodernism, which tried to negate even the categories of modernism ─ for example, rationalism, which is one of the pillars of 18th century modernism, and empiricism. In a sense it is dissolution of modernism, but nevertheless it belongs to modernism as such. That is, modernism contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. And we see this in postmodernism. But that doesn't mean that this whole phenomenon is gone by any means.

The second difference is that in the 19th century, when people talked about modernism, they talked about its social implications. People were not aware that modernism leads to the death and destruction of the natural environment in which we live. Even now people don't want to accept that; they want to evade this. They say, "Oh this or that is due to bad engineering, bad planning," but it's really due to a worldview that negates the fact that nature is, by itself, sacred and has its own rights, and that goes against tens of thousands of years of human experience and human perception in relation to nature. So this is, yes, something that has changed, but not in the nature of modernism itself, as it continues to be a philosophy that tries to see reality independent of divine reality, which posits the independence of man from any other agency in the universe and makes the powers of thinking and of doing independent of both the spiritual element within man and religion and revelation. That has continued very much unabated.

James Kiger: Recently there has been a trend in Europe and America among certain writers, such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, of very direct criticism ─ and even hostility ─ toward religion. What do you see as the significance of this trend?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Many think this is the swan song of Western atheism. That is, now with religion becoming stronger, these secularists never imagined that. Everyone was taught at school that the flow of history is away from religion and toward secularism, and the secularists believed that they had already won the day. But then you have this tremendous revival of interest in religion in the second half of the 20th century... So these people come along, who are usually very haughty people and they're not really that intelligent, but what they're attacking is the simple faith of people that is coming back, what they call fundamentalism. Therefore, they posit their own intelligence against a sort of "simpleton faith," considering their opponents to be stupid ─ with themselves being the "brights," which is what Dawkins calls himself. I think it's an unfortunate phenomenon. I don't think that it's going to be very long lasting, but it will have a role in polarizing more and more the landscape of Western thought.

James Kiger: One of the common objections that these authors voice is the idea that religion is the prime, if not only, cause of violence in the world. All conflict, they argue, can be reduced to some matter of religious disagreement. Similarly, others have argued that the main conflict in the world is being fought by the West against Islam, which is perceived as a fundamentally violent religion. What is the connection or relationship between religion and violence?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: To be human is to be placed in a world of violence. Every time you inject your child with an injection against the flu, you are committing violence against the germs, if you look at it from their point of view. Let's not talk about sentimentality. Violence in that sense is part and parcel of life. Life, in order to grow, has to face violence. It's remarkable that, amidst this violence, there's so much beauty and peace and harmony in the world. That's what's really remarkable. Now, whatever distinguishes a human being from other human beings is a source of violence. First of all, two human beings: If there is only a certain amount of food, one will become violent against the other. There needs to be a higher principle to bring peace to them...

Now, throughout history, what has defined the identity of the human being, from the individual to larger aggregates of societies, has been religion, with no exception... In every case, therefore, those religious identifications have, in a sense, been both the cause of what would have been there anyway ─ that is, violence within the various groups ─ and the force that tried to overcome that. That's why you have both...However, there is something deeper involved. Religion can be destroyed, but man cannot live in a vacuum. So what took the place of religion for these people was an ideology that played the role of religion. That is, communism on the one hand and Nazism and fascism on the other. And so we are already witness to what happens ─ that is, tremendous violence ─ without religion in the traditional sense, but with pseudo-religion that takes the place of religion.

As for Islam, the calling of Islam the religion of violence by a civilization that has killed hundreds of times more Muslims than Muslims have killed Christians is really hypocrisy of the worst kind... This is very obvious... No society wants to be in prison. No society wants to be colonized. When the movement against the colonial powers began in the Islamic world, different things were tried, such as nationalism and liberalism, and none of them really fully succeeded... What instrument was left with which to fight against Western domination, including that of the so-called elites in society who had the same Arabic names but were also Western in the deeper sense of the term? What was left? It was religion. And so, from the early 20th century... movements began that tried to make use of Islam in order to face the situation.

Obviously, having done that, Islam becomes identified by those who do not want to leave the Islamic world, those who do not want to be defeated, with violence. And this is a very powerful form of propaganda to use against Islam and people use it all the time. Look, for example, at the tremendous amount of violence done in Gaza. You never hear people talk about Jewish violence, or Judaism as a source of violence. I have respect for Judaism as a religion of God ─ or Christianity ─ so I'm not happy that people should call it that, but Islam has the privilege of being the only religion in the world about which you can say anything negative you want and nobody says anything.

James Kiger: Speaking of the Gaza situation, what do you see as the root of this conflict?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: That's a very complicated matter. The root comes from a wedding between nationalism and secularized religious ideology. The founders of the idea of Zionism were not devout Jews, they were secular. They were products of European secular culture. They were not oriental Jews, they were Germans, and later on English. The idea of tying this ideology to land, of course, is a form of nationalism, which also came out of the West. To this must be added the exceptional tragedy that took place in World War II at the hands of the Germans against the Jews and the ground was perfectly prepared for people who were totally innocent, who had nothing to do with this, to pay the price ─ that is, the Palestinians. There are many pious Jews, both in the United States and in Israel, who still consider, after 60 years, Zionism to be a Jewish heresy...

So it was a very complicated set of events. You also have human reality on the ground: There are Jews who live in Israel. They are human beings, they must be kept there. Their health and wealth must be protected. They cannot be thrown out. So it's an even more complicated situation now.

James Kiger: What positive role do you believe religion can play in this conflict?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: I've dedicated my life to the thesis that only in-depth understanding between religions can bring about peace in any meaningful way. You cannot be fighting against God while trying to have peace on earth, which is what most of us do. There has to be, first of all, a peace within oneself and with the divine reality. And there has to be peace between religions, in the deepest sense. And that can percolate into a world that doesn't want to accept either God's reality or that of religion, and just wants to make money and power. It can percolate into that world.

James Kiger: Turkey is currently working toward membership in the European Union. This is seen by some as a threat to Europe's Christian heritage. What is the current state of Christianity in the West and what role do you think Islam in general, and Turkey in particular, will play in the future of Western religion?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: First of all, I wish that Europe still carried its Christian heritage. The bride of the church, France, would have more than 11 percent of people attending church on Sundays... But the reality of the matter is that Europe tried very hard for several centuries to marginalize its Christian heritage. The attacks against Christianity have not come from Zimbabwe, but from Europe... The heritage has already been weakened by centuries of attacks against Christianity by Europeans, from Montaigne and Bayle down to Karl Marx and so many others. So that is a reality...

I sympathize with the Catholic Church, which wants to revive traditional Christianity in Europe. I wish all the buildings in Europe looked like Chartres Cathedral and that all this horrible modernized classical music in Europe would sound like Johann Sebastian Bach...

The European powers, which are not necessarily Catholic, which just make use of Christianity nominally but are secularized, are afraid of the loss of their secularism. Belgians don't like to have half a million Muslims in Belgium who pray all the time while they don't go to church. At first they say: "They are uneducated, so they go to the mosque; we are educated so we don't have to go to church." … That's why I don't think Turkey is going to get into the EU so easily. The EU should get into Turkey later on, the way things are going. It is an uphill battle. Europe is not going to accept Turkey, no matter how much the Turks say: "Oh, we're not Muslims. We're just Europeans like you; we buy ties just like you and put them on our neck." That's not going to be sufficient. Turkey has to also look for its stature and self-respect as a major country that was the center of the most powerful empire in the world for centuries. It cannot humble itself in a negative way. For the human being, it's good to be humble. A nation, once humbled beyond a certain point, loses its creative power.

James Kiger: With significant amounts of westward immigration, Islam has become more decentralized than ever before. There are many different conceptions of where Islam should be heading in the future. In Turkey, for example, the thought of Fethullah Gülen has shaped many people's ideas about the future of Islam. What role will movements such as this play in Islam in the 21st century?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: First of all, Fethullah Gülen is in Pennsylvania, not in Turkey, which is itself an important fact... Muslims have to deal with different social realities and cultural realities and therefore often give different responses to different questions. The heart, of course, remains the same: belief in one God, in the Prophet, in the Quran and ethics and so forth. But changes come about. Throughout history, Islam has not at all been a centrally located religion juridically and administratively like Catholicism... The people who became great religious leaders were individuals to whom people responded in the deepest sense of the term, and they became powerful figures.

Now Fethullah Gülen, of course, has a lot of administrative capabilities, but obviously he speaks of things that attract certain people. That's why he has a million followers. But that's far from being the only interpretation of Islam, even in Turkey. There are other people and other strands. Now you have two different things: strands of Islamic thought for Islamic societies in the West, and strands of Islamic thought within the Islamic world ─ and then their interaction... There is a kind of crisscrossing and going back and forth that's unprecedented in Islamic history.

James Kiger: The lecture you will be giving today has the theme of "Islam, modernity and the Muslim world: a new agenda for the 21st century." Can you summarize this agenda?

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: As far as the present moment is concerned, I think much of the new agenda for the Islamic world is the old agenda. That is, we have to face the major challenges that the Islamic world faced from the outside and which have now entered into the Islamic world to some extent. And these challenges are at once intellectual, social, economic, political and artistic ─ they cut across the whole gamut of human experience. I think what we have to do is prioritize these agendas, and I've always been one who believes that the priority has to be intellectual ─ the way we think is what determines everything else...

Of course, globally speaking the most important challenge is the environment. Everything else is secondary. All wars and all human injustice are nothing if we cannot keep the home in which we live, that is, the earth. People tend to forget that and have to be reminded of that.