This is a revised and updated edition of this seminal work on the responses of Islam to the modern world. Starting with the present-day condition of man in the modern world and the dilemma of the present-day Muslim, Seyyed Hossein Nasr discusses the interchange that has continued between Islam and the West over the centuries. The author then proceeds to examine the profound struggle in the Muslim world between the Islamic tradition and Western ideologies and culture concentrating on the present situations in the Arab world, in Iran, in India and in Pakistan. In addition to a new preface, this revised edition of Islam and the Plight of Modern Man includes two new chapters: Islam at the Dawn of the Third Christian Millennium, and Reflections on Islam and the West: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born in Teheran to a family of traditional scholars and physicians. After receiving his early education in Iran he went to America where he studied physics , and the history of science and philosophy at M.I.T. and Harvard, where he received his doctorate. Nasr was Professor at Teheran University and founder and first President of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy. He is currently Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University and author of numerous books including: Ideals and Realities of Islam, A Young Muslim’s Guide to the Modern World and Science & Civilization in Islam, all published by The Islamic Texts Society.

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Table of Contents

Excerpt: Contemporary Western Man Between the Rim and the Axis

Although the present work deals primarily with Islam and the Muslims, it is also concerned directly with the modern world—whose impact upon the Islamic world during the past century has brought havoc and confusion beyond comparison with anything that Islamic history has witnessed since its origin—and with the message of Islam and its significance for the contemporary West. Hence it is most appropriate to begin with the study of the situation of modern Western man, and by implication that of his imitators on other continents, a study which has become especially imperative and urgent as a result of the rapid deterioration of both modern society and the natural environment during the past few decades.

The confrontation of man’s own inventions and manipulations, in the form of technology, with human culture, as well as the violent effect of the application of man’s acquired knowledge of nature to the destruction of the natural environment, have in fact reached such proportions that many people in the modern world, especially in the West, are at last beginning to question the validity of the conception of man held in the Occident since the rise of modem civilization. But, despite this recent awareness, in order to discuss such a vast problem in a meaningful and constructive way, one must begin by clearing the ground of the obstacles which usually prevent the profoundest questions involved from being discussed. Modern man has burned his hands in the fire which he himself kindled when he allowed himself to forget who he is. Having sold his soul in the manner of Faust to gain dominion over the natural environment, he has created a situation in which the very control of the environment is turning into its strangulation, bringing in its wake not only ecocide but also, ultimately, suicide.

The danger is now evident enough not to need repetition. Whereas only a few decades ago everyone spoke of man’s unlimited possibility for development understood in a physical and materialistic sense, today many are aware of “limits to growth”—a phrase well-known in the West today—or even of an imminent cataclysm, although many others remain heedless. But the concepts and factors according to which the crisis is analyzed, the solutions sought after and even the colors with which the image of an impending doom are depicted are usually all in terms of the very elements that have brought the crisis of modern man into being. The world is still seen by the forces and elements that govern it as devoid of a spiritual horizon, not because there is no such horizon present, but because he who views the contemporary landscape is most often the man who lives at the rim of the wheel of existence and therefore views all things from the periphery. He remains indifferent to the spokes and completely oblivious of the axis and the Center, which nevertheless remain ever accessible to him through them.

The problem of the devastation brought upon the environment by technology, the ecological crisis and the like, all issue from the malady of amnesia or forgetfulness from which modern as well as post modern man suffer. Modern man has simply forgotten who he is. Living on the periphery of his own circle of existence, he has been able to gain a qualitatively superficial but quantitatively staggering knowledge of the world. He has projected the externalized and superficial image of himself upon the world. And then, having come to know the world in such externalized terms, he has sought to reconstruct an image of himself based upon this external knowledge. There has been a series of ‘falls’ by means of which man has oscillated in a descending scale between an ever more externalized image of himself and of the world surrounding him, moving ever further from the Center both of himself and of his cosmic environment. The inner history of the so called development of modem Western man from his historic background as traditional man—who represents at once his ancestor in time and his center in space—is a gradual alienation from the Center and the axis through the spokes of the wheel of existence to the rim, where modern man resides. But just as the existence of the rim presupposes spokes which connect it to the axis of the wheel, so does the very fact of human existence imply the presence of the Center and the axis and hence an inevitable connection of men of all ages with Man in his primordial and eternal reality as he has been, is, and will continue to be, above all outward changes and transformations.

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