Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar. He is University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
"Shihāb ad-Dīn" Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardī (1154–1191) was a Persian philosopher and founder of the Iranian school of Illuminationism, an important school in Islamic philosophy. The "light" in his "Philosophy of Illumination" is the source of knowledge. He is referred to by the honorific title Shaikh al-ʿIshraq "Master of Illumination" and Shaikh al-Maqtul "the Murdered Master", in reference to his execution for heresy. Mulla Sadra, the Persian sage of the Safavid era described Suhrawardi as the "Reviver of the Traces of the Pahlavi (Iranian) Sages", and Suhrawardi, in his magnum opus "The Philosophy of Illumination", thought of himself as a reviver or resuscitator of the ancient tradition of Persian wisdom. Suhrawardi provided a new Platonic critique of the peripatetic school of Avicenna that was dominant at his times, and that critique involved the fields of Logic, Physics, Epistemology, Psychology, and Metaphysics.
Ziauddin Sardar is a British-Pakistani scholar, award-winning writer, cultural critic and public intellectual who specialises in Muslim thought, the future of Islam, futurology and science and cultural relations. The author and editor of more than 50 books, Prospect magazine has named him as one of Britain's top 100 public intellectuals and The Independent newspaper calls him: 'Britain's own Muslim polymath'.
Contemporary Islamic philosophy revives some of the trends of medieval Islamic philosophy, notably the tension between Mutazilite and Asharite views of ethics in science and law, and the duty of Muslims and role of Islam in the sociology of knowledge and in forming ethical codes and legal codes, especially the fiqh and rules of jihad. See list of Islamic terms in Arabic for a glossary of key terms used in Islam.
Hikmah is an Arabic word that means wisdom, sagacity, philosophy, rationale or underlying reason. The Quran mentions "hikmah" in various places, where it is understood as knowledge and understanding of the Quran, fear of God, and a means of nourishing the spirit or intellect. Hikmah is sometimes associated with prophethood, faith, intelligence ('aql), comprehension (fahm), or the power of rational demonstration. In the Quran, God bestows wisdom upon whomever He chooses, and various individuals including the House of Abraham, David, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and Luqman are said to have received wisdom. The Quran also uses the term hikmah in connection with the Book or the scripture in general. The Quran also refers to itself as the Wise Book, and refers to God as The Wise in several places.
William Clark Chittick is an American philosopher, writer, translator, and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn 'Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn 'Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University.
Muslim scholars have developed a spectrum of viewpoints on science within the context of Islam. The Quran and Islam allows much interpretation when it comes to science. Scientists of medieval Muslim civilization contributed to the new discoveries in science. From the eighth to fifteenth century, Muslim mathematicians and astronomers furthered the development of almost all areas of mathematics. At the same time, concerns have been raised about the lack of scientific literacy in parts of the modern Muslim world.
Religious intellectualism in Iran reached its apogee during the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1906–11). The process involved philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and cultural theorists.
Ismaʻīl Rājī al-Fārūqī was a Palestinian-American philosopher. He spent several years at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, then taught at universities in North America, including McGill University in Montreal. He was Professor of Religion at Temple University, where he founded and chaired the Islamic Studies program. Al-Faruqi was also the founder of the International Institute of Islamic Thought. He wrote over 100 articles for various scholarly journals and magazines in addition to 25 books, of the most notable being Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas. He also established the Islamic Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion and chaired it for ten years. He served as the vice-president of the Inter-Religious Peace Colloquium, The Muslim-Jewish-Christian Conference and as the president of the American Islamic College in Chicago.
Mona Abul-Fadl (1945-2008) was a scholar of contemporary Western thought and women's studies. She was associated with the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and later with what is now known as Cordoba University. Her research interests included political theory, comparative politics, Islam and the Middle East, epistemology, and feminist scholarship.
In traditionalist philosophy, desacralization of knowledge or secularization of knowledge is the process of separation of knowledge from its perceived divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality. The process reflects a paradigm shift in modern conception of knowledge in that it has rejected divine revelations as well as the idea of spiritual and metaphysical foundations of knowledge, confining knowledge to empirical domain and reason alone. Although it is a recurrent theme among the writers of the Traditionalist school that began with René Guénon, a French mystic and intellectual who earlier spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order", the process of desacralization of knowledge was most notably surveyed, chronicled and conceptualized by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his 1981 Gifford Lectures that were later published as Knowledge and the Sacred.
Knowledge and the Sacred is a 1981 book by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr. It was originally presented as his Gifford Lectures, which he delivered in 1981. The book is an exposition of perennial philosophy and has been described as a summa of the traditional perspective. It reflects Nasr's desire to revive what he refers to as the sacred quality of knowledge as opposed to knowledge based on sense perception and reason.
Adnan Aslan is a Turkish Islamic scholar.
Islamic environmentalism is a strand of environmental philosophy as well as an Islamic movement that employs environmental principles derived from Islamic scriptures and traditions to the environment and the modern-day environmental crisis. Muslim environmentalists believe in God's absolute sovereignty over nature and emphasize humanity's role as God's vicegerent, making it their duty to protect and preserve the environment. Islamic environmentalism encompasses Islamic ecological philosophy, Sharia-based environmental law, and Islamic environmental activism.
In perennial philosophy, scientia sacra or sacred science is a form of spiritual knowledge that lies at the heart of both divine revelations and traditional sciences, embodying the very essence of every sacred tradition. It recognizes sources of knowledge beyond those accepted by modern epistemology, such as divine revelations and intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is believed to allow access to an innate knowledge of God, which is to be reawakened through the use of human intellect. The principles and doctrines of scientia sacra are derived from reason, revelation, and intellectual intuition, with the conviction that these sources of knowledge can be reconciled in a hierarchical order, and applied in the human quest to understand different orders of reality. Its objective is to show how the transmitted, intellectual, and physical sciences are related and unified within the framework of metaphysics, as traditionally defined.
In perennial philosophy, tradition means divinely ordained truths or principles that have been communicated to humanity as well as an entire cosmic sector through various figures such as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos, or other transmitting agencies. The purpose of these sacred truths or principles is to continuously remind human beings of the existence of a "Divine Center" and an "Ultimate Origin." According to this perspective, tradition does not refer to custom, habit, or inherited ways of thinking and living. Contrarily, it has a divine foundation and involves the transmission of the sacred message down through the ages. Used in this sense, tradition is synonymous with revelation, and it encompasses all forms of philosophy, art, and culture that are influenced by it.
In traditionalist philosophy, pontifical man is a divine representative who serves as a bridge between heaven and earth. Promethean man, on the other hand, sees himself as an earthly being who has rebelled against God and has no knowledge of his origins or purposes. This concept was notably developed in contemporary language by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
Resacralization of nature is a term used in environmental philosophy to describe the process of restoring the sacred quality of nature. The primary assumption is that nature has a sanctified aspect that has become lost in modern times as a result of the secularization of contemporary worldviews. These secular worldviews are said to be directly responsible for the spiritual crisis in "modern man", which has ultimately resulted in the current environmental degradation. This perspective emphasizes the significance of changing human perceptions of nature through the incorporation of various religious principles and values that connect nature with the divine. The Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr first conceptualized the theme of resacralization of nature in contemporary language, which was later expounded upon by a number of theologians and philosophers including Alister McGrath, Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether.
In traditionalist philosophy, resacralization of knowledge is the reverse of the process of secularization of knowledge. The central premise is that knowledge is intimately connected to its perceived divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality—which has been severed in the modern era. The process of resacralization of knowledge seeks to reinstate the role of intellect—the divine faculty believed to exist in every human being—above and beyond that of reason, as well as to revive the role of traditional metaphysics in acquiring knowledge—especially knowledge of God—by drawing on sacred traditions and sacred science that uphold divine revelations and the spiritual or gnostic teachings of all revealed religions. It aims to restore the primordial connection between God and humanity, which is believed to have been lost. To accomplish this, it relies on the framework of tawhid, which is developed into a comprehensive metaphysical perspective emphasizing the transcendent unity of all phenomena. Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr elaborated on the process of resacralization of knowledge in his book Knowledge and the Sacred, which was presented as Gifford Lectures in 1981.
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