A quiet item published on June 18 by Traditional Hikma, the classical-Islam resource site, dusts off a book by Seyyed Hossein Nasr — Religion & the Order of Nature, issued by Oxford University Press in New York — that reads less dated than its publication history might suggest. The site republished a review by Asli Yildirim, and on closer reading the case it makes is almost uncomfortably current — a philosophical diagnosis of an ecological crisis, filed decades before the crisis became a beat.
The review opens with Nasr’s own framing, and it does not hedge: “The Earth is bleeding from wounds inflicted upon it by a humanity no longer in harmony with Heaven and therefore in constant strife with the terrestrial environment.” The mechanics here are the whole argument. In Nasr’s telling, environmental wreckage is not an engineering failure that better engineering will fix; it is the visible symptom of a rupture between humanity and a sacred order — a cosmological problem before it is a technical one.
The Man Behind The Argument
The reviewer spends as much time on the author as the thesis, and the resume justifies it. Nasr is described as a polymath — a prolific writer whose range runs from religion and Sufism to architecture, art, spirituality, literature and the natural environment — with more than 50 books and over 500 articles to his name. He holds the distinction of being the only Muslim included in the Library of Living Philosophers.
The trajectory is unusual. An MIT scholarship led to an undergraduate physics degree in 1954; a doctorate in the history of science and philosophy followed at Harvard. His dissertation treated Islamic cosmological doctrines — in the review’s account, the first work in Islamic studies to deal with cosmology at all. Along the way he encountered the writings of Frithjof Schuon, a leading figure of the Traditionalist school, an encounter that shaped his thought permanently.
Back in Iran, Nasr was tapped to head the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, an institution the review credits as the first in the country built on the intellectual principles of Philosophia Perennis. The roll call of scholars who passed through its discourses reads like an index of the field: Henri Corbin, William Chittick, Sachiko Murata, Toshihiko Izutsu. Today Nasr teaches Islamic Studies at George Washington University.
Why An Old Book Review Travels Now
The catch is that nothing in the review is new — which is precisely the point its republication makes. A book arguing that despoliation of the planet flows from a collapsed metaphysical order reads differently in a decade of climate accounting, carbon markets and technological optimism. Nasr’s camp would say the modern toolkit manages symptoms while ignoring the diagnosis; critics would call that a category error. The review does not referee that fight. It simply restates the position with force.
For readers of the finance pages, the instinct is to ask what the thesis is worth in practice. Follow the money and you find none here — no policy proposals, no carbon price, no technology assessment. What Traditional Hikma has republished is something rarer: an argument that the ledger itself, the one that treats nature as an input, is the error. A quarter-century and more later, the book still declines to make peace with the spreadsheet.
Sources
- RELIGION & THE ORDER OF NATURE, By Seyyed Hossein Nasr. New York: Oxford University Press By Aslı Yıldırım – Traditional Hikma
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr: an organic radical inspiration – Al-Andalus Tribune
