Justice is inseparable from truth in human life. Seyyed Hossein Nasr More Quotes by Seyyed Hossein Nasr More Quotes From Seyyed Hossein Nasr Tariqah [The Spiritual Path] without the Sharia [Islamic Law] is like having a pistachio tree without the shell. Or a walnut, a walnut cannot grow on a tree without having a shell, and the food that you eat is inside the shell. Seyyed Hossein Nasr islamicspirituallaw Jalaluddin Rumi is completely rooted in Islamic teachings of Quran. He was a great scholar, he belonged to a madrassa, and he knew Islamic theology and jurisprudence very well. He knew Persian, Arabic and Turkish, which was coming into Anatolia at that time, very well. He was a remarkable, remarkable scholar, besides being a great saint. Seyyed Hossein Nasr islamicsaintteaching The Prophet was taken by the order of God to heaven, which is a prototype of all spiritual realization in Islam. But, he had a guide; Gabriel, the angel, was his guide. He took him to heaven. Seyyed Hossein Nasr angeltakenspiritual Love is loss combined with pain. Seyyed Hossein Nasr painlosslove-is If you want to make a decision in life on what to do, but if you're trying systematically, through spiritual practice, through meditation, through the invocation of the name of God, to walk closer and closer in this life to Him, you need someone to guide you. And God has made it possible in Islam for this guidance to exist. Seyyed Hossein Nasr practicespiritualnames Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love. Seyyed Hossein Nasr divorcedobjectssuffering In the same way that we have a body and a soul and a spirit, our soul can't walk in the street without our body - we would be dead then. Religion is the same way; it has to have a body, it has to have a form, it has to have structure. Without that, the soul cannot be prepared to follow the tariqah. Seyyed Hossein Nasr bodysoulwould-be If God did not love us, we could not love him. And Sufis are those who have realized this love. Seyyed Hossein Nasr sufiifs What is tragic today is that there is a number of Muslims who think that all the solutions are to be found simply by external actions. They don't have to do anything within themselves. This is a deeply Western idea - modern, Western idea, where you try to improve the world without improving yourself. And this is what the Muslims who talk about others putting their heads in the sand and that "We are doing jihad and we are political" and so forth, they are emulating a very important mistake of modernism. Seyyed Hossein Nasr mistakeideasthinking The Prophet, peace be on him, presents all the possibilities of the human state in perfection. Now, a part of that of course is love of God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr possibilitygod-loveperfection The word Habib in Arabic means both lover and beloved. At the heart of it is that the Prophet loves God, God loves him. But God designated him to be also the founder of a new world order of a civilization of a society. Seyyed Hossein Nasr heartordermean Without Sufism, Islam would not have spread into two thirds of what we call the Islamic world. Seyyed Hossein Nasr islamictwoworld Muhammad sets the model for being a good statesman. He also sets the model for being a good warrior, for chivalry, of nobility, of all the things which the Quran and Hadith [The recorded collections of the sayings and traditions of the Prophet] says of treating your enemy with dignity and kindness. Seyyed Hossein Nasr warriorkindnessenemy In fact, the machine doesn't have the consciousness we have, the free will that we have, and to surrender one's free will, not in every matter but in spiritual matters, to a spiritual teacher is in a sense a lower level of surrendering one's will to God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr machinesspiritualteacher Yearning is inseparable from love, and since once doesn't have the object of love immediately, one has not fallen in the embrace of the beloved immediately, they are suffering. That's how they are related. Seyyed Hossein Nasr embracebelovedsuffering In Islam, there is no priesthood and each person stands before God, like in the daily prayers, without an intermediary. That's in contrast to Christianity, where during the Eucharist, a priest has to officiate and the priest functions as a link - at least in Catholic Christianity - between the laity and God. Seyyed Hossein Nasr islamcatholicprayer Islam, in contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, does not have monasticism; spiritual life, social life, they are all integrated and related together in one way or another. And the Prophet represents that in his life. Seyyed Hossein Nasr buddhismislamspiritual When one talks about being like a dead corpse in the hands of a spiritual teacher it means being able to surrender one's will, specially one's nafs al ammarah, that is a part of our soul which is again a Quranic term, which commands us to evil - we must surrender that. That's what it means. It doesn't make you become part of a cog of a machine. Seyyed Hossein Nasr spiritualteachermean The Islamic world doesn't stop in the Arab world or Persia. There is the whole Turkic world, the Central Asian world, South Asian world, Southeast Asian world, and African world. Seyyed Hossein Nasr islamicasianworld 300 years after the rise of Islam there were Zoroastrians in Iran. The Muslim armies never forced people to accept Islam. It was only within Arabia that God ordered the idolaters to have a choice of either embracing Islam or fight against Muslims, because He wanted to remove this terrible idolatry that exited there. But outside Arabia where Islam met Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus, they were given a choice by and large. That's why many Christians and Jewish communities survived in the Muslim world, but gradually many of them embraced Islam for different reasons. Seyyed Hossein Nasr armyfightingchristian
