Editing Seyyed Hossein Nasr (section)

===Ecology===
{{See also|Resacralization of nature|Islamic environmentalism|Ecotheology|Religion and environmentalism}}

{{blockquote|That the harmony between man and nature has been destroyed is a fact which most people admit. But not everyone realizes that this disequilibrium is due to the destruction of the harmony between man and God.{{sfn|Stone|2005 |p=1802}}}}

It was in 1966, during the Rockefeller Foundation Lectures at the University of Chicago, that Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for the first time, made public the importance that he placed on nature and his concern for its degradation.{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=13}} He was one of the first philosophers to turn to this question{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=177}} and he is considered to be the founder of environmentalism in the Muslim world.{{sfn|Boujaoude|2018 |p=299}} In several works he deals with the causes of the mutilation of the planet and the restorative remedies.{{sfn|Moore|2010 |p=xxiii}}

'''Causes'''

Tarik Quadir argues that "the ecological crisis, for Nasr, is only an externalization of an inner malaise [...] due in large part to the various applications of modern [western] science. [...] Following the loss of the vision of the universe proper to medieval Christian worldview, [...] this science ignores or denies the existence of any reality other than that of the material aspect of nature".{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=5, 13}} Indeed, as Nasr explains, "the [[Renaissance]] and its aftermath […] witnessed the rise of a secular [[humanism]] and the absolutization of earthly man with immeasurable consequences for both the world of nature and traditional civilizations conquered by this new type of man, who gives free rein to his Promethean ambition to dominate nature and its forces in order to gain wealth or to conquer others civilizations, or both. [...] Nature, more than a lifeless mass, has thus become a machine to be dominated and manipulated by a purely earthly man".{{sfn|Religion and the Order of Nature|1996 |p=4}} Thus, it is "to modernism and its false presumptions about the nature of man and the world", that Nasr attributes "the destruction of the natural environment", in addition to "the disintegration of the social fabric",{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=274}} and he deplores that all States, "from monarchies to communist governments, to revolutionary regimes, […] all want to copy avidly Western science and technology, without thought of their cultural, social and environmental consequences".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=118}}

Nasr believes that another cause of ecological problems is found in [[scientism]], that is, the conviction that "modern science provides if not the only, at least the most reliable means to true knowledge" and that it leads thereby "to human progress",{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=13}} as imagined by those who evaluate a human society solely in terms of its economic growth.{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=29}} Nasr corroborates the observation that the development of the current economic system rests largely on human passions, which it feeds in its turn, thus generating a continuous blossoming of new needs which, in reality, are only desires.{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=12-13}} Finally, "if modern man destroys nature with such impunity, it is because he looks upon it as a mere economic resource".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=205}}

'''Remedies'''

Quadir maintains that for Nasr, it is not by technology that environmental problems can be solved in the long term, being themselves the consequence of this technology.{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=15-16}} According to Nasr, the critique of the extraordinary technological development is certainly necessary, but the real critique must start with the root of the problem, i.e. with oneself,{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=198}} because in a desacralized West,{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=279}} few are aware of what Nasr considers the raison d'être of human life and of nature.{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=198}} This consciousness, for Nasr, is present in the wisdom of the various religious traditions,{{sfn|Aslan|2004 |p=23}} "as well as in their cosmologies and sacred sciences".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=xiv}} And it alone makes it possible to rediscover "the sense of the sacred",{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=36}} in particular with regard to nature,{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=205}}because deprived of this sense, the human being remains immersed in the ephemeral, abandoning himself to his own lower nature, with an illusory feeling of freedom.{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=145}}

As a consequence, the philosopher [[Ramin Jahanbegloo]] argues that Nasr's goal "is to negate the totalitarian claims of modern science and to reopen the way to the religious view of the order of nature, developed over centuries in the cosmologies and sacred sciences of the great traditions".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=xiii–xiv}} "Once the awareness comes of what really nature is, warns Nasr, that nature is not just an 'it', that it is a living reality and has a sacred content, that it has an inner relation with our own inner being, [...] that we cannot destroy nature without destroying ourselves. [...], then we will begin to respect her" and, consequently, the dominant technology will initiate a reconversion.{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=197}} Realizing then, by this interior transformation, that true happiness is not linked to consumption,{{sfn|Quadir|2013 |p=16}} the human being will recognize his "real and not imagined needs",{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=198}} the only solution to slow down the uncontrolled appetite which leads to the daily rape of the planet.{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=197}}