Islamic Science

Reblogging for future reference.

And the Words became Books

Tarik M. Quadir. Traditional Islamic Environmentalism: The Vision of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Lanham: University of America Press, 2013.

Is it God’s fault that we are destroying the earth? In a famous lecture from 1966 Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argued that once God told Adam to “dominate the earth” in Genesis, “no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.” The result was catastrophic for the environment, because “by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” A flood of objections to White’s position appeared almost immediately, among them one from the Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr (1933- ), who today teaches philosophy at George Washington University. Nasr argued that it was not Christianity that was hell-bent on destroying the earth, but Western modernity. “Neither Christian Armenia nor Ethiopia nor even Christian Eastern Europe gave…

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