in China was to unify knowledge as a sacred quest
for the truth. Finally the world’s great religions as
reflected in holy books, such as the Hindu Vedas,
the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Daodejing
(Tao te Ching), all illuminate a path to divinity
through a spiritual philosophy, seeking to unify
humans, nature, and God.
Nasr was the youngest philosopher ever hon-
ored by the Library of Living Philosophers and
the first Muslim. He has exerted considerable
influence in efforts to revive Islamic philosophy
in Europe and the Americas with his discussion of
philosophers after Ibn Rushd. He has profoundly
influenced scholars worldwide who are seeking to
reunderstand Islamic philosophy and the sacred
nature of knowledge.
See also creation; secUlarism; theology.
Judy Saltzman
Further reading: Lewis Hahn, Randall Auxier, and
Lucien W. Stone, Jr., eds., The Philosophy of Seyyed
Hossein Nasr (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2001);
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islamic Philosophy from Its Ori-
gins to the Present (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2006); ———, Science and Civilization in
Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1970); ———, Philosophy and the Plight of Modern Man
(London: Longmans, 1976); ———, Knowledge and
the Sacred (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989); ———, Religion and the Order of Nature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
Nation of Islam
This indigenous African-American Muslim com-
munity of the Nation of Islam (NOI) began in
1930, when racism and violence against blacks
were still widespread in the United states.
Although the shadowy figure of W. D. Fard (also
known as Fard Muhammad, Wallace D. Fard, Wali
Fard Muhammad, et al.) was the original impetus
of the community’s distinctive black theology
and eschatological message, its true founder and
leader for many decades until his death was Elijah
Muhammad, born Elijah Poole (1897–1975), in
Sandersville, Georgia. In 1923 he married Clara
Evans, who later came to be known in the NOI
as Sister Clara Muhammad, and settled in Detroit,
where, in the early 1930s, he became acquainted
with W. D. Fard and his already established Tem-
ple of Islam. By 1934 Fard had disappeared and
Elijah Muhammad became the sole leader of the
new community known as the Nation of Islam.
Combining use of the Bible and later the
qUran, Elijah Muhammad preached a message of
modern black prophecy that emphasized themes
of the chosenness and salvific destiny of the
“Blackman,” doing his own revisionist history on
racist American attitudes toward the “Negro” or
“colored man” since the Civil War (1861–65). Pos-
sible Islamic sources for these teachings have been
found by scholars of sUFism and Islamic sectarian
theologies (shiism, ahmadiyya, and even drUze
teachings), all of which espouse varying notions
of the divinity within, cyclic prophecy, ongoing
revelation, messianism in the Islamic figure of
the mahdi, and millennialism in the imminent
coming of the Last Judgment and reversal/over-
throw of the present corrupt world order. Several
of these ideas exist on the margins of Islamic
sectarianism and are strongly disavowed by the
Sunni Muslim majority, particularly notions of
modern prophecy, ongoing revelation, and human
(in this case, black) divinity. These doctrines have
made the NOI universally rejected by the Ameri-
can Sunni community since its origins, although
there are more recent signs of a rapprochement
with the larger world Muslim umma, or religious
community.
The NOI has frequently been categorized in
purely secular political or sociological terms as
black nationalism and not as a religious commu-
nity. This community certainly has played a large
role in paralleling, stimulating, and critiquing var-
ious civil rights and sociopolitical activism move-
ments in America: the National Association for the
Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP),
Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro ImprovementK 520 Nation of Islam