In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.
Seyyed Hossein NasrThe love of God is not only the highest form of love, but also in reality the only love of which all other loves are but shadows
Seyyed Hossein NasrWhat 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 NasrOnly in the West did a philosophy develop that was not only no longer the love of wisdom but went so far as to deny the category of wisdom as a legitimate form of knowledge. The result was a hatred of wisdom that should more appropriately be called ‘misosophy’ (literarily hatred of Sophia, Wisdom) rather than philosophy.
Seyyed Hossein NasrMilitarily, the great movements of resistance against colonial powers in the 18th and 19th century were almost all from Sufis: Imam Shamil in Caucasia, Amir Abd al Qadir in Algeria, The Barelvi family in the modern province of India, today which is Pakistan, and you can go down the line.
Seyyed Hossein NasrIn the field of medicine, if you're sick you need a doctor. A doctor has already studied how to deal with your ailments, and human beings are imperfect. There any many ailments of the psyche and the soul that need to be treated, and the serious murshid, or spiritual master, is also really a doctor of the soul: a person who can heal the wounds of the soul in the same way as a medical doctor takes care of our physical problems.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr