Seyyed Hossein Nasr's panoramic study stems from his observation in the Preface that “there is no religion about which so much has been written in the West by those opposed to it than Islam” (p. xiii). According to Nasr, this animus, and the misunderstandings it willfully creates, predate but have been exacerbated by the tragic events of 11 September 2001. Thus motivated, he develops a spirited defense and illumination of “the authentic teachings of Islam anew in light of the challenges of the present-day situation” (p. xiii). Nasr's purview is vast, encompassing the diversity of Islamic voices—“the spectrum of Islam” across Sunnism, Shi

ism, Sufism, and their subdivisions—and what these voices have to say on divine and human laws and justice, community and society, in the human context and in the relationship of human beings to God. In his exploration, the author delineates those values and traditions that are common to Islam and the two other great Abrahamic faiths (frequently highlighting where they have been jettisoned or diluted in Judaic or Christian practice while maintained in Islam). He also directs us to areas where Islam stands alone: for example, Islam is less rigid in orthodoxy, or assertion of religious truth. There is no magisterium or synod in Islam, where the emphasis is rather on orthopraxy, or the correct practice of received divine truth, embodied in the “pillars” of Islam, which include acts of daily prayer, fasting, alms giving, and pilgrimage. On occasion, Nasr's evolutionary distinction between the Abrahamic faiths may take on an implied judgmental tinge. For instance, in his chapter “Divine and Human Laws,” he writes, “From the Renaissance onward laws became more and more secularized in the West, and they came to be seen as ever-changing regulations devised and defined by society to be made and discarded as circumstances dictate” (p. 116).

Nasr maintains that this is in stark contrast to the “Islamic perspective,” which he holds as consistent with Jewish law and the Christian Old Testament, in which “Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be” (p. 117). Fair enough, but herein lies the germ of the problem that the reader for whom Nasr is writing, versed in the tenets of the Abrahamic faiths, may have with at least part of his message. He writes with passion, authority, and, for the most part, conviction on Islam with respect to its essential oneness with Judaism and Christianity and its inclusiveness of them. “Churches dot the skyline of Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and many other cities, and synagogues are also found everywhere a Jewish community lives from Teheran to Fez” (p. 51). He quotes the famous Qur

anic passage, “Had God willed, He could have made us one community” but chose to have us learn from each other in our diversity (Q. 5:48). He offers illustrations of how Muslim respect for law, community, sexuality, art and music, and—dare one say—values of love and compassion resonate with those of cognate faiths.

In this spirit, The Heart of Islam joins a literature most recently and notably exemplified by Vartan Gregorian in Islam: A Mosaic, Not a Monolith and Feisal Abdul Rauf's What's Right with Islam. Whereas Gregorian (and here I must reveal that this scholar is the president of my foundation) blends irony, humor, sensitivity, and admonition, Nasr's defense of Islam can become defensive and at times pokes jabs at the other Abrahamic branches, Christianity in particular, that may seem gratuitous or at least insufficiently argued. To cite just one example, in his chapter “One God, Many Prophets,” he takes to task Christian missionary activity and its deleterious impact—especially with respect to attempts at religious conversion—on not only Muslims but also “Hindus, Buddhists, and others.” He goes on to conclude, “This question of Christian missionary activity (of the Western churches, not Orthodoxy) is a complicated matter requiring an extensive separate treatment, but it must be mentioned briefly here” (p. 47). To flag this is not to deny that Nasr may have a valid point to make about something important but, rather, to say that he does not do it justice by scant discussion.

It is in his treatment of Christianity, and especially in that of the post-Renaissance Christian West, that Nasr will raise most eyebrows. The issue is joined in his Preface, where in the context of—quite legitimate—discussion of Western distortion of Islam in the West, he observes, again in passing, that “the new methods of rationalist, historicist, and skeptical scholarship about religion growing out of the so-called Age of Enlightenment (which was in reality an age of the darkening of the soul and eclipse of the intellect) began to apply their methods to the study of Islam in the name of Orientalism” (p. xii). This is a perfect example of a valid point undermined by gratuitous swipe. For better or worse, this unprecedented age of cosmic inquiry has shaped, and continues to shape, more than two hundred years of Western history. The problem is later compounded, when, in seeking to underscore his central argument that the Christian West has abandoned its received Old Testament guidance, Nasr writes, “In America one always speaks of the separation of church and state, although religion itself has never been totally separated from political life from the time of the writing of the American constitution onward” (pp. 147–48). The fact is that, despite the current spirited debate over our nation's founders' intent with regard to religion in public life, God is not mentioned (and presumably deliberately so) in the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, the document, like those principally responsible for framing it, is widely considered a product of the Enlightenment that Nasr rejects, not of Christian doctrinal tradition.

These criticisms are relevant only in that they address fundamentally important questions that Nasr chooses to raise. It is by no means a rejection of the book or its core theme and purpose to suggest that, in his masterly survey of Islam, he brings other faiths to the discussion and seems occasionally to give them short shrift.