From Up in the Air to the Roots of Avatar’s Tree of Souls: Hossein Nasr’s Islamic Traditionalism and the Hope for Western Futures Grounded in the Sacredness of the Earth

Abstract

In the first half of this article I situate Up in the Air (2009) and Avatar (2009) within the recent preoccupation in English language cinema with reflections on the future. I then argue that a juxtaposition of Ryan Bingham’s world of detachment and isolation, lived in airports and hotels, with the rich and interconnected life of the Na’vi on Pandora powerfully evokes the contemporary need, crucial for any discussion about our possibilities for the future, to overcome alienation by recovering our understanding of the sacredness of the world. In the second half of the article I take up the suggestion, implicit in Avatar, that perhaps it will be the peoples in actual battle with Western forces that can provide a model for this renewed encounter with the sacred. This cannot be true in any facile sense, for often the philosophies of so-called fundamentalist Islam that have inspired the fiercest resistance to European and North American capitalist imperialism, prove to be merely the sterile inverse of Western modernity, in which both sides share a common decoupling of the sacred and the profane. However, within the societies of the Middle East we also see a much deeper and richer current of traditionalist Islam that does maintain a powerful connection to the sacredness of the world and thereby may provide an invaluable dialogue partner for recovering the sacred and renewing our hopes for the future. To support this claim and to begin the dialogue for which I am arguing, I then give a sympathetic reading of Hossein Nasr’s assertion that it is the commitment to tradition in his strand of Islam that could be of value to a Western world that seems to be yearning for the goods that he believes are deeply intertwined with traditional practice. In his view, tradition grounds the encounter with the sacred in three main ways. First, the exegesis of scripture within a traditional framework reveals that every act of knowing involves an inner illumination by which the human mind participates in the divine intellect. Second, tradition as the handing down of divine truth places this personal experience of divine intellect within a historical and geographical context, thus revealing the worldly aspect of inner illumination. Third, within the bounds of tradition the things in their sensuous materiality can reveal their richly sacramental nature as transcendent symbols manifesting the divine.