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.

The Islamic intellectual tradition has usually not seen a dichotomy between intellect and intuition but has created a hierarchy of knowledge and methods of attaining knowledge according to which degrees of both intellection and intuition become harmonized in an order encompassing all the means available to man to know, from sensual knowledge an reason to intellection and inner version or the "knowledge of the heart.

Let me also again emphasize that it is only within Islam that Sufism can be practiced. The two have never been separated from each other in their reality and in fact are inwardly one, and certainly they have never been separated for me throughout my life.

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

The gnostic is Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no separate individual existence of his own. He is like the birds and the flowers in his yielding to the Creator; like them, like all the elements of the cosmos, he reflects the Divine to his own degree. He reflects it actively, however, they passively; his participation is a conscious one.

For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.

From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.

The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.