A Critical Evaluation of Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s View on the Essential Characteristics of Islamic Architecture

Tradition is a path that preserves all fundamental aspects of human life and keeps them connected to their original sources, to the sacred past, and one of the most important aspects of human life - almost encompassing and framing all the others and being central to our experience of being human - is ‘architecture’. There is a causal relation between the ‘Islamic tradition’ and ‘Islamic architecture’, thus, it would actually be meaningless to attribute the adjective ‘Islamic’ to ‘architecture’ in the absence of true traditional values. The present study critically investigates Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s attitude toward Islamic architecture, including its relation to Islamic tradition and traditional Islam, its definition and its essential characteristics, its interaction with urban societies and finally its socio-religious functions in traditional and modern life. Islamic architecture is not an outdated-forgotten art with some sets of footprints left in the remains of ancient settlements. It has internally survived long enough to reproduce itself in concordance with the necessities of the time without losing its essential characteristics and elements.