Hossein Nasr

Hossein Nasr

Iranian scholar contemporary
Hossein Nasr at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 1, 2007
Full name	Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Born	April 7, 1933

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Persian: سید حسین نصر) (born April 7, 1933 in Tehran) is an Iranian University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and a prominent Islamic philosopher. He is the author of many scholarly books and articles.^[1]

Nasr is a Muslim Persian philosopher and renowned scholar of comparative religion, a lifelong student and follower of Frithjof Schuon, and writes in the fields of Islamic esoterism, Sufism, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

Professor Nasr speaks and writes based on the doctrine and the viewpoints of the perennial philosophy on subjects such as philosophy, religion, spirituality, music, art, architecture, science, literature, civilizational dialogues, and the natural environment. He also wrote two books of poetry (namely Poems of the Way and The Pilgrimage of Life and the Wisdom of Rumi), and has been even described as a 'polymath'.^[2][3]

Biography

Origins

Nasr was born in 1933 in south-central Tehran to Seyyed Valiallah, who was physician to the Persian royal family, and one of the founders of modern education in Iran. His parents were originally from Kashan.

He is a descendant of Sheikh Fazlollah Nouri from his mother's side, and is the cousin of Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, and the father of American academic Vali Nasr, a leading expert on political Islam.

Education

Nasr went to Firuz Bahram High School in Tehran^[5] before being sent to the United States for education at thirteen. In the US, Nasr first attended Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, which was a baptist private boarding school. In 1950 he graduated as the valedictorian of his class and also winner of the Wyclifte Award which was the school's highest honor given to the most outstanding all-round student.

A scholarship offered by MIT in physics made him the first Iranian undergraduate to attend that university.^[4] There, he also began studying under Giorgio de Santillana and others in various other branches such as metaphysics and philosophy. During his studies there he became acquainted with the works of the prominent perennialist authority Frithjof Schuon. This school of thought has shaped Professor Nasr's life and thinking ever since. Professor Nasr has been a disciple of Frithjof Schuon for over fifty years and his works are based on the doctrine and the viewpoints of the perennial philosophy.

Upon his graduation from MIT, Nasr obtained a master's degree in geology and geophysics in 1956, and went on to pursue his Ph.D. degree in the history of science and learning at Harvard University. He planned to write his dissertation under the supervision of George Sarton, but Sarton died before he could begin his dissertation work and so he wrote his dissertation under the direction of I. Bernard Cohen, Hamilton Gibb, and Harry Wolfson.

At the age of twenty-five, Nasr graduated with his Ph.D. from Harvard completing his first book, Science and Civilization in Islam. His doctoral dissertation entitled "Conceptions of Nature in Islamic Thought" was published in 1964 by Harvard University Press as An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines.

Back to Iran

Seyyed Hossein Nasr began his teaching career in 1955 when he was still a young doctoral student at Harvard University. He became a full professor by the age of 30.

After Harvard, Nasr returned to Iran as a professor at Tehran University, and then at Arya Mehr University (Sharif University) where he was appointed president in 1972. Before that, he served as Dean of The Faculty of Letters, and Academic Vice-Chancellor of Tehran University from 1968 to 1972.

Professor Nasr also learned Islamic philosophy from the prominent Muslim philosophers Allameh Tabatabaei, Sayyid Abul-Hasan Qazwini and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Assar during that period leading up to the revolution.

In the 1970s, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran appointed professor Nasr as head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, the first academic institution to be conducted in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School. During that time, Nasr, Tabatabaei, William Chittick, Kenneth Morgan, Sachiko Murata, Toshihiko Izutsu, and Henry Corbin would meet and hold various philosophical discourses. The famous book Shi'ite Islam was one product of this period.

This experiment ended with the arrival of the Islamic revolution, which forced Professor Nasr to emigrate to the United States.

Return to the US

Upon his return to the west, Nasr took up positions at University of Edinburgh, Temple University, and since 1984 has been at The George Washington University where he is now a full time University Professor of Islamic Studies.

Nasr helped with the planning and expansion of Islamic and Iranian studies academic programs in several universities such as Princeton, the University of Utah, and the University of Southern California.

Awards and honors

• Templeton Religion and Science Award (1999)^[6]
• First Muslim and first non-Western scholar to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures
• Honorary Doctor of Uppsala University, Sweden (1977)
• He was nominated and won King Faisal Foundation award, but his prize was withdrawn upon the prize knowledge of him being a Shia. He was notified of winning the prize in 1979 but later the prize was withdrawn with no explanation. Extracts from ( http://www.arabiaradio.org/ )

Works

Nasr is the author of over fifty books and five hundred articles (a number of which can be found in the journal, Studies in Comparative Religion) on topics such as traditional metaphysics, Islamic science, religion and the environment, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy. Listed below are most of Dr. Nasr's works in English (in no particular order), including translations, edited volumes, and fetschrifts in his honor:

• Islam and the Plight of Modern Man
• Ideals and Realities of Islam
• An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines
• Knowledge and the Sacred online
• Islamic Life and Thought
• Islamic Art and Spirituality
• Sufi Essays
• Sadr al-Din Shirazi and His Transcendent Theosophy, 2nd edition
• A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World
• The Need for a Sacred Science
• Traditional Islam in the Modern World
• Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man
• The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, edited by Mehdi Aminrazavi
• The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition
• Three Muslim Sages
• Science and Civilization in Islam
• Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study
• Religion and the Order of Nature
• Muhammad: Man of God
• Islamic Studies: Essays on Law and Society, the Sciences, and Philosophy and Sufism
• The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity
• Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy
• Poems of the Way
• The Pilgrimage of Life and the Wisdom of Rumi
• Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization
• Islam, Science, Muslims, and Technology: Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Conversation with Muzaffar Iqbal
• The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by William Chittick
• The Essential Frithjof Schuon
• Religion of the Heart: Essays Presented to Frithjof Schuon on his Eightieth Birthday, edited with William Stoddart
• The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by L.E. Hahn, R. Auxier, and L.W. Stone
• History of Islamic Philosophy, edited with Oliver Leaman
• The Essential Sophia, editd with Katherine O'Brien
• An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, edited with Mehdi Aminrazavi (5 vols.)
• Islamic Spirituality, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Vol. 1: Foundations; Vol. 2: Manifestations)
• In Quest of the Sacred: The Modern World in the Light of Tradition, edited with Katherine O'Brien
• An Annotated Bibliography of Islamic Science, edited with William Chittick and Peter Zirnis (3 vols.)
• Isma'ili Contributions to Islamic Culture, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• Mecca the Blessed, Madina the Radiant, photographs by Ali Kazuyo Nomachi; essay by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• The Works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr Through His Fortieth Birthday, edited by William Chittick
• Knowledge is Light: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by Zailan Moris
• Beacon of Knowledge - Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, edited by Mohammad Faghfoory
• Shi'ite Islam by Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, translated by Seyyed Hossein
  

See also

• Sufi studies
• Higher Education in Iran
• Iranian traditional humanism

Other religious and traditional scholars

• Frithjof Schuon
• Titus Burckhardt
• Martin Lings
• Tage Lindbom
• Kurt Almqvist
• Ivan Aguéli
• James Cutsinger
• Rene Guenon
• Julius Evola
• Ismail Faruqi
• Allameh Tabatabaei
• Louis Massignon
• Henry Corbin
• William Chittick

Nasr speaks Persian, English, French, German, Spanish and Arabic fluently.^[4]