Seyyed Hossein Nasr
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Muslim philosopher
Hossein Nasr at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 1, 2007
Name:	Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Title:	Professor
Birth:	1933
Death:
Ethnicity:	Persian
Region:	Iran and U.S.
Maddhab:	Shia
School tradition:	Traditionalist School
Main interests:	Sufism and philosophy
Works:	Almagest, The Royal Present ,Pearly Crown, etc.
Influences:	René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Avicenna, Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra[1]
Influenced:	William Chittick, Sachiko Murata, Haddad Adel, Gholamreza A'vani [1]

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Persian: سید حسین نصر), an Iranian University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University, is a leading Iranian Muslim philosopher. He is the author of many scholarly books and articles. ^[2]

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.

Nasr speaks English, French, Persian, and Arabic fluently. ^[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^[4] before being sent to the United States for education in his thirteenth year of age. 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.^[3] 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)^[5]
• First Muslim 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 wining the prize in 1979 but later the prize was withdrawn with no explanation. Extracts from ( http://www.arabiaradio.org/ )

Works

Cover of book The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Nasr is the author of over fifty books and five hundred articles on Islamic science, religion, and the environment, in 4 languages, including:

• Islam and the plight of Modern Man (1975)
• Ideals and Realities of Islam (1975)
• An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (1978)
• Living Sufism (1980)
• Knowledge and the Sacred (1981), online
• Islamic Life and Thought (1981)
• Islamic Art and Spirituality (1981)
• Sufi Essays (1991)
• The Need for a Sacred Science (1993)
• Religion and the Order of Nature (1996)
• Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man (1997)
• The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition (2007)
• The Essential Frithjof Schuon: Selected and Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr ISBN 0-941532-92-5
• Three Muslim Sages (His first major book which is dedicated to Frithjof Schuon)
• An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines ISBN 0-7914-1516-3
• Science and Civilization in Islam ISBN 1-930637-15-2
• Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study ISBN 1-56744-312-5
• Man and Nature ISBN 1-871031-65-6
• Religion and the Order of Nature ISBN 0-19-510274-6
• The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity ISBN 0-06-009924-0
• Ideals and Realities of Islam
• Beacon of Knowledge - Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Fons Vitae books) 2003 ISBN 1-887-75256-0
• History of Islamic Philosophy Part I and Part II Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman
• Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy ISBN 0-7914-6799-6
• The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr (World Wisdom) ISBN 978-1-933316-38-3

Nasr was also a frequent contributor of articles to the journal Studies in Comparative Religion.

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
• Rene Guenon
• Ismail Faruqi
• Allameh Tabatabaei
• Louis Massignon
• Henry Corbin

References

External links

Articles and biography

• The Seyyed Hossein Nasr Foundation
• Nasr's CV
• Biography of Sayyed Hossein Nasr by Ibrahim Kalin
• George Washington University commemorating Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• Islam and ecology - Nasr

Media

• Encounters with Islam and Nature Downloadable interview with Nasr regarding Islam and the environment. June 15, 2007.
• Nasr on PBS
• In The Beginning Was Consciousness. 2003 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University.
• Development and Muslim Societies. Lecture at the World Bank.
• Unlearning Intolerance. U.N. Conference on Islamophobia. Key-note address given by Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
• Pilgrimage: The Heart of Islam. Lecture at the Washington National Cathedral.
• This is America - Show 925. Seyyed Hossein Nasr television interview on Google video.
• Controversy over the Pope's Remarks. Radio interview on The Diane Rehm Show.