Seyyed Hossein Nasr

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Image:Sayyed Hosein Nasr book cover.jpgSeyyed Hossein Nasr, (Persian: سيد حسين نصر) Iranian philosopher and renowned scholar of comparative religion, is a prominent authority in the fields of Islamic esoterism, sufism, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. He may be now the most famous Muslim Philsopher in the West.

He received his PhD from Harvard after receiving his undergraduate degree in Physics from MIT, and became a full professor by the age of 30. During his studies 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 for the rest of his life. 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.

Author of over fifty books and five hundred articles, Nasr is a well known and highly respected intellectual figure both in the West and the Islamic world. An eloquent speaker with a charismatic presence, Nasr is a much sought after speaker at academic conferences and seminars, university and public lectures, and also radio and television programs in his areas of expertise. Possessor of an impressive academic and intellectual record, his career as a teacher and scholar spans over four decades.

Born in 1933, Professor Nasr began his illustrious teaching career in 1955 when he was still a young doctoral student at Harvard University. Over the years, he has taught and trained an innumerable number of students who have come from the different parts of the world, and many of whom have become important and prominent scholars in their fields of study.

He has trained different generations of students over the years since 1958 when he was a professor at Tehran University, Sharif University (where he was appointed president in 1972), and then in America at Temple University and at the George Washington University since 1984 to the present day. The range of subjects and areas of study which Professor Nasr has involved and engaged himself with in his academic career and intellectual life are immense. As demonstrated by his numerous writings, lectures and speeches, Professor Nasr speaks and writes with great authority on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from philosophy to religion to spirituality, to music and art and architecture, to science and literature, to civilizational dialogues and the natural environment.

For Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the quest for knowledge, specifically knowledge which enables man to understand the true nature of things and which furthermore, "liberates and delivers him from the fetters and limitations of earthly existence," has been and continues to be the central concern and determinant of his intellectual life.

Professor Nasr was also a student of Allameh Tabatabaei, a spiritual scholar whose commentary on the Holy Koran Tafsir al-Mizan is widely known as one of the best commnetaries. 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. That was when 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 fundamentalist revolution, which forced Professor Nasr to emigrate to the United States.

Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr is currently University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University.

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Works

He is the author of many works on Islamic science, religion, and the environment, including:

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See also

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External links

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