Background

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born on April 7, 1933, in Tehran, Iran. His father, Seyyed Valiallah, was a physician to the Persian royal family, and one of the founders of modern education in Iran.

Education

Nasr’s parents, though part of the modernizing classes, were traditional in their outlook and took great care to instill into him Persian and Islamic culture. At an early age he began memorizing the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ, Rūmī, Saʿdī, and others, though he remarks that during his first period of occidental exile in America, he lost a good deal of what he had learned as a child.

Nasr went to Firuz Bahram High School in Tehran. When Nasr was thirteen in 1945 he went to the United States for high school. Nasr joined relatives in New York City and was soon enrolled in the Peddie School in New Jersey. He had exhibited his academic talents already in Iran by placing first in national examinations. At Peddie he quickly learned English and graduated four years later as valedictorian, showing exceptional gifts in mathematics and science.

Nasr chose to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for college. He began his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Physics Department with some of the most gifted students in the country and outstanding professors of physics. Nasr began his serious study of not only the ancient Greek wisdom but also European, Medieval philosophy, Dante's highly mystical and symbolic Divine Comedy, Hinduism, and a critique of modern Western thought.

Upon his graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nasr enrolled himself in a graduate program in geology and geophysics at Harvard University. After obtaining his Master's degree in geology and geophysics in 1956, he went on to pursue his Ph.D. degree in the history of science and learning at Harvard.

He struggled with philosophical Arabic. However, the mastery of philosophical Arabic was only attained after he studied Islamic philosophy from the traditional masters of Iran after his return to his homeland in 1958. At twenty-five, Nasr graduated with a Ph.D. degree from Harvard.

Career

Nasr began his illustrious teaching career in 1955 when he was still a young and promising, doctoral student at Harvard University. From 1958 until 1979 Nasr was a professor of the history of science and philosophy and was named the dean of the Faculty of Letters at Tehran University. At the age of thirty, he was the youngest person to become a full professor at Tehran University.

The twenty-one years that he remained in Iran made up an enormously productive period in his life. Not only did he publish a series of groundbreaking books in both English and Persian, but he also undertook heavy teaching and administrative loads that helped sow the seeds for a revival of traditional education in the context of the modern university system. At Tehran University’s Faculty of Letters, he was director of both the Faculty’s library and the foreign student's program, and he was a very popular teacher in the philosophy department.

Every year he also taught a well-attended course on Islam or Persian culture in English for the expatriate community, and he was constantly writing books and articles. In 1968 he was appointed dean of the Faculty of Letters, and from there he moved on to become academic vice-chancellor of the university and, in 1972, chancellor of Aryamehr University.

In 1973, the Queen of Iran appointed Professor Nasr to establish a center for the study and propagation of philosophy under her patronage. Hence, the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy was established and very soon became one of the most important and vital centers of philosophical activities in the Islamic world, housing the best library of philosophy in Iran and attracting some of the most distinguished scholars in the field, both from the East and the West, such as Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu.

Nasr almost single-handedly arranged for the founding, of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. This was a fruitful period in the recovery of traditional Iranian intellectuality. The Academy hosted courses taught by many important Iranian philosophers, held frequent conferences, and published a bilingual journal, Sophia Perennis. The primary foreign faculty was the prolific and highly influential experts in Islamic thought.

Especially interesting to watch was the manner in which Nasr was able to twist the arms of the foremost scholars of the country to produce important books, an extraordinary number of which were published - mainly in Persian and Arabic - while he was director. At the same time, he remained chancellor of Aryamehr University, professor of philosophy at Tehran University, and, from 1978, the director of the private bureau of the empress, the Shahbanou of Iran.

Another very important dimension to Nasr's intellectual activities after his return to Iran in 1958, was his program in re-educating himself in Islamic philosophy by learning it at the feet of the masters through the traditional method of oral transmission. He studied hikmah for twenty years under some of the greatest teachers in Iran at the time, reading traditional texts of Islamic philosophy and gnosis, three days a week at the Sepahsalar madrasah in Tehran and also in private homes in Tehran, Qom and Qazvin.

Among his venerable teachers were Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Assar, an alim who was an authority on Islamic law, as well as philosophy, and a very close friend of Professor Nasr's father; the great luminary and master of gnosis, Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai and Sayyid Abul-Hasan Qazwini, a great authority on Islamic law and the intellectual sciences who knew mathematics, astronomy and philosophy extremely well.

Nasr read and studied several of the major texts of Islamic philosophy under these masters such as the al-Asfar al-arbaah of Mulla Sadra and the Sharh-i manumah of Sabziwari and benefited greatly from the invaluable insights and commentaries provided by them orally. In this way, Nasr had the best educational training both from the modern West and the traditional East, a rare combination which put him in a very special position to speak and write with authority on the numerous issues involved in the encounter between East and West, and tradition and modernity, as demonstrated very clearly by his writings and lectures.

Nasr wrote extensively in Persian and English and occasionally in French and Arabic. His doctoral dissertation was rewritten by him in Persian and it won the royal book award. Nasr also brought out the critical editions of several important philosophical texts such as the complete Persian works of Suhrawardi and of Mulla Sadra and the Arabic texts of ibn Sina and al-Biruni.

Nasr's great interest in the philosophy of one of the greatest later Islamic philosophers, Mulla Sadra resulted in the publication of the Mulla Sadra written by the traditional masters of Islamic philosophy. Nasr was also the first person to introduce the figure of Mulla Sadra to the English speaking world.

With the assistance of William Chittick, Nasr prepared An Annotated Bibliography of Islamic Science in three volumes, with Persian and English annotations. He also wrote Three Muslim Sages and completed and published Science and Civilization in Islam which he had written while still a student at Harvard. Both of these books were translated into several languages very quickly and were reprinted in Iran many times and have been used for the past three decades as textbooks for courses in Islamic philosophy and science in Iranian universities.

Three Muslim Sages, which presents the whole of the Islamic intellectual tradition from within, grew out of three lectures which Nasr gave in 1962 as the first visiting professor at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Ideals and Realities of Islam, which is one of Nasr's most widely read book on the Islamic religion and which opens up the world of Islam, revealing some of its most universal and profound dimensions, was based on the text of the first six of fifteen lectures which he delivered at the American University in Beirut as the first Aga Khan Professor of Islamic studies in 1964-1965.

In 1966 Nasr was invited to deliver the Rockefeller Lectures at the University of Chicago and to speak on some aspects of the relation between religion, philosophy, and the environmental crisis. Consequently, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, which deals with the philosophical and spiritual roots of the question, and the first work to predict the coming of the environmental crisis was written for the occasion. Nasr also brought out Islam and the Plight of Modern Man, Sufi Essays, and The Transcendent Theosophy of Sadr al-Din Shirazi. Both Islam and the Plight of Modern Man and Sufi Essays have proved to be very popular and have been translated into many European and Islamic languages and reprinted several times since their first appearance.

Although Nasr lived in Iran, he maintained strong contacts with America and many of the major universities in the country. He taught at Harvard and conducted short seminars at Princeton University and the University of Utah. He also had close associations with several important American scholars such as Huston Smith, professor of philosophy and comparative religion, Jacob Needleman, editor of the well-known work, Sword of Gnosis which includes Nasr's essays, and a number of Catholic and Protestant philosophers and theologians. Nasr also helped with the planning and expansion of Islamic and Iranian studies in several universities such as Princeton, the University of Utah, and the University of Southern California. In 1977, he delivered the Kevorkian Lectures on Islamic art at New York University on the meaning and philosophy of Islamic art.

In 1979 at the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Nasr moved with his family to the United States where he would rebuild his life again and secure a university position to support himself and his family. By 1980, Nasr began to write again. He started to work intensively on the research and text of the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh to which he received an invitation shortly before the Iranian Revolution took place. Nasr had the honor of being the first non-Westerner to be invited to deliver the most famous lecture series in the fields of natural theology and philosophy of religion in the West.

Thus, Knowledge and the Sacred, one of Nasr's most important philosophical works, one which had a great impact on scholars and students of religious studies, came to be prepared amidst the strain of trying times and the strenuous commute between Boston and Philadelphia. However, Nasr discloses that the actual writing of the text of Knowledge and the Sacred came as a gift from heaven. He was able to write the texts of the lectures with great facility and speed and within a period of fewer than three months, they were completed. Nasr says that it was as though, he was writing from a text he had previously memorized.

In 1982, Nasr was invited to collaborate on a major project to bring out the Encyclopedia of World Spirituality together with Ewert Cousins, chief editor and professor of Medieval philosophy at Fordham University, and many other leading philosophers and scholars of religion. Nasr accepted to edit the two volumes on Islamic Spirituality, which came out in 1989 and 1991. Both volumes have since become invaluable reference material in English for those interested in this subject. In 1983, Nasr delivered the Wiegand Lecture on the philosophy of religion at the University of Toronto in Canada. He also helped in the establishment of the section on Hermeticism and perennial philosophy at the American Academy of Religion. Since 1984, Nasr has been a Professor of Islamic Studies at The George Washington University.

Nasr was soon recognized in American academic circles as a traditionalist and a major expositor and advocate of the perennialist perspective. Much of his intellectual activities and writing since being in exile in America, are related to this function and also in the fields of comparative religion, philosophy, and religious dialogue. He has participated in many debates and discussions with eminent Christian and Jewish theologians and philosophers such as Hans Kung, John Hick, and Rabbi Izmar Schorch.

In 1986, Nasr edited The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon and in 1990, he was selected as a patron of the Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations of the Sally Oaks College in Birmingham. In addition, he has played an active role in the creation and activities of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. He has also attended many conferences on this subject including the famous 1993 Parliament of World Religions.

He continues to travel to Europe often, giving lectures and being involved with intellectual activities. He gives lectures at Oxford, the University of London, and a few other British universities and is a member of the Temenos Academy. In 1994, he was invited to deliver the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, and a major work entitled Religion and the Order of Nature was produced by Nasr for this occasion.

Nasr also continues to travel to Spain, especially southern Spain which still has an Islamic presence and which reminds him very much of his home country, Iran. It was also during some of his journeys to Spain, that Nasr was inspired to compose several poems related to Spanish themes. Nasr has brought out recently a collection of forty English poems on spiritual themes, which were written within the past fifteen years, under the title Poems of the Way.

Although Professor Nasr continues to have a very busy teaching and lecturing schedule, he still manages to allocate much of his time and energy to writing. 1987 saw the publication of two of his books: Islamic Art and Spirituality and Traditional Islam in the Modern World. Islamic Art and Spirituality which deals with the metaphysical and symbolic significance of Islamic art, poetry, and music is Nasr's first book on this subject.

Traditional Islam in the Modern World discusses several important dimensions of the Islamic tradition and its relation to the West. Nasr also wrote a book specifically for young Muslims entitled, A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World which addresses some of the major problems and challenges which the modern world presents to them.

Recently, Nasr together with the British scholar of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, Oliver Leaman, edited a two-volume work, History of Islamic Philosophy which consists of articles written by important scholars in this field, discussing the different aspects and schools of Islamic philosophy and its development in the different parts of the Islamic world. Nasr's continued interest in science is made evident by his latest book on this subject, The Need for a Sacred Science.

Also, together with one of his former students, Mehdi Amin Razavi, Nasr is now bringing out a major four-volume work, An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia which will be published by Oxford University Press. Razavi also edited earlier, The Islamic Intellectual Tradition in Persia, which is a collection of Nasr's articles on Islamic philosophy in Persia written during the last forty years.

Achievements

• Sayyed Hossein Nasr is a world-renown scholar on Islam. The first Muslim to deliver the Gifford Lectures, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a pioneer who has bridged Islamic studies with the world of Western philosophy, science, and religion. Nasr played a significant role in the Islamization of knowledge. His interpretations seem to influence discussions in Muslim countries.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition

    (The foremost authority on Islam and, Seyyed Hossein Nasr ...)

    2012
  • Islamic Art and Spirituality

    (With the remarkable breadth of vision, Seyyed Hossein Nas...)

    1986
  • Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World

    (Through Muslim "maps" of the modern "intellectual" landsc...)

    1993
  • The Pilgrimage of Life and the Wisdom of Rumi

    (With this second volume of poetry, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, w...)

    2007
  • Muhammad: Man of God

    (This short study of the life of the Blessed Prophet of Is...)

    1995
  • The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr

    (Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic St...)

    2007
  • The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity

    (As the specter of religious extremism has become a fact o...)

    2002
  • An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines: Conceptions of Nature and Methods Used for Its Study by the Ikhwan al Safa, al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina

    (This is the only book to deal with classical Islamic cosm...)

    1964
  • Sufi Essays

    (The author combines his research into Sufi doctrine and h...)

    1972
  • The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam's Mystical Tradition

    (The headlines are filled with the politics of Islam, but ...)

    2007
  • Ideals and Realities of Islam

    (This is the first of very few English books to treat Isla...)

    1966
  • Religion & the Order of Nature: The 1994 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham

    (The current ecological crisis is a matter of urgent globa...)

    1996
  • The Need For a Sacred Science

    (The meaning of a science rooted in the sacred, its contra...)

    1993
  • Islamic Life and Thought

    (This is a series of well-written essays on Islamic law an...)

    1981
  • Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization

    (The worlds leading Islamicist offers a concise introducti...)

    2001
  • Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy

    (A comprehensive overview of the Islamic philosophical tra...)

    2006
  • Three Muslim Sages Avicenna - Suhrawardi - Ibu 'arabi 1964
  • Islamic Studies 1967
  • The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man 1968
  • Islam and the Plight of Modern Man 1975
  • Sadr Al-Din Shirazi And His Transcendent Theosophy 1977
  • Knowledge and the Sacred: The Gifford Lectures 1981
  • Traditional Islam in the Modern World 1987

Religion

Nasr is very religious. He leads a very intense spiritual life spent in prayer, meditation, and contemplation.

Views

Nasr is a very prolific writer on both modern and traditional Islamic philosophy, and his training in modern Western philosophy has not prevented him from seeing the significance of ishraqi thought. A particularly important contribution which he made to modern Iranian intellectual life was its introduction to more traditional forms of Islamic philosophy in such a way as to show its relevance. He has done much to popularize Suhrawardi’s philosophy, and especially his Persian mystical narratives.

Nasr has dealt with a wide range of topics, ranging from humanity and nature to cosmology, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Many of his works undertake to provide a specifically Islamic response to the challenges of modernity. In general, he argues that the spiritual poverty of the West is explained through its secularization of knowledge and the loss of contact with the sacred.

The identification of knowledge with scientific knowledge in a narrow sense has led the springs of sacred knowledge to dry up, and it is now necessary to turn to the East for spiritual refreshment.

Nasr regards metaphysics as the basis of Islamic philosophy, and both ontology and science are linked to a notion of pure being as the origin of existence. Religious law represents the practical side of that existence, and the Qur’an itself has to be related to the inner meaning of the aims of humanity which lie in the nature of being. Like Schuon and Corbin, Nasr sees philosophy in the Islamic world continuing after Averroes in the Shiite world through the influence of Suhrawardi and Sabzawari, with the continuing development of neo-Platonic ideas and Islamic insights into the nature of spiritual harmony and perennial philosophy which represent the progress of wisdom.

This sort of wisdom is common to a variety of religions but is perhaps most clearly portrayed in mystical and Sufi forms of thought. By showing how these disparate forms of expression are linked with more modern types of philosophy Nasr has gone a long way towards reconciling twentieth-century philosophy with earlier philosophical approaches in the Islamic world. He has not only influenced contemporary philosophy through his publications but has been active in organizing conferences and academic institutions for the pursuit of Islamic philosophy.

Interests

• mysticism

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Avicenna

Connections

Nasr married a young woman from a respected family whose members were close friends of his family. The couple has a son, Vali Nasr.

Father:

Seyyed Valiallah

Son:

Vali Nasr

References

• Beacon of Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an extraordinary scholar and thinker, who has done more than any other, Muslim or non-Muslim, to revive the intellectual dimensions of traditional civilizations, including Islam.
  2003