Seyyed Hossein Nasr


Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and an Islamic philosopher. He is the author of scholarly books and articles.
Nasr speaks and writes on subjects such as philosophy, religion, spirituality, music, art, architecture, science, literature, civilizational dialogues, and the natural environment. He has also written two books of poetry and has been described as a "polymath".

Biography

Origins

Nasr was born in 1933 in south-central Tehran to Seyyed Valiallah, who was a physician to the Persian royal family, and one of the founders of modern education in Iran. He wrote many essays which still remain in manuscript form, some of which have been assembled by Nasr into a book called Danish wa Akhlaq. His parents were originally from Kashan. He is a descendant of Sheikh Fazlollah Nouri from his mother's side, through him is related to the communist Noureddin Kianouri, is the cousin of Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo as well as the father of American academic Vali Nasr.

Education

Nasr went to Firuz Bahram High School in Tehran before being sent to the United States for education at thirteen. In the US, Nasr first attended Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, graduating in 1950 as the valedictorian of his class and also winner of the Wyclifte Award.
A scholarship offered by MIT in physics made him the first Iranian undergraduate to attend that university. 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 Traditionalist authority Frithjof Schuon. This school of thought has shaped Nasr's life and thinking ever since. Nasr had 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.
After receiving an MIT SB degree in physics in 1954, Nasr obtained a master's degree in geology and geophysics in 1956, and went on to pursue his PhD 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 a PhD from Harvard and completed his first book, Science and Civilization in Islam, the title being a direct tribute to Science and Civilization in China, the work by Joseph Needham which had for task to present to Westerners the complex developments of the history of science and technology in China, a mission Nasr was himself following for the Islamic civilization, "although I was working single-handedly, a twenty-five-year-old scholar, and he had a whole group working with him at Cambridge". 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.
Apart from mastering Arabic he was initially taught in his childhood, during his student years, Nasr also learned different languages, namely French, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and German.

Back to Iran

Nasr began his teaching career in 1955 when he was still a young doctoral student at Harvard University.
After Harvard, Nasr returned to Iran as a professor at the University of Tehran, and also served as the President of Aryamehr University from 1972 to 1975.
Nasr also learned Islamic philosophy from the philosophers Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, Allameh Sayyed Abul Hasan Rafiee Qazvini and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Assar during the period leading up to the Revolution.
Nasr was appointed personal secretary to Farah Pahlavi, Empress of Iran, as Head of the Empress's Private Bureau. In 1974 she commissioned him to establish and lead 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, Tabataba'i, William Chittick, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Kenneth Morgan, Sachiko Murata, Toshihiko Izutsu, and Henry Corbin held various philosophical discourses. The book Shi'ite Islam was one product of this period.

Return to the West

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.
He was an advisor for the award-winning, PBS-broadcast documentary , produced by Unity Productions Foundation.

Views on evolution

Nasr rejects the theory of evolution, claiming that it is "an ideology, it is not ordinary science" and "more a pseudo-religion than a scientific theory." The sociologist Farzin Vahdat sees this as part of Nasr's rejection of secular reason and modern science, and more broadly of the modern world.

Awards and honors

Nasr is the author of over fifty books and five hundred articles on topics such as Traditionalist metaphysics, Islamic science, religion and the environment, Sufism, and Islamic philosophy. He has written works in Persian, English, French, Arabic and Indonesian. Listed below are most of Nasr's works in English, including translations, edited volumes, and Festschriften in his honor:
;As author
;As editor
;As translator
;Works about Nasr