Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian-American philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar born in Tehran in 1933 who serves as a University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University before returning to Iran in 1958 to become a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University, later serving as the university's vice chancellor and as president of Aryamehr University and establishing the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy at the request of Empress Farah Pahlavi. The 1979 Islamic Revolution forced him into exile in the United States, where he has taught Islamic sciences and philosophy since, becoming an active representative of the Islamic philosophical tradition and of the perennialist school, especially its Traditionalist stream. His work critiques modern worldviews and defends Islamic and perennialist doctrine, arguing that knowledge in the modern period has become desacralized, severed from its divine source, and that sacred tradition and sacred science are needed to resacralize it; although Islam and Sufism are major influences on his writing, his perennialist approach examines the essence of all orthodox religions regardless of their particular forms, and his environmental philosophy is expressed through Islamic environmentalism and the resacralization of nature. He has written more than fifty books and over five hundred articles.