Seyed Hossein Nasr

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (born 7 April 1933) is an Iranian philosopher, theologian and Islamic scholar, University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. ^{1 2} The museum records his faith as Twelver Shia on the two attestations set out in his data record, one of them a journal article stating that his being a Shi'ah is a dimension of his own identity. ³

He was born in Tehran to Seyyed Valiollah Nasr, a physician to the Iranian royal family and a founder of modern education in Iran. Sent to the United States as a boy, he graduated from the Peddie School in New Jersey in 1950, took a bachelor's degree in physics at MIT, then a master's in geology and geophysics and a doctorate in the history of science at Harvard, completed in 1958. ¹

Returning to Iran in 1958, he became professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University, served as its dean of letters and academic vice-chancellor and as president of Aryamehr University, and founded the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy at the request of Empress Farah Pahlavi. In Iran he also studied with traditional masters of Islamic philosophy. The 1979 revolution forced him into exile in the United States, where he taught at Temple University before joining George Washington University in 1984. ¹

Nasr is a leading representative of the perennialist or Traditionalist school: he argues that modern knowledge has been desacralised — severed from its divine source — and calls for its resacralisation through sacred tradition and sacred science, and he has developed an Islamic environmental philosophy of the resacralisation of nature. He was the first Muslim to deliver the Gifford Lectures (1981, published as Knowledge and the Sacred). He has written more than fifty books and five hundred articles, including Science and Civilization in Islam, The Heart of Islam and Shi'ism: Doctrines, Thought, and Spirituality (as editor, 1988). ¹

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