Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, born April 7, 1933, in Tehran, is a philosopher, religious scholar, Islamicist, and Traditionalist theologian. He went to the United States as a teenager to continue his education, earning a bachelor's degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completing his graduate studies in philosophy and the history of science at Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation was on the concept of nature in Islamic thought.

After returning to Iran, Nasr became a professor of philosophy and the history of science at the University of Tehran and later served as Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tehran, President of Aryamehr University of Technology, and founder of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, now the Iranian Institute of Philosophy. Following the 1979 revolution, he settled in the United States and has been teaching Islamic studies and philosophy at George Washington University since 1984.

Nasr is one of the most important representatives of the Traditionalist school in the contemporary world, influenced by the ideas of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Titus Burckhardt. His main areas of work include Islamic philosophy, perennial wisdom, sacred science, comparative religion, Islamic mysticism, Islamic art, the history of science in Islamic civilization, the critique of modernity, and the relationship between religion and nature.

He was among the first thinkers to analyze the environmental crisis within a spiritual and philosophical framework, viewing it as a result of the desacralization of nature in the modern world.

Among his honors are receiving an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University; being the first Muslim and the first non-Westerner to deliver the Gifford Lectures; winning the Templeton Prize for Religion and Science; having a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers series dedicated to him; winning the Islamic Research Award for the book The Heart of Islam; and receiving the Wisdom Award at the International Avicenna Wisdom Festival.