لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Brief Biography
Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born on April 7, 1933 (19 Farvadin 1312 A.H.
solar) in Tehran into a family of distinguished scholars and physicians.
His father, Seyyed Valiallah, a man of great learning and piety, was a
physician to the Iranian royal family, as was his father before him. The
name "Nasr" which means "victory" was conferred on Professor Nasr's
grandfather by the King of Persia. Nasr also comes from a family of Sufis.
One of his ancestors was Mulla Seyyed Muhammad Taqi Poshtmashhad, who was
a famous saint of Kashan, and his mausoleum which is located next to the
tomb of the Safavid king Shah Abbas, is still visited by pilgrims to this
day.
As a young boy, Nasr attended one of the schools near his home. His
early formal education included the usual Persian curriculum at school
with an extra concentration in Islamic and Persian subjects at home, as
well as tutorial in French. However for Nasr, it was the long hours of
discussion with his father, mostly on philosophical and theological
issues, complemented by both reading and reaction to the discourses
carried on by those who came to his father's house, that constituted an
essential aspect of his early education and which in many ways set the
pattern and tone of his intellectual development. This was the situation
for the first twelve years of Nasr's life.
Nasr's arrival in America at the young age of twelve marked the
beginning of a new period in his life which was totally different and
therefore, discontinuous from his early life in Iran. He attended The
Peddie School in Highstown, New Jersey and in 1950 graduated as the
valedictorian of his class and also winner of the Wyclifte Award which was
the school's highest honor given to the most outstanding all-round
student. It was during the four years at Peddie that Nasr acquired his
knowledge of the English language, as well as studying the sciences,
American history, Western culture and Christianity.
Nasr chose to go to M.I.T. for college. He was offered a scholarship
and was the first Iranian student to be admitted as an undergraduate at
M.I.T. He began his studies at M.I.T in the Physics Department with some
of the most gifted students in the country and outstanding professors of
physics. His decision to study physics was motivated by the desire to gain
knowledge of the nature of things, at least at the level of physical
reality. However, at the end of his freshman year, although he was the top
student in his class, he began to feel oppressed by the overbearingly
scientific atmosphere with its implicit positivism. Furthermore, he
discovered that many of the metaphysical questions which he had been
concerned with were not being asked, much less answered. Thus, he began to
have serious doubts as to whether physics would lead him to an
understanding of the nature of physical reality. His doubt was confirmed
when the leading British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, in a small group
discussion with the students following a lecture he had given at M.I.T,
stated that physics does not concern itself with the nature of physical
reality per se but with mathematical structures related to pointer
readings.
The shock of discovering the real nature of the subject he had chosen
to study, together with the overbearingly scientific atmosphere at his
Department, led Nasr to experience a major intellectual and spiritual
crisis during his second year. Although the crisis did not destroy his
belief in God, it shook certain fundamental elements in his worldview,
such as his understanding of the meaning of life, the significance of
knowledge and the means to find the Truth. He was prepared to leave the
field of physics and M.I.T. and depart from America in quest of the Truth.
However, the strong discipline in him, inculcated by his father, prevented
him from abandoning his studies altogether. He remained at M.I.T. and
graduated with honors, but his heart was no longer with physics.
Having realized in his second year that a study of the physical
sciences would neither lead him to an understanding of the nature of
physical reality nor deal with some of the metaphysical questions he was
concerned with, Nasr decided to look at other fields of study for his
answers. He started to read extensively and to take many courses in the
humanities, especially those taught by Professor Giorgio Di Santillana,
the famous Italian philosopher and historian of science. Under Professor
Di Santillana's instruction, Nasr began his serious study of not only the
ancient Greek wisdom as contained in the philosophies of Pythagoras,
Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus but also European, Medieval philosophy,
Dante's highly mystical and symbolic Divine Comedy, Hinduism and a
critique of modern Western thought. It was also Di Santillana who first
introduced him to the writings of one of the most important traditionalist
writers of this century, Rene Guenon. Guenon's writings played a decisive
role in laying the intellectual foundation of Nasr's traditionalist
perspective. Nasr also had the great fortune of having access to the
library of the late Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the outstanding Singhalese
metaphysician and historian of art. The library had an incredible
collection of works on traditional philosophy and art from all over the
world. It was in this library that Nasr first discovered the works of the
other traditionalist writers such as Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt,
Marco Pallis and Martin Lings and who were to have tremendous and enduring
intellectual and spiritual influence on Nasr.
According to Nasr, it was the discovery of traditional metaphysics and
the philosophia perennis through the works of these figures which settled
the crisis he had experienced and gained an intellectual certitude which
has never left him since. From then on, he was certain that there was such
a thing as the Truth and that it could be attained through knowledge by
means of the intellect which is guided and illuminated by divine
revelation. His childhood love for the attainment of knowledge returned to
him but on a higher and deeper plane. The traditional writings of Schuon
with their singular emphasis on the need for the practice of a spiritual
discipline as well as theoretical knowledge, were especially instrumental
in determining the course of Nasr's intellectual and spiritual life from
that time onward.
Upon his graduation from M.I.T., 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.
Nasr wanted to study other types of sciences of nature apart from the
modern Western and also to understand why modern science had developed as
it had. He planned to write his dissertation under the supervision of
George Sarton, a great authority on Islamic science. However, Sarton
passed away before he could begin his dissertation work and since there
was not another specialist in Islamic science at Harvard then, he wrote
his dissertation under the direction of three professors. They were I.
Bernard Cohen, Hamilton Gibb and Harry Wolfson.
It was also at Harvard that Nasr resumed his study of classical Arabic
which he had left since coming to America. He struggled with philosophical
Arabic while getting some assistance from Wolfson and Gibb. 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.
During his Harvard years, Nasr also traveled to Europe, especially to
France, Switzerland, Britain, Italy and Spain, widening his intellectual
horizon and establishing important and fruitful contacts. It was during
these travels to Europe that Nasr met with the foremost traditionalist
writers and exponents of the philosophia perennis, Frithjof Schuon and
Titus Burckhardt, who made a tremendous impact and decisive contribution
to his intellectual and spiritual life. He also traveled to Morocco in
North Africa, which had great spiritual significance for Nasr who embraced
Sufism in the form taught and practiced by the great Sufi saint of the
Maghrib, Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi. Thus, the years at Harvard witnessed the
crystallization of the major intellectual and spiritual elements of Nasr's
mature worldview, elements which have since dominated and determined the
course and pattern of his scholarship and academic career.
At twenty-five, Nasr graduated with a Ph.D. degree from Harvard and on
the way to completing his first book, Science and Civilization in Islam.
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. Although he was offered a
position as assistant professor at M.I.T., Nasr decided to return
permanently to Iran.
Back in Iran, Nasr was offered a position as an Associate Professor of
philosophy and the history of science at the Faculty of Letters in Tehran
University. A few months after his return, Nasr married a young woman from
a respected family whose members were close friends of his family. Five
years later at the age of thirty, Nasr became the youngest person to
become a full professor at the University. He used his position and
influence to bring major changes to strengthen and expand the philosophy
program at Tehran University which like many of its other programs, was
very much dominated by and limited to French intellectual influence. Nasr
initiated the important move of teaching Islamic philosophy on the basis
of its own history and from its own perspective and to encourage his
Iranian students to study other philosophies and intellectual traditions
from the point of view of their own tradition. He maintains that one
cannot hope to understand and appreciate one's own intellectual tradition
from the viewpoint of another, just as one cannot see oneself through the
eyes of another person. He also created greater awareness and interest in
the study of Oriental philosophies among the students and faculty members.
Since Tehran University was the only university in Iran to offer a
doctorate in philosophy, these changes introduced by Nasr had far reaching
influence. Many universities in Iran integrated these changes into their
philosophical studies and until today Nasr's perspective that Iranian
students should study other philosophical traditions from the view of
their own tradition instead of studying their tradition from the
perspective of Western thought and philosophy remains widely influential.
The students he has trained and who have become scholars and university
professors of philosophy have enabled this perspective to have enduring
influence in Iran.
Apart from the philosophy program, Nasr was also involved in the
university's doctoral program in Persian language and literature for those
whose mother tongue was not Persian. He strengthened the philosophical
component of this program and had many outstanding students from outside
of Iran to receive training, not only in Persian language, but also the
rich treasury of philosophical and Sufi literature written in Persian.
Many of the students trained in this program have since become important
scholars in this field such as the American scholar, William Chittick and
the Japanese woman scholar, Sachiko Murata.
Furthermore, from 1968 to 1972, Nasr was made Dean of the Faculty and
for a while, Academic Vice-Chancellor of Tehran University. Through these
positions, he introduced many important changes which all aimed at
strengthening the university programs in the humanities generally and in
philosophy, specifically. In 1972, he was appointed President of Aryamehr
University by the Shah of Iran. Aryamehr University was then the leading
scientific and technical university in Iran and the Shah, as the patron,
wanted Professor Nasr to develop the university on the model of M.I.T. but
with firm roots in Iranian culture. Consequently, a strong humanities
program in Islamic thought and culture, with a particular emphasis upon an
Islamic philosophy of science, was established at Aryamehr University by
Nasr. Nasr's pioneering effort has led Aryamehr to create one of the first
graduate programs in the Islamic world in the philosophy of science based
upon the Islamic philosophy of science, some ten years ago. 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. The
Academy also organized important seminars and lecture series given by
philosophers, offered fellowships for short and long term research work in
Islamic philosophy, and comparative philosophy and undertook a major
publication program of works in this field in Persian, Arabic, English and
French.
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 Qazwin. 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.
During the years Professor Nasr was in Iran, he 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 lbn 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 1964-65.
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.
In 1964-65, Nasr spent an academic year at the American University of
Beirut as the first Aga Khan professor of Islamic Studies. Besides Ideals
and Realities of Islam, Nasr also brought out Islamic Studies, which is a
collection of articles discussing several fundamental aspects of the
Islamic tradition. This work was later expanded and published under the
title, Islamic Life and Thought. During this period in Lebanon, Nasr also
met with and had intellectual discourses with several important Catholic
and Shi`ite thinkers and scholars. He also had the opportunity to meet
with the woman Sufi saint Sayyidah Fatimah Yashrutiyah, daughter of the
founder of the Yashrutiyah order, a branch of the Shadhiliyah Sufi order.
Although Nasr lived in Iran, he maintained strong contacts with America
and many of the major universities in the country. He taught at Harvard in
1962 and 65 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 less 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.
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,
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.
Another important aspect to Nasr's intellectual activities in
Washington D.C. is his active involvement in the activities of the
Foundation for Traditional Studies. The Foundation which is devoted to the
dissemination of traditional thought was established in 1984 under the
direction of a board presided by Nasr. The Foundation has published
several books including the festschrift of Frithjof Schuon entitled,
Religion of the Heart, edited by Nasr and William Stoddart and In Quest of
the Sacred: The Modern World in the Light of Tradition which Nasr
co-edited with the executive director of the Foundation, Katherine
O'Brien. In Quest of the Sacred is a collection of essays presented by
some of the major traditionalist writers in an important conference held
in Peru, organized by the Foundation and the Peruvian Instituto de
Estudios Tradicionales. The Foundation also publishes the journal,
"Sophia," which carries essays on traditional thought written by the
leading authorities in this field. Together with the Foundation, Nasr is
also involved in the production of a major documentary television series
on "Islam and the West," which deals with some of the more important and
profound aspects of the encounter between the Islamic and Western
civilizations.
At sixty-six, Seyyed Hossein Nasr leads an extremely active
intellectual life with a very busy schedule of teaching at the university
and lecturing at many institutions in America and around the world,
writing scholarly works, being involved in several intellectual projects
simultaneously and meeting individuals who are interested in traditional
thought. At the same time, he leads a very intense spiritual life spent in
prayer, meditation and contemplation and also providing spiritual counsel
for those who seek his advice and guidance. Exiled from his homeland,
Seyyed Hossein Nasr has found his home in the inviolable and sacred Center
which is neither in the East nor the West.
