Sayyed Hossein Nasr b. 1933

Sayyed Hossein Nasr is an Iranian-American Islamic philosopher, university professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, and one of the leading living exponents of the perennialist or traditionalist school of religious philosophy. Knowledge and the Sacred, his Gifford Lectures, set out a sweeping critique of modern secular knowledge as a forgetting of the sacred ground of every traditional civilization, while Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present and his many studies of Mulla Sadra, Suhrawardi, and Ibn Arabi have shaped the contemporary Western reception of the Islamic philosophical tradition. He has also been a leading voice in Islamic environmental philosophy.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born at Tehran in April 1933 into a distinguished family of Persian physicians and Islamic scholars. He was sent to the United States as a boy, took his bachelor's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in physics in 1954, his master's in geology and geophysics at Harvard in 1956, and his doctorate at Harvard in 1958 in the history of science under I. Bernard Cohen, Hamilton Gibb, and Harry Wolfson. He returned to teach at Tehran University, became its vice-chancellor in 1968, served as chancellor of Aryamehr (Sharif) University from 1972 to 1975, and ran the Iranian Imperial Academy of Philosophy with Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu until the Islamic Revolution drove him into exile in 1979; since 1984 he has been University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University.

His books include Three Muslim Sages (1964), Ideals and Realities of Islam (1966), Science and Civilization in Islam (1968), Knowledge and the Sacred (the 1981 Gifford Lectures), Islamic Spirituality (the two-volume edited encyclopaedia), Sufi Essays, The Heart of Islam (2002), Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present (2006), and the supervisory editorship of The Study Quran (2015).

Nasr is the principal contemporary representative of the Traditionalist or perennialist school of Schuon, Coomaraswamy, and Burckhardt, on which the great religions are diverse but legitimate forms of one primordial truth. He combines this metaphysics with a sustained defence of Islamic philosophy from al-Farabi to Mulla Sadra, a religious ecology that traces the environmental crisis to modern desacralisation, and an architectural devotion to the sacred sciences.