Muhammad U. Faruque (Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is the Taft Distinguished Professor at the University of Cincinnati, USA. A global philosopher who has lectured widely across North America, Europe, and Asia, his work brings Islamic philosophy, Sufism, environmental humanities, and contemporary philosophy into sustained dialogue in order to address some of the defining intellectual and civilizational questions of the present age. His books and academic articles have been translated into numerous languages and have been recognized by important funding bodies across the United States, such as the Templeton Foundation and the US Department of Education. He has also presented lectures at Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He is the author of five books and sixty academic articles, which have appeared (or are forthcoming) in numerous peer-reviewed journals. Professor Faruque’s first book Sculpting the Self (University of Michigan Press, 2021) has won Iran’s prestigious World Book of the Year Award. His forthcoming book The Interconnected Universe: Sufism, Climate Change, and Ecological Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2027) develops a theory of the “interconnected universe” and offers a new framework for understanding the global environmental crisis. Dr. Faruque is currently working on several major projects. One of them is dedicated to AI and the existential threat of information technology, and the other is a contemporarily accessible introduction to the famous Safavid philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā entitled, Why Read Mullā Ṣadrā Today? (Cambridge University Press).

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Islamic intellectual and spiritual history. The first non-Western philosopher to give the Gifford Lectures, he has devoted sixty years to the recovery and transmission of the Islamic intellectual tradition. At Tokat, he teaches what cannot be found in any other living classroom.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born in Tehran in 1933 and educated in the United States, completing a doctorate in the history of science and learning at Harvard in 1958. He returned to Iran to teach at the University of Tehran and became president of the Iranian Academy of Philosophy before leaving the country in 1979.
Nasr’s scholarship spans Islamic philosophy, cosmology, and the history of science — but at its centre is a sustained argument that the Islamic intellectual tradition offers a coherent and living alternative to the dominant assumptions of modern Western thought.
He has written more than fifty books — among them Ideals and Realities of Islam, Knowledge and the Sacred, and Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present. He is one of the few living scholars whose work belongs simultaneously to philosophy, religious studies, and the history of science.
At Tokat, Professor Nasr teaches what cannot be transmitted through books alone: the questions, the method of approach, and the felt sense of what Islamic metaphysics is asking.
An eight-week inquiry into being, knowledge, and existence as understood through the Islamic intellectual tradition — from Ibn Sina and Mulla Sadra to the living present. Not a survey. A sustained encounter with the deepest questions the tradition has asked.
An eight-week inquiry into being, knowledge, and existence as understood through the Islamic intellectual tradition. Not a survey. A sustained encounter with the deepest questions the tradition has asked.
An eight-week inquiry into being, knowledge, and existence as understood through the Islamic intellectual tradition. Not a survey. A sustained encounter with the deepest questions the tradition has asked.
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Become an AssociateThis archive is available to Associate members. Scholar Notes, Deep Dives, and the full lecture library — included at $99 / year.
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