William Chittick

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.