Hossein Nasr

Seyyed Hossein Nasr (; fa, سید حسین نصر, born April 7, 1933) is an Iranian philosopher and University Professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.

Born in Tehran, Nasr completed his education in Iran and the United States, earning a bachelor's degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master's in geology and geophysics, and a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. He returned to his homeland in 1958, turning down teaching positions at MIT and Harvard, and was appointed a professor of philosophy and Islamic sciences at Tehran University. He held various academic positions in Iran, including vice-chancellor at Tehran University and President of Aryamehr University, and established the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy at the request of Empress Farah Pahlavi, which soon became one of the most prominent centers of philosophical activity in the Islamic world. During his time in Iran, he studied with several traditional masters of Islamic philosophy and sciences.

The 1979 revolution forced him to exile with his family to the United States, where he has lived and taught Islamic sciences and philosophy ever since, establishing himself as one of the world's leading representatives of the Islamic philosophical tradition and the perennialist school of thought.

Nasr's works offer a critique of modern worldviews as well as a defense of Islamic and perennialist doctrines and principles. He argues that knowledge has become desacralized in the modern period, which means that it has been severed from its divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality—and he calls for its resacralization through sacred traditions and sacred science. Although Islam and Sufism are major influences on his writings, his perennialist approach inquires into the essence of all orthodox religions, regardless of their formal particularities. He is considered a key thinker on the environment, particularly in terms of Islamic environmentalism and resacralization of nature. He is the author of over fifty books and more than five hundred articles.

Biography

Origins

Seyyed Hossein Nasr was born on 7 April 1933 in Tehran to Seyyed Valiallah Khan Nasr, who was a physician to the royal family, philosopher and homme de lettres, and one of the founders of modern education in Iran. Nasr's parents were originally from Kashan. His mother was well-versed in Persian literature and poetry. He is a descendant of Sheikh Fazlollah Nouri from his mother's side, is the cousin of Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo as well as the father of American academic Vali Nasr.

The surname "Nasr", which means "victory", was given to his grandfather by the Shah. The title "Seyyed" indicates a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.

Education

Nasr completed his primary education in Tehran. His education was supplemented by religious and philosophical discussions with his father and an entourage of theologians, ministers, scholars, and mystics. He immersed himself in the Koranic studies, Persian literature, Arabic and French languages at an early age. While he was completing his first year of secondary school at Firooz Bahram High School, his father was hurt in a serious accident, so his mother sent him to continue his education in the United States so that he would not be present at the time of his father's imminent death. He would later say that there are three things that his father left him: "first of all, love of knowledge for our own Persian culture, our religious, literary, philosophical tradition; secondly, an avid interest in what was going on in the West in the realm of science and philosophy, literature and everything else; thirdly, a sense of serenity that he had within himself."

In the United States, Nasr first attended Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, graduating in 1950 as the valedictorian of his class.

He then applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston to study physics and was accepted with a scholarship. When he realized, after an encounter with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, that the study of physics would not bring answers to his questions, he enrolled in additional courses on metaphysics and philosophy with Giorgio de Santillana who introduced him to the works of René Guénon. From there, Nasr discovered the works of other Perennialist metaphysicians, notably Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, and Marco Pallis. This school of thought has shaped Nasr's life and thinking ever since. The widow of Commaraswamy gave him access to the library of her late husband, and Nasr spent much of his time there and worked to catalogue the library. He visited Schuon and Burckhardt in Switzerland while still a student and was initiated into the Alawi branch of the Shadhili Sufi order. He considered the works of Schuon, with central importance given to the practice of a spiritual discipline in addition to doctrinal knowledge, especially instrumental in determining his intellectual and spiritual life.

After receiving an MIT B.S. degree in physics in 1954, Nasr enrolled in the graduate program in geology and geophysics at Harvard University, where he received a Master of Science in both fields in 1956, and went on to pursue his PhD degree in the history of science and learning at the same university. He planned to write his dissertation under the supervision of George Sarton, but Sarton died before he could begin his dissertation work and so he wrote it under the direction of I. Bernard Cohen, Hamilton Gibb, and Harry Wolfson.

At the age of twenty-five, Nasr graduated with a PhD from Harvard and completed his first book, ''Science and Civilization in Islam'', the title being a direct tribute to ''Science and Civilization in China'', the work by Joseph Needham which had for task to present to Westerners the complex developments of the history of science and technology in China, a mission Nasr was himself following for the Islamic civilization. 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''.

Apart from mastering Arabic and French he was initially taught in his childhood, during his student years, Nasr also learned Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and German.

Back to Iran

After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1958, Nasr was offered the position of associate professor at MIT, as well as a three-year research position as a junior fellow followed by a formal teaching position at Harvard, but he decided to return to Iran. That same year, Tehran University hired him as associate professor of philosophy and the history of science. He continued his study of Islamic sciences with traditional Iranian masters and philosophers ( Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, Allameh Sayyed Abul Hasan Rafiee Qazvini and Sayyid Muhammad Kazim Assar), completing his dual education, academic and traditional.

He had married and started a family at this point. His son, Vali Nasr, would go on to become an academic and expert on the Islamic world.

At thirty, Seyyed Hossein Nasr was the youngest person to become a full professor at Tehran University. He was quickly recognized as an authority in Islamic philosophy, Islamic science and Sufism. For fifteen years he conducted a doctoral seminar in comparative philosophy and Islamic philosophy with Henry Corbin who was at that time the director of the French Institute for Iranian Studies in Tehran. Five years later he would be made the dean of the faculty of letters and then vice-chancellor of the university.

In 1972, the Shah chose him to become the President of Aryamehr University (now Sharif University of Technology). There, Nasr created a faculty for the humanities in order to encourage the students not to focus exclusively on scientific matters. He also designed courses that focused on the assessment of modern technology and its impact on human society and the environment. During this time, he was also involved in the creation of the Islamic and Iranian studies departments at Harvard, Princeton, the University of Utah, and the University of Southern California.

Nasr refused to engage in the politics of his country despite a number of offers for ministerial positions and ambassadorship. In 1974, Empress Farah Pahlavi commissioned him to establish and lead the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (now the Institute for Research in Philosophy), the first academic institution to be conducted in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School. During that time, Nasr, Tabataba'i, William Chittick, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Kenneth Morgan, Sachiko Murata, Toshihiko Izutsu, and Henry Corbin held various philosophical discourses. The book '' Shi'ite Islam'' and the traditionalist journal ''Sophia Perennis'' were products of this period. In 1978, he was named director of the Empress's private bureau, while continuing to teach philosophy at Tehran University, and serve as chancellor of Aryamehr University, and President of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.

Return to the West

In January 1979, the revolution put an end to the Pahlavi dynasty and Nasr, who was visiting London with his family at the time, was unable to return to Iran. He lost everything, including his manuscripts and library. His family settled in Boston. After a few months of teaching at the University of Utah, Nasr was appointed a professor of Islamic studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, which had the largest Ph.D. program in religious studies in the United States.

During the 1980–1981 academic year, Nasr delivered the Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which were later published under the title ''Knowledge and the Sacred''. According to William Chittick, "three out of the four of his first books in English (''An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines'', ''Three Muslim Sages'', and ''Science and Civilization in Islam'') were published by Harvard University Press, and they immediately established him as one of the major and original voices in Islamic studies. His strong endorsement of the writings of Schuon and Burckhardt in these books were in turn instrumental in bringing the Traditionalist school to the notice of official academia".

Nasr left Temple University in 1984 to become a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., a position he holds to this day. That same year, he established the Foundation for Traditional Studies which published the journal ''Sophia'' and works on traditional thought. He has authored over fifty books and over five hundred articles based on the principles of the ''philosophia perennis''. He is regularly invited to give courses and conferences at various institutions and universities of the five different continents on the major themes for which he has become well known: Islam, philosophy, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, spirituality, religion, science, ecology, literature, art, etc. His works have been translated into twenty-eight different languages.

Notable aspects of his works

Nasr's expertise encompasses traditional culture (wisdom, religion, philosophy, science and art), Western thought from antiquity to the present day, and the history of science. He argues in favor of revelation, tradition, and what he considers ''"scientia sacra"'', in opposition to rationalism, relativism, and modern western materialism.

Nasr has not developed a new system of thought, but instead hopes to revive traditional doctrines that he believes have been forgotten in the modern world. He is content to recall what, according to him, corresponds to the many manifestations of a timeless wisdom. Although Islam and Sufism are present throughout his writings, his universalist perspective, which is that of perennial philosophy, takes into account what he assumes to be the common essence of all orthodox religions beyond their formal particularities or their current state: "My philosophical world is a kind of synthesis between the perennial philosophy, which I espouse and represent, and the Islamic philosophical tradition, which I have tried to revive and to which I also belong. And so I would say that for the first category, there are Guénon and Schuon; if I had to name a third person, then Coomaraswamy; and for the second category, Ibn Sina, Suhrawardı, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra." According to Sarah Robinson-Bertoni, Nasr is one of the principal figures in Islamic philosophy, working at the crossroads of Western and Islamic intellectual traditions.

Harry Oldmeadow considers Nasr to be "of the living traditionalists the most widely known in academic circles". For him, Nasr's works are characterized by "rigorous scholarly methodology, an encyclopedic erudition about all matters Islamic, a robustness of critical thought, and a sustained clarity of expression"; and he is "the foremost traditionalist thinker" to base himself on "eternal wisdom (''sophia perennis'')" in order to provide a solution to the contemporary environmental crisis.

The Perennialist or Traditionalist school

When he discovered the writings of the most influential members of what would become the Traditionalist or Perennialist school (René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings), the student Seyyed Hossein Nasr fully aligned himself to their perspective founded on the ''philosophia perennis''.

Thus, in the middle of a "materialistic century", this School provides Nasr with the keys to his spiritual quest: an esoteric doctrine and method within the framework of a Sufi path. For Patrick Laude:

For Nasr, the expression, "''philosophia perennis''", as understood by the Perennialist School refers to both the universal metaphysical truth and to its spiritual realization. The latter can only be considered, according to Nasr, in the framework of a tradition, thus with the aid of a method, rites, symbols and other means sanctified by revelation. The truth, though veiled, is innate to the human spirit and its realization leads to what he calls "knowledge", that is to say gnosis or wisdom (''sophia''), hence the expression "''sophia perennis''", common ground at the heart of all religions. Nasr clarifies that the notion of the ''philosophia perennis'' does not derive from a compilation "of wisdom writings of various historical traditions", which would have resulted in the conviction of the existence of common truths, but it is these very truths which, by "the practice of intellection, the use of the intellect" understood in a spiritual manner, are revealed to the human spirit which then observes "their presence in other times and climes and in fact in all the sacred traditions the world over". The language of the perennial philosophy is symbolism.

God and the world

According to Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the "Divine Reality" includes, metaphysically speaking, an "Impersonal Essence" and a personal aspect that the believer "ordinarily identifies with God", in accordance with the perspective of "most religions". Only the "esoteric dimension" within these religions take into account the "Impersonal Essence", as can be seen most notably in "the Kabbalah, Sufism, and among many Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart

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