Education of the Interior: Essays in Honour of Professor Syed Ali Ashraf

About the foreword writer

Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Born in Tehran in 1933, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is a scholar of Islamic philosophy, science, and Sufism, and a prominent representative of the perennialist or traditionalist school of thought. He studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and went on to Harvard, taking a master's in geology and geophysics and a doctorate in the history of science in 1958. Returning to Iran, he became a full professor at Tehran University while still in his early thirties, later serving as dean, vice-chancellor, and founding president of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. After the events of 1979 he emigrated to the United States, teaching at Temple University and, from 1984, as University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. His many works include An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Science and Civilization in Islam, Three Muslim Sages, and Knowledge and the Sacred, the last drawn from the Gifford Lectures he delivered at Edinburgh in 1980 to 1981. Shaped intellectually by the writings of René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon, he has written on metaphysics, cosmology, the environment, and the relation between religion and the order of nature. He served as editor-in-chief of The Study Quran (HarperOne, 2015), a single-volume translation with continuous commentary drawing on the classical Sunni and Shiʿi traditions.