Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World

About the author

William C Chittick: William C. Chittick (b. 1943 CE), born in Milford, Connecticut, is among the foremost living scholars of Sufism and Islamic philosophy writing in English, and is frequently described as the leading interpreter of Ibn ʿArabi in the language. After undergraduate study at the College of Wooster, he completed his PhD in Persian literature at the University of Tehran in 1974, where his teacher was Seyyed Hossein Nasr and his research centered on the Ibn ʿArabi commentator Jami. He taught in Tehran before the Iranian revolution, then returned to the United States, where he has spent his career at Stony Brook University as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. Chittick has authored and translated some two dozen books and many articles on Sufism, Islamic thought, and Persian literature. His landmark studies include The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (1983), The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989), and The Self-Disclosure of God (1998), alongside the accessible Sufism: A Short Introduction. Much of his finest work was undertaken with his wife, the scholar Sachiko Murata, including The Vision of Islam. Known for careful translation and lucid exposition rather than polemic, he has opened the metaphysical worlds of Ibn ʿArabi and Rumi to a wide modern readership.