Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who recently won the Templeton Award for teaching the best course in Islam in America.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Iranian-born philosopher and renowned scholar of Islam, for his view of ecology, comparative religion and sufism. Like Thomas Berry the Catholic scholar of "reconciliation with creation", Nasr sees the emergence of khalifa focused strictly on the natural world and the furtherance of biodiversity to create a Garden of Eden-like planet, as a convergence of scientific, aesthetic, and religious views of human destiny.
Traditional Muslim notions of stewardship, haram, hima are seen in his work as fundamental, and records of sira and hadith ("sunnah") the derivatives of a general ethics of pure stewardship.
He is the author of many works on Islamic science and religion and the environment including:
An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines ISBN 0791415163
Science and Civilization in Islam ISBN 1930637152
Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study ISBN 1567443125
Man and Nature ISBN 1871031656
Religion and the Order of Nature ISBN 0195102746
The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity ISBN 0060099240
Ideals and Realities of Islam
Professor Nasr was a student of Allameh Tabatabaei, a Shiite icon of the 20th century. He received his PhD from Harvard after receiving his degree in Physics from MIT. In the 1970s, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran appointed professor Nasr as head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy: the first academic instituton to be conducted in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School. This experiment ended with the arrival of the fundamentalist Islamic Revolution.
Like Thomas Berry the Catholic scholar of "reconciliation with creation", Nasr sees the emergence of khalifa focused strictly on the natural world and the furtherance of biodiversity to create a Garden of Eden-like planet, as a convergence of scientific, aesthetic, and religious views of human destiny.
Professor Nasr was a student of Allameh Tabatabaei, a Shiite icon of the 20th century.
In the 1970s, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran appointed professor Nasr as head of the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy: the first academic instituton to be conducted in accordance with the intellectual principles of the Traditionalist School.