Nasrollah Pourjavady

Born in Tehran and received his early education there. He went to the United States at the end of 1962 to start his undergraduate education. After having obtained his BA in 1967 in Western philosophy from San Francisco State University, he returned to Iran and earned his MA and PhD degrees in philosophy from the University of Tehran. Subsequently he taught philosophy and mysticism at Sharif University of Technology (then called Aryamehr) in Tehran, and then at the University of Tehran, where he still teaches as a full professor. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Colgate University in New York State (2002), the Gregorian University in Rome (2005), and the University of Maryland (Spring and Summer 2008).

Over the last thirty years, Pourjavady has written some 30 books as well as over a hundred essays and articles in the fields of Islamic mysticism, philosophy, and Persian literature. These include: a critical edition of Ahmad Ghazzali’s Sawanih (1980) and its English translation (1986); Ru’yat-e mah dar asman (La vision de Dieu en theologie et mystique musulmane) (1996); Eshraq-o erfan ( Illuminationist Philosophy and Mysticism) (2001); Do mojadded (2002), which is a study of two key figures in the development of Islamic thought, Abu Hamid Ghazzali and Fakhruddin Razi;  Zaban-e hal (2007), a survey of Persian literature from of the point of view of the usage of one literary device; Bada-ye ‘eshq (2008), a study of the meaning of wine as a metaphor in Persian poetry; and most recently, introductions and notes to the Persian philosopher Shehaboddin Sohravaradi’s allegorical works, translated into Italian and published under the title of  IL FRUSCIO DELLE ALI DI GABRIELE, Racconti esoterici (Milano 2008).

Pourjavady was also the general editor of a monumental, three-volume English language book on Iranian art and culture, The Splendour of Iran (London 2001). He has also edited and introduced the works of several lesser known classical Iranian mystics and Persian poets, such as Abu’l-Hasan Busti, Abu Mansur Esfahani, Mobarakshah Marvirudi, Yar-Ali Tabrizi, and Awhad al-Din Razi.

As the founding-director of Iran University Press, he supervised the publication of some 1,200 academic books and 11 periodicals in Persian, English, French, and German for 24 years, until the spring of 2004. He personally edited two of these journals, Nashr-e Danesh and Ma’aref. He is a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, which awarded him the Academy’s Persian Literature Award in 2004. He received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2005, and spent the year 2006 as a research scholar at the Free University of Berlin. In the spring of 2008, Pourjavady taught a semester at the University of Maryland, meanwhile giving talks to a number of other universities and institutions in America.  His Persian book Do Mojadded was awarded as the book of the year in Iran, and his Zaban-e hal received the 2008 International Society for Iranian Studies award for the best book on Persian studies published in any language in the two previous years.