Islam and Authors Series - William Chittick Author of "In serach of the Lost Heart: Exploration in Islamic Thought" - Sat. May 4, 2013

Please join us for an onstage conversation with Prof. William Chittick author of "In search of the Lost Heart: Exploration in Islamic Thought", followed by audience Q&A session and book signing.

Date & Time: Sat. May 4, 2013 at 5:00 PM

Location: ICCNC 1433 Madison Street, Oakland, CA 94612

Tickets: $10 general, $5 students

For more info, call (510) 832-7600 or email us at info@iccnc.org

Tickets will be available at the door.

About the Author

Born and raised in Milford, Connecticut, William C. Chittick did his B.A. in history at the College of Wooster (Ohio) and then went to Iran, where he completed a Ph.D. in Persian literature at Tehran University in 1974. He taught comparative religion in the humanities department at Aryamehr Technical University in Tehran and, for a short period before the revolution, was assistant professor at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy. He returned to the United States in January, 1979. For three years he was assistant editor at the Encyclopaedia Iranica (Columbia University), and from 1983 he has taught religious studies at Stony Brook.

Chittick is author and translator of twenty-five books and one hundred articles on Islamic thought, Sufism, Shi'ism, and Persian literature. His more recent books include The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-`Arabi's Cosmology (State University of New York Press, 1998), Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oneword, 2000), The Heart of Islamic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Elixir of the Gnostics (Brigham Young University Press, 2003), and Me & Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabrizi (FonsVitae, 2004). He is currently working on several research projects in Sufism and Islamic philosophy.

About the Book

Renowned scholar William C. Chittick explores the worldview of Islam in a series of essays written over thirty-six years.

In Search of the Lost Heart brings together twenty-six essays by William C. Chittick, renowned scholar of Sufism and Islamic philosophy. Written between 1975 and 2011, most of these essays are not readily available in Chittick’s own books. Although this is a collection, its editors have crafted it to be a book “sufficient unto itself, which, when taken as a whole, can be said to explore the underlying worldview of Islam.”

Chittick draws upon the writings of towering figures such as Ibn al-‘Arabi, Rumi, and Mulla Sadra, as well as other important, but lesser-known thinkers, as he engages with a wide variety of topics, such as the nature of being and knowledge, the relationship between love and scriptural hermeneutics, the practical and theoretical dimensions of Islamic mysticism, the phenomenon of religious diversity, and the ecological crisis.

The book will be available for purchase and signing.