Chittick, William

William Chittick

Bio

William C. Chittick is professor of religious studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, State University of New York, Stony Brook.  Born in Connecticut, he received a BA in history from the College of Wooster (Ohio).  He completed a PhD at Tehran University in the Persian language and its literature, and taught comparative religion and philosophy at Aryamehr Institute of Technology in Tehran.  He left Iran shortly before the revolution, became an editor at the Encyclopedia Iranica at Columbia University, and since 1983 has taught religious studies at Stony Brook.  He has published thirty books and numerous articles on Islamic intellectual history, including Imaginal Worlds:  Ibn al-`Arabī and the Problem of Religious Diversity (State University of New York Press, 1994), The Heart of Islamic Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World (Oneworld, 2007).