What is the nature and significance of beauty in Islamic theology and intellectual thought? To what extent did theological, philosophical, and mystical ideas inform the production and reception of Islamic material culture? These and other questions will be the focus of the English interview series "Beauty and Islamic Theology", a series that explores the rich and diverse relationships between theology, art, and aesthetics in the Islamic world. In this weeks' conversation, Dr Bilal Badat talks to Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Professor Nasr describes his journey through Islamic art, explores how to bridge the gap between art and theology, and offers valuable advice to contemporary practitioners of traditional art and architecture.Seyyed Hossein Nasr, currently University, Washington D.C. is one of the most important and foremost scholars of Islamic, Religious and Comparative Studies in the world today. Author of over fifty books and five hundred articles which have been translated into several major Islamic, European and Asian languages, Professor Nasr is a well-known and highly respected intellectual figure both in the West and the Islamic world.As demonstrated by his numerous writings, lectures and speeches, Professor Nasr speaks and writes with great authority on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from philosophy to religion to spirituality, to music and art and architecture, to science and literature, to civilizational dialogues and the natural environment. For Professor Nasr, the quest for knowledge, specifically knowledge which enables man to understand the true nature of things and which furthermore, "liberates and delivers him from the fetters and limitations of earthly existence," has been and continues to be the central concern and determinant of his intellectual life.This interview series concludes the one-year AIWG project workshop "Beauty and Islamic Theology", a joint research program of the Centre for Islamic Theology at the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen and the Chair of Islamic Religious Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
