William Chittick

[2] Following a period of scholarly inquiry into the precepts of Sufism, he attended a public lecture by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who was then the Aga Khan Visiting professor of Islamic studies at the American University of Beirut.

This extended contact with such scholars gave Chittick a unique appreciation and mastery of classical Arabic and Persian, as well as a broad understanding of medieval Islamic philosophical, theological, and mystical texts.

[2] Prior to the revolution in 1979, Chittick returned to the United States with his wife, and served as an associate editor for Encyclopædia Iranica in the early 1980s.

In addition, he has been awarded fellowships from a number of esteemed organizations, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Centre for the Study of World Religions, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

[2] Taneli Kukkonen of New York University states that "Over the course of four decades, William Chittick has done more than anyone to elucidate for an Anglophone audience's benefit the theosophical side of Sufi literature and later Islamic philosophy".