Hossein Ziai

Hossein Ziai, born July 6, 1944 in Mashhad and dying August 24, 2011 in Los Angeles, was an Iranian scholar who held the inaugural Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Chair in Iranian Studies at UCLA, where he was professor of Islamic philosophy and Iranian studies. His research centered on Illuminationist philosophy, particularly the work of the twelfth-century philosopher Suhrawardi, and he devoted his career to exploring the rationalist principle within Iranian Illuminationist thought, authoring eleven books on Islamic philosophy and founding the first undergraduate major in Iranian studies in North America. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Yale in 1967 and a doctorate in Islamic philosophy from Harvard in 1976 under Muhsin Mahdi, and in December 2010 was elected president of the international academic society for the study of Persian and Arabic philosophical heritage.