William C. Chittick is professor of religious studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was born and raised in Milford, Connecticut and earned his BA in history at the College of Wooster (Ohio) and then went to Iran, where he completed a PhD 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 1979 and for three years was assistant editor of the Encyclopaedia Iranica (Columbia University). Professor Chittick has written and translated thirty books and one hundred-fifty articles on Islamic thought, Sufism, Shiism, and Persian literature. His more recent books include in Search of the Lost Heart: Explorations in Islamic Thought (2012); Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (2007); Me & Rumi: The Autobiography of Sham-i Tabrizi (2004); The Elixir of the Gnostics (2003); The Heart of Islamic Philosopy (2001); Sufism: A Short Introduction(2000); and The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-Arabi’s Cosmology (1998). He is currently working on several research projects in Sufism and Islamic philosophy.