Dr. Syed Nomanul Haq is Dr. Haq teaches at University of Pennsylvania.  Prior to this, Dr. Haq held professorial positions at Rutgers, Tufts and Brown Universities, and this followed his postdoctoral appointment at the Center of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. He is General Editor of Oxford University Press’ Studies in Islamic Philosophy series, and serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Islamic Studies, and the Journal of Islamic Science. He is also a member of the Board of Advisors of the UN sponsored Forum on Religion and Ecology, and of the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Science and Technology, Islamabad; he is an advisor and honorary professor of Hamdard University, Karachi, and a visiting scholar of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

            At the undergraduate level Dr. Haq was trained as a physical scientist, receiving his first degree from England’s Hull University. Subsequently, he entered the field of the history of philosophy, and the history and philosophy of science, eventually focusing on the general area of mediaeval Islamic intellectual history. He worked for his doctorate largely at Harvard University where he remained a transfer student from the University of London, receiving the degree in 1990.

            Dr. Haq has published widely and in diverse areas. His first book, Names, Natures, and Things, has been published in two editions by the Dutch publishing house, Kluwer Academic Publishers; this book, a volume in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science series, reconstructs the metaphysical system of the famous alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, known as “Geber” in the mediaeval Latin West. In the field of Islamic mysticism, Dr. Haq is completing a book in Urdu on the sufi-martyr Ibn Mansur Hallaj, and is completing another one in English, the latter to be published by Oxford University Press (OUP). In the OUP’s Studies in Islamic Philosophy series, Dr. Haq has just edited a volume by Professor Sherman Jackson; and, along with Muzaffar Iqbal and Ted Peters, he has jointly edited a book entitled, God, Life, and Cosmos (Ashgate, 2002).

            The American History of Science Association’s official journal Isis, the Journal of the American Oriental Society, and the Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review are among the numerous international scholarly journals in which Dr. Haq has been published. The prestigious periodical of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Daedalus has recently published his paper on Islamic environmental philosophy written by him. In 2001, he published in the journal Nature a review of Stepehen Jay Gould’s Rocks of Ages, discussing the question of science and religion; Nature has published Dr. Haq’s articles also in the past. He has also contributed to E. J. Brill’s The Encyclopaedia of Islam, the most recent being an extensive discourse on the concept of nature (fusis ) in Islamic philosophy and science. Among several books containing chapters written by Dr. Haq are the Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy, Blackwell Companion to Environmental Philosophy, Ultimate Realities (ed. Robert Neville), The Human Condition (ed. Robert Neville), Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Encyclopedia of Science in Non-Western Cultures, and many others. To his credit are also journalistic writings, prominent among them is an article of his that was published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times.

            Dr. Haq was the recipient of the year 2000 Science and Religion Course Prize of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, funded by the Templeton Foundation.