William C. Chittick was born in Milford, Connecticut, USA in 1943. He did his undergraduate degree in history at the College of Wooster in Ohio and came into contact with the field of Sufi studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) while spending the 1964–1965 academic year as a study abroad student. After attending Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s public lectures at the AUB, the young Chittick resolved to enroll into the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters to do graduate work under Nasr’s supervision. Having written his honors thesis on Rūmī during his senior year in 1965–1966, Chittick then devoted the next eight years of his life (1966–1974) to his doctoral studies in Persian literature at the University of Tehran. He also worked as a research assistant in Tehran’s Center for the Study of Islamic Science from 1971 to 1972. His PhD dissertation, published in 1977 and reprinted in 1992, was a study and critical edition of Jāmī’s Naqd al-nuṣūṣ, a major commentary on Ibn ʿArabī’s own abridgement of his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam entitled Nasqh al-fuṣūṣ.
Sachiko Murata was born in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, Japan in 1943. She did her undergraduate degree at Chiba University, where she obtained a BA in family law in 1965. After serving as a lawyer’s assistant from 1965–1966 at the Iimura Law Firm based in Tokyo, Murata joined the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters as a doctoral student in 1967. She obtained her PhD in 1971 with a thesis on the role of women in Niẓāmī’s Haft paykār. During this time, she also served as a teacher of Japanese at the Japanese Embassy in Tehran. Murata then set out to do a second doctoral degree at the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Theology. She thus first completed an MA in Islamic law in 1975. Her MA thesis, which was published in Persian in 1978 and revised into an English monograph in 1987, was on the institution of temporary marriage (mutʿa) in Islamic jurisprudence. By 1977, she had finished all of her PhD course work and was well on her way to completing a second PhD, this time with a thesis on the theme of family law in Islam and Confucianism. Unfortunately, the revolution of 1979 spelt an end to the realization of this goal.
Chittick and Murata met and married during their time in Iran. While after their studies Murata served as Assistant Director for the Japanese Institute for West Asian Studies in Tehran and Chittick as Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion at Aryamehr University of Technology (now called the Sharif University of Technology), they both eventually took up positions at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy (now called the Iranian Institute of Philosophy) in the late 1970s. As students and then teachers in Tehran, Chittick and Murata had the very fortunate opportunity to study with a number of Iran’s most illustrious scholars. Amongst their teachers were such noteworthy names as Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Āshtiyānī, Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar, Abū l-Qāsim Gurjī, Jalāl al-Dīn Humāʾī, Toshihiko Izutsu, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sayyid Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī, and Sayyid Ḥasan Iftikhārzāda Sabziwārī. The kind of academic training Chittick and Murata received was thus quite unparalleled, which partly explains why their writings display such a profound level of insight and technical know-how.
They made their permanent move to the United States before the 1979 revolution. Chittick served as Assistant Editor for the Encyclopaedia Iranica from 1981–1984, and he and Murata joined SUNY Stony Brook as Assistant Professors of Religious Studies (and eventually Comparative Studies) in 1983. At present, Chittick is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy, and Murata is Full Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies.
Throughout the course of their long and distinguished careers, Professors Chittick and Murata have received many academic honors. These include Kenan Rifai Distinguished Professorships at Peking University’s Institute of Advanced Humanistic Studies and Honorary Professorships at Minzu University’s School of Philosophy and Religious Studies, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Harvard Centre for the Study of World Religions, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).
∵
Over the past five decades William Chittick and Sachiko Murata have contributed in major ways to changing the landscape of not only their fields of concentration—Sufism and Islamic philosophy—but also the broader disciplines of religious studies and global philosophy. Together, they have published more than forty books in the form of monographs, edited volumes, and translations, and over 300 original articles. Their writings have been translated into some fifteen languages and are taught at every major academic institution worldwide.
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of their books is the manner in which they approach premodern texts of Islamic thought. They place great emphasis on the robust analysis and concrete English translation of these texts over and against any kind of simplistic and convenient theorizations of them. Indeed, one of the reasons why their writings have been widely accessible to so many different types of people is because they cut to the chase, taking their readers to the heart of the texts themselves with impressive explanatory clarity and careful attention to rendering their technical language in terms that are cogent and consistent.
As partners in life and scholarship, Chittick and Murata have collaborated on many important projects. The best-known of their co-authored works is their introductory textbook on Islam, The vision of Islam (1994). This work has significantly informed the discursive categories through which scholars present and explain the Islamic tradition in the classroom, and it continues to do so.
Among Chittick’s monographs that delve into the worldview of key figures in Islamic thought, three titles that typify his unmatchable skills in translation and rigorous textual analysis are The Sufi path of love: The spiritual teachings of Rumi (1983), The Sufi path of knowledge: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics of imagination (1989), and The heart of Islamic philosophy: The quest for self-knowledge in the teachings of Afḍal al-Dīn Kāshānī (2001). Some of his more recent books include Divine love: Islamic literature and the path to God (2013) and his complete translation of Aḥmad Samʿānī’s Persian masterpiece Rawḥ al-arwāḥ under the title, The repose of the spirits: A Sufi commentary on the divine names (2019). These two works demonstrate how central love has been to the spiritual and intellectual quest in Islam, and this over 100 years before the appearance of such great lovers as Rūmī and ʿAṭṭār.
Sachiko Murata’s ongoing research on the Han Kitab and its major representatives has opened up an entirely new universe to scholars of Islamic studies and non-Western philosophy. Her first book on Chinese-language Islam, Chinese gleams of Sufi light: Wang Tai-yü’s Great learning of the pure and real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the concealment of the real realm (2000), and her more recent study and translation entitled The first Islamic classic in Chinese: Wang Daiyu’s Real commentary on the true teaching (2017), are major landmarks of scholarship. With great erudition and a linguistic range that is second to none, these works highlight how Sufi metaphysics was integrated into the language and worldview of Neo-Confucianism, thereby providing a window for Islamicists and cross-cultural philosophers into the unique nature of Islamic thought in Chinese. Murata’s best-known work, The Tao of Islam: A sourcebook on gender relationships in Islamic thought (1992), remains an essential resource for the study of Islamic cosmology, Sufi psychology, and divine names theology.
As teachers, Chittick and Murata have trained a variety of graduate students and have always kept the doors of their home open to those seeking to read Arabic, Persian, and Chinese texts with them. Those who have had the fortunate opportunity to study with them would readily note their characteristic hospitality, humility, and humor. Then there are of course an even wider number of people who are their students by virtue of having been significantly influenced by their scholarship.
A Festschrift that brings together these various kinds of ṭullāb in addition to including Chittick and Murata’s countless friends and colleagues across the globe would easily take up six or seven large volumes. The essays in Islamic Thought and the Art of Translation are therefore limited to people who have learned from them, in one way or another, over the past twenty-five years. Many of these authors are established scholars of Islamic studies today, others advanced graduate students, and still others professional educators and artists across various domains in the humanities. Suffice it to say, despite their diverse approaches to and understandings of the field of Islamic thought, one thing these contributors have in common is the profound debt of gratitude they owe to the present volume’s recipients.
Mohammed Rustom
Toronto, September 2022