Vali Nasr

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Vali Reza Nasr (b. 1960) is an Iranian-American academic and scholar, as well as Associate Chair of Research at the Department of National Security Affairs of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

An expert in contemporary Middle Eastern affairs and Islam and politics, in January, 2006, Nasr was named the Adjunct Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think-tank focusing on foreign policy. He is also a Senior Fellow at Belfar Center for the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. He was named Carnegie Scholar in 2006.

He was born in 1960 in Tehran. He was raised in a prominent scholar family. His father is Seyyed Hossein Nasr [1] - an Islamic philosopher and historian of science.

Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival, The Islamic Leviathan, Democracy in Iran, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama`at-i Islami of Pakistan, and Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism. His early work focused on Islamic activism in Pakistan, but he then shifted his attention to Iran and the Arab world. His work on the role of states in Islamization and evolution new democratic ideas in the Muslim world presented new analysis. He has been engaged in debates in the Muslim world on Islam and democracy and accommodating modernity. His most influential work has been on the importance of sectarian identity in Middle East politics and the growing importance of Shia politics following the Iraq war, which he was one of the first to identify.

In August 2006, Nasr briefed President Bush on the dynamics of sectarian violence in Iraq.[2]