Remembering Fuat Sezgin: An Obituary

Abstract

First Paragraph: With the death of Fuat Sezgin (1924-2018) not only Turkey, but all of the Islamic world and in fact the fields of Islamic studies and the history of science as a whole have lost one of their great scholars, a person who devoted his whole long life to making Islamic thought and especially the rich treasuries of Arabic manuscripts better known to the world at large. Born in Bitlis and raised in Istanbul, he studied at the University of Istanbul where he had the occasion to work closely with the famous German orientalist Hellmut Ritter under whose guidance he was able to master modern methods of research and scholarship. But he was not a blind follower of Western Islamicists and orientalists. Already in his doctoral thesis which was on al-Bukhārī he demonstrated that in contrast to the views of Western orientalists going back to Goldziher and his students the ḥadīths recorded by al-Bukhārī were not invented in the 3rd/9th century and then attributed to the Prophet of Islam, but went back to the 1st/7th century and the lifetime of the Prophet.

Keywords

• Fuat Sezgin
• Seyyed Hossein Nasr
• Obituary