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June 2025
About the ProgramÜsküdar University Institute for Sufi Studies, with the support of Sufi Corner and Kerim Foundation, will organize a training program entitled “Humanity, Sufi Thought, and Healing Lecture Series” between 23-27 July 2025. The program will be held face-to-face at Üsküdar University. The languages of the program are English and Turkish.Application Deadline: July 17, 2025It is a paid certificate program organised by the Institute of Sufi Studies.Participants will receive a program certificate from Üsküdar University.In the program, 16 conferences will be given by 16 scholars, 11 of which will be face-to-face.Participants will have the opportunity to meet the scholars in person and raise questions face-to-face/online.The conferences will also be available online.All conferences will be simultaneously translated into Turkish and English.Video recordings of the conferences will be available to participants for 6 months. All those concerned can apply for the program at lectureseries@uskudar.edu.trPhone: 0090 216 4002222 - 2851Click HERE for the details.ApplicationApplications will start on June 13, 2025.Students enrolled in or graduated from Üsküdar University graduate programs can complete their registration process by depositing only the program fee by using the “online payment” option on the website of the Institute of Sufi Studies.Except for students enrolled in or graduated from Üsküdar University Institute of Sufism Studies graduate programs, those who wish to enroll in the program are required to fill out the application form, send their CV and a copy of their ID / passport and the receipt of the program fee for EFT payments to lectureseries@uskudar.edu.tr.1. CLICK HERE for the application form2. Photocopy of Turkish ID card and/or the first page of the passport of non-Turkish citizens3. Program fee payment receiptFor all your questions and comments, you can contact the Institute of Sufi Studies via lectureseries@uskudar.edu.tr and/or by calling 0216 400 2222/2851.Program FeeA. Applications from TurkeyProgram Fee:For Üsküdar University students and/or graduates 10 200,00 TL (including VAT).For the other applicants 16 500,00 TL (including VAT).There are 4 or 6 month payments are available via Yapı Kredi, Garanti, World and Bonus credit cards.B. Application from AbroadProgram Fee: 600 $The fee for the participants who have previously received a certificate from at least one of the Institute of Sufi Studies International Summer School Programs is $500.Speakers:Yasushi Tonaga: Yasushi Tonaga is a professor at the Institute of Asian and African Field Studies, in Kyoto University. He is also the current director of the Kenan Rifâî Centre for Sufi Studies and the Centre for Islamic Studies at Kyoto University. He graduated from the University of Tokyo, and received his doctorate from Kyoto University. His major field of interest includes Ibn ‘Arabī and Akbarian school. He is also the president of the Japan Association for Middle Eastern Studies.Kenan Gürsoy: Kenan Gürsoy graduated from the University of Rennes and the University of Paris Sorbonne (Paris IV) in France. He started working as an assistant at Atatürk University, Faculty of Literature, Department of Philosophy. He received his PhD in 1979, became an Assistant Professor in 1982 and an Associate Professor of Systematic Philosophy-Logic in 1983. In the meantime, he was assigned to do research for another year (1981-1982) at the Department of Philosophy of Paris-Ouest-Nanterre-la-Défense (Paris X) in France. In November 1984, he joined the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Languages and History-Geography at Ankara University as an Associate Professor in the History of Philosophy Department, where he became a Professor in January 1989. He was a faculty member at Galatasaray University between 1997 and 2009, first at the Faculty of Communication, then at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and finally as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Galatasaray University from 2000 to 2009. Professor Gürsoy, who was the Ambassador of the Republic of Türkiye to the Holy See (Vatican) between 2009 and 2014, served for a while on the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs after his return to Turkey in 2014, and retired from the Embaccy in 2015. From 2015 to June 2017, he served as a faculty member and director of the Center for Western Studies at Istanbul Aydın University. Professor Gürsoy has been the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Cenan Foundation since 2013. His works are mainly on ethics.Emine Yeniterzi: Emine Yeniterzi graduated from the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Selçuk University Faculty of Letters in 1981. She received her master’s degree with her thesis, “The Names of Prophet Muhammad in Classical Turkish Literature” in 1983 and PhD degree with the thesis of “Praising Poetry of the Prophet Muhammad [Na’t] in Divan Poetry” in 1989, both in the field of Classical Turkish Literature. She continued her academic life at Selçuk University between 1981-2011, and Istanbul Medeniyet University between 2011-2015. Currently she works at the Institute for Sufi Studies of Üsküdar University. Her major areas of study are: Classical Turkish poetry, text commentary, religious-moral-mystical masnavis, various types of religious poetry and Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî. She is the author of nine books andmany articles published in scholarly journals.Carl W. Ernst: Carl W. Ernst was recognized for his work on the comparison of religions at Stanford University in 1973. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1981 and taught at Pomona College between 1981 and 1992. Ernst is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. In 2005, he was awarded the “DOST Award for Service to Islam” for his book named Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World, which was also translated to Turkish. In 2009, he founded the Ken’an Rifai Chair of Islamic Studies with the cooperation of TÜRKKAD on behalf of the Department of Religious Studies at the UNC at Chapel Hill. His studies of Sufism have engaged with the literary, histrorical, and contemporary aspects of Islamic mysticism, particularly in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and the Persianate cultural sphere. He is the co-director of the UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies and the co-editor of Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks Series of the University of the North Carolina Press.Omneya Ayad: Right after she earned her bachelor degree in Journalism and Mass Communications from the American University in Cairo, she started pursuing a bachelor degree in Islamic studies in the Sufi Academy of Arabic and Islamic Studies – a college affiliated with Al Azhar University. After earning her Master’s degree on “The Contemporary Sufi Heritage of Shaykh Ahmed Ibn Mustafa al-‘Alawī and His Elements of the Sufi Path towards the Divine” from the American University in Cairo, she had pursued a doctoral degree in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, UK where she finished her doctoral thesis on “Ibn ‘Ajība (d. 1224/1809) and His Oceanic Exegesis of the Quran: Love in the Moroccan Sufi Tradition”. During her postgraduate studies she has worked as a teaching assistant of Islamic history while pursuing her Master’s degree in the American University in Cairo and during her doctoral studies she spent two years teaching the Arabic language in the University of Exeter.Mahmud Erol Kılıç: Mahmud Erol Kılıç was born in 1961 in Istanbul. Following his graduation from the Faculty of Political Science of Istanbul University (1985), he obtained his masters’ degree in Islamic Philosophy at Marmara University (1989), then defended his doctorate on Ibn Arabi’s thought (1995). He was the President of the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts in Istanbul (2005-2008) and was then appointed as the Secretary General of the Parliamentary Union of the OIC Member States (PUIC, Tehran) from 2008 to 2018. Following this, he was appointed as the Ambassador of the Republic of Türkiye to the Republic of Indonesia (2019-2021). He is currently the Director General of the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA), the cultural subsidiary of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Ambassador Prof. Kılıç is married and has two children and one grandchild.Mohammed Rustom: Mohammed Rustom is Professor of Islamic Thought and Global Philosophy at Carleton University and Director of the Carleton Centre for the Study of Islam. An internationally recognized scholar whose works have been translated into over ten languages, Professor Rustom’s research focuses on Islamic philosophy, Sufism, Quranic exegesis, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is the author, translator, and editor of thirteen books, the most recent of which are Inrushes of the Heart: The Sufi Philosophy of ‘Ayn al-Qudat (SUNY Press, 2023) and A Sourcebook in Global Philosophy (Equinox, 2025). Professor Rustom is also Editor of Equinox Publishing’s Global Philosophy series and Editorial Board member of the Library of Arabic Literature (NYU Press).Cyrus Ali Zargar: Cyrus Ali Zargar is Al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor of Islamic Studies and Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. Zargar’s research interests focus on the metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical intersections between Sufism and Islamic philosophy. His most recent books include Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ʿAṭṭār (2024); The Ethics of Karbala: Myths, Modernity, and Virtues of Nobility (2024); and The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (2017). He is currently associate editor of the Journal of Sufi Studies, as well as Islamic Intellectual Traditions, both with Brill. He is also Director of Research at the Institute for Advanced Islamic Studies in New York.H. Dilek Güldütuna: Güldütuna graduated from Istanbul University Cerrahpaşa Faculty of Medicine. She completed her residency in Anesthesiology at the Koşuyolu Research Hospital. She spent three years at the Professor Fuat Sezgin’s Arab-Islamic History of Science Institute in Frankfurt to complete her Arabic education. Between 2005 and 2011, she first received her master’s degree at the Department of Islamic and Religious Sciences in Johann Wolfgang Goethe University with her thesis titled “Buchstabensymbolik bei Ibn Arabi” (Letter Symbolism in Ibn Arabi) and then her PhD at the Department of Islamic Studies on “Konstruktionen des weiblichen bei Ken'ân Rifâî: Das weibliche als Spiegel der göttlichen Wirklichkeit” (Women as a Miracle of Truth). She is currently giving lectures on Sufism at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her main areas of interest are symbolism in general, symbolism in Ibn Arabi, the role of woman in Islamic mysticism and femininity and symbolism as symbols, the role of Islamic culture in the history of thought and science, and the effects in the West.Reşat Öngören: Professor Öngören graduated from Marmara University Department of Theology. He earned his master’s degree in the field of History of Tasawwuf in 1990, and he received his PhD in 1996. He worked as a researcher, specifically on the field of Tasawwuf, between 1996 to 2000 in the Turkiye Diyanet Foundation for Islamic Studies (ISAM). He was assigned as Assistant Professor to Istanbul University Department of Theology. He was assigned to Associate Professor in November 2001 and Professor in November 2007. He worked as a guest lecturer in Higher Islamic Institute in Sofia, during 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 academic calenders. Among many academic articles, papers, and book chapters he wrote on Tasawwuf, he also the author of the books Tasawwuf in Ottomans: Sufis, State and Scholars in Anatolia (printed in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2016), Zayniyyah: A Sufi Order in the History (printed in 2003), and A Popular Tariqa Among Scholars: Zayniyyah (printed in 2012). He also wrote articles for the Encyclopedia of Islam (DIA) published by ISAM and the encyclopedia of Mevsūatu a‘lāmi’l-ulemāi ve’l-udebāi’l-‘Arabi ve’l-müslimīn published in Tunisia. He is currently working as a lecturer at the Institute of Sufi Studies in Uskudar University.Youssef Carter: Youssef Carter is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an advisory board member of the 'Black American Muslim Internationalism Project', facilitated in part by the Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. He also serves as faculty advisor for the Muslim Student Association and the newly-formed Black Muslim Collective at UNC. His scholarship centers on Muslim life and networks in the Black Atlantic and is primarily interested in religious empowerment. In addition to other projects, Dr. Carter is working on a manuscript called “The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawiyya Sufi Path” which is a multisite ethnography of a transatlantic spiritual network of African-American and West African Muslims in South Carolina and Senegal.Oludamini Ogunnaike: Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought at the University of Virginia specializing in the intellectual and artistic dimensions of West and North African Sufism and Yoruba oriṣa traditions. He received his PhD from the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and his A.B. in Cognitive Neuroscience and African Studies from the same institution. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (Penn State University Press, 2020) winner of the ASWAD's (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora) Outstanding First Book Prize, Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (Islamic Texts Society, 2020), and The Book of Clouds (Fons Vitae, 2024). He is currently working on a podcast and book manuscript on Sufi poetry and poetics as well as a book on Yoruba Mythology.Cemalnur Sargut: After receiving her BSc in Chemical Engineering, she taught Chemistry for 20 years. Born into a sufi family, she was interested in philosophy and examined the lives of great philosophers when she was young. After realizing that philosophy is not a kind of knowledge that can be lived, she looked for an example who lived his knowledge and found Rumi. Upon her teacher, Samiha Ayverdi’s request, she started to work on the Quran and conduct a comparative study on Rumi’s Masnavi. Again on her teacher’s request she started giving Masnavi lessons to young people when she was 24, and since then she has reached millions of people. Since 2000, Cemalnur Sargut has been the President of Turkish Women’s Cultural Association, Istanbul (TURKKAD),(www.turkkad.org) founded by her teacher, Samiha Ayverdi in 1966. Under her leadership and with the belief that tasavvuf (sufism) can be the common language of humans and societies, TURKKAD has been organizing international symposiums addressing a wide range of people with a view to offering solutions to today’s problems through tasavvuf, which considers knowledge as a state to be practiced and sees worship as a journey towards love.Tuba Işık: Tuba Işık is a professor for Islamic Education and Practical Theology in the Berlin Institute of Islamic Theology at Humboldt University zu Berlin. Her research interests include religious education and its pedagogy, Virtue Ethics, Muslim Women, and Comparative theology. Işık holds a master’s degree in international public law and pedagogy from Georg-August University of Göttingen (Germany) and a Ph.D. from the University of Paderborn, Germany, meanwhile she studied Catholic Theology in Paderborn and Rome. She received further education in Islamic Education at the University of Osnabrück, as well as at the Ilahiyat Faculties of Bursa and Ankara in Turkey. Işık is the co-editor of the first textbook (2022) on the didactics of Islamic Religious Education in German. Her monography on Character Cultivation was published in 2022. Her latest published book Islamisch-Ästhetische Bildung is an edited volume in which various authors explore different dimensions of learning through aesthetic experience.Arzu Eylül Yalçınkaya: Arzu Eylül Yalçınkaya is a faculty member at the Institute for Sufi Studies at Üsküdar University. Her research explores Sufism’s intersections with modernity and secularism, focusing on late Ottoman-era Sufi movements. Yalçınkaya completed her MA thesis on the Mathnawī discourses of Ken‘ān Rifāī (d. 1950) and then undertook three years of graduate courses in religion at Harvard Extension School. Her PhD thesis, examining the life, works, and Sufi thought of Ken‘ān Rifāī, was published as a monograph (2020). Currently, she is a visiting researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, conducting postdoctoral research on the “Bridging Role of the Sufi Intellectuals Between the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey.” Her recent work on 19th-century Sufi soundscapes has led to events on Sufi music and poetry at Harvard Divinity School, the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and other related venues. Her forthcoming article, “In Pursuit of Truth: Djalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Perception of Happiness within the Mathnawī-i Ma‘nawī,” and her book on Ahmed er-Rifai’s (d. 1182) monography are in publication.Cangüzel Güner Zülfikar: Cangüzel Güner Zülfikar graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Literature, History and Geography Department of History. She completed her PhD studies on the “Aziz Mahmud Hudayi’s [ca. 1543-1628] Shrine Complex: Sufi Impact in the Civil Society Organizations in Ottoman Religious, Socio-Cultural History” at the Department of History of Hacettepe University. She gave courses on Tasawwuf and Islamic civilization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University. She was the Associate Director (2006-2010) of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at UNC-Chapel Hill. She established the Turkish Studies Program at UNC-CH in 2009, and served as an instructor there until December 2013. At present, she teaches at the Institute for Sufi Studies in Uskudar University.
