Reflections on The Life and Legacy of Fuat Sezgin: Reviving The Heritage of Islamic Knowledge

Abstract

Prof. Fuat Sezgin, who died at the age of 94 in the year 2018, was an erudite Turkish scholar who left an unmatched legacy behind him. He was indeed a pioneering scholar, devoted his entire life to the field of the history of science in Islam, par excellence. His major aim was to investigate the contributions of the Muslim scholarship to human civilization. Even though he was among the most renowned Turkish academician outside Turkey, there is little information about his life in Turkish circles. What makes him so special is not just his illustrious academic career or the amount of his publications, but also his extraordinary personality. Apart from providing biographical information, this paper will shed some light on his contributions and reveal some aspects of his productive life. Finally, the paper will examine the nature of the relationship that Fuat Sezgin had with the Orientalist tradition and try to answer the question of whether he can be characterized as an ‘Orientalist’ or not.