Prof. Dr. Hayrettin KARAMAN

Prof. Dr. Hayrettin Karaman was born in Çorum in 1934 as the child of a family from Erzurum. After completing his primary school education, he privately studied Arabic and Islamic sciences. He enrolled in Imam Hatip School in Konya, one of the first Imam Hatip schools and was among the second graduates (1959). He studied at the newly opened Istanbul Higher Islamic Institute where he graduated from in 1963 as one of the first graduates. After working as an instructor for vocational courses at the Istanbul Imam Hatip School for two years, he became a research assistant in Islamic Law (fiqh) at the Istanbul Higher Islamic Institute. With his thesis on “Ictihad (judicial opinion) in Islamic Law from the beginning until the fourth century”, he became a lecturer on fiqh (1971). In the same year, he was appointed to the Izmir Higher Islamic Institute. In 1975, he returned to the Istanbul Higher Islamic Institute. After the conversion of the Higher Islamic Institutes into the Faculties of Theology, he completed his academic studies and received the titles of doctor, associate professor and then professor. He published the periodical “Nesil” magazine between September 1976 and September 1980.

Throughout his ideological and professional career which has extended for half a century, he continued the activities of education, training, advice and irşad (the act of showing the true path) by taking part in thousands of conferences, seminars, panels, sermons, courses, written and visual media programs and educational programs both in Turkey and abroad. He trained thousands of students, including today’s well-known scientists and intellectuals. In 2001, he resigned from his position at the Faculty of Theology of Marmara University, opposing the pressures prevailing in the university environment where freedom is a must. He was a visiting professor at the European International Islamic University in the Netherlands for a period of time and still continues his private and civil science studies. He has been a columnist in the Yeni Şafak daily newspaper since 1995.