uskudar.edu.tr 
Carl W. Ernst was born in LA in 1950. He 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.
https://carlwernst.web.unc.edu/