Prof. Dr. Fuat SEZGİN 1924-2018

He studied Orientalism and Islamic Sciences at Istanbul University in the 1940s. He studied under the German orientalist Hellmut Ritter, who was an authority in his field. When his teacher said that the basis of the sciences was based on "Islamic Sciences", he turned to this field. In 1954, he completed his doctoral dissertation, "Sources of Bukhari" in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at İstanbul University. Following the 1960 revolution, he emigrated to Germany in 1961 because a decision was taken to remove him from the university. He started to give lectures as a guest professor at the Institute of History of Natural Sciences at the J. J. Goethe-University in Frankfurt. In 1966, he became a professor. The focus of his scientific studies was on the "History of Sciences of Arab-Islamic Culture". Since 1967, he published 17 volumes of his well-known work, the History of Arab-Islamic Sciences, in German. Only the first volume of this work was published in Turkish under the name of “History of Arab-Islamic Sciences”. He first taught at the Institute of Natural Sciences History as a J.W. Goethe University Professor. In 1982, he founded the Institute of Arab Islamic History of Sciences and the museum affiliated to J.W.Goethe-University. A similar museum of this museum, which has been made by Muslim scholars and exhibited examples of instruments, scientific instruments and materials based on written sources, was built in the Gülhane Park of Istanbul as the "Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam". In 2010, Prof. Fuat Sezgin founded the Islamic Foundation of History of Science Research in order to support the activities of the museum in İstanbul. He has received numerous International King Faisal awards, the Frankfurt Goethe Plaque and the German State Distinguished Service Medal. Sezgin was awarded the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Prize in 2013, and lastly in 2017 he received the “DOST Service to Islam Award”.