When I was still a student, I was never really satisfied with formal school education. I felt it lacked the ability to address my entire being. While my mind was being nourished with abstract knowledge, my soul yearned for more. It wasn’t long before I pursued other sources of knowledge. Many traditional scholars still lived and taught in Istanbul, continuing a legacy of a timeless tradition. I knocked on the doors of some of these scholars and by the grace of God, they accepted me as their student. They opened up before me new horizons of knowledge that were simply not available in modern academic education.

Yet they never discouraged me from continuing my formal education. On the contrary, they advised me to combine both traditional Islamic education with modern academic education to become a scholar with two wings (dhū al-janāḥayn). They impressed upon me the idea that what our modern age desperately needs is this kind of well-rounded scholar. So, I completed my traditional education with them while continuing my modern academic training in Istanbul, Cairo, and New York. I always remember them with gratitude and send prayers upon their souls. Among them is Talip Uluşan who first initiated me to the path of Islamic knowledge in 1976. I was still a young child when he met me in my father’s shop and taught me Tajwīd, Ṣarf, and Naḥw. There is also the venerable Mahmut Kaya, who privately taught me Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn among other subjects in his home for many years; Mustafa Al-Azami whom I first met in New York but came to Istanbul to teach me and my friends hadith, and Muhammed Emin Er, whom I first met in New York and who continued to teach me privately in my home and his home in New York, Istanbul and Ankara until he departed this world to travel to the eternal abode. May Allah be pleased with all of them.

After I reached a certain level of knowledge, my teachers encouraged me to teach other students in order that I may continue this tradition and keep it alive. This is how I began teaching students in private and on a voluntary basis, in my home or at my office. Sometimes we met in a quiet corner of a mosque. Through these lessons, my students and I forged a strong bond of fellowship similar to the one I had with my teachers. This relationship was characterized by highly refined good adab (manners), mutual love and care. In the meantime, I successfully carried on my academic work, teaching and researching at various universities. My education is a combination of private tutoring in traditional Islamic disciplines by respected scholars and modern academic training under prominent academicians in Istanbul and New York. This opened my mind to various ways of looking at things from a comparative and critical perspective. It also made me realize that we should be epistemologically inclusive and avoid false dichotomies in our thinking between religion and science or tradition and modernity.