TÜBA Publishes Details of the Museum of the History of Islamic Science and Technology
TÜBA published "The Istanbul Museum for the History of Science and Technology in Islam", based on the 5-volume work "Science and Technology in Islam" by TÜBA Honorary Member Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin, in partnership with the Islamic Science History Research Foundation (İBTAV).
The book, which includes nearly 600 instruments, device replicas, model drawings and photographs exhibited in "The Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam" in Istanbul Gülhane Park, as well as historical details, was presented for the convenience of the academy.
President Şeker said: "Fuat Sezgin challenged the Eurocentric approach to the history of science with his research."
Reminding that TÜBA Member Prof. Sezgin dedicated his life to ensuring that Islamic civilization finds the value it deserves, TÜBA President Prof. Muzaffer Şeker said that visionary works such as "Science and Technique in Islam", first written in German and later translated into Turkish under the auspices of TÜBA, reveal the contribution of Islamic civilization to science. He stated that Prof. Sezgin's great efforts in this direction throughout his life were crowned with the opening of the 'Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam' in Istanbul Gülhane Park in 2008. Stating that the work was presented by TÜBA as a gift in memory of Prof. Sezgin on the 6th anniversary of his death, President Şeker said, "Publishing the works of our Honorary Member Prof. Fuat Sezgin and making his valuable contributions to the world of science visible is very important, especially for the Islamic world. Civilization is the collective heritage of humanity. While Europe has long portrayed the Middle Ages as a universal "thousand years of darkness", recent research reveals that during the same period, the Islamic world experienced a significant enlightenment characterized by advances in science and reason. This Islamic enlightenment significantly influenced Europe's intellectual revival. These contributions by Sezgin challenged the traditional Eurocentric view of the history of science, emphasizing the need to acknowledge diverse perspectives in the history of science."
Who is Prof. Dr. Fuat Sezgin?
Born on October 24, 1924 in Bitlis, he studied at Istanbul University, Faculty of Literature, Institute of Orientalism under the German Orientalist Hellmut Ritter, a pioneer in the field of Islamic Sciences and Orientalism. Upon Ritter's advice, he increased his scientific work hours to 18 hours a day. Prof. Fuat Sezgin, after whom this street in our university is named, is a scholar who devoted his life to the study of the History of Islamic Sciences and is considered the greatest living authority of this discipline. He did not read any of the sources he utilized from translations, but from the original language by learning the language itself. In this way, he learned nearly 30 foreign languages. In 1961, Fuat Sezgin went to Germany and lectured at the University of Frankfurt, first as a visiting associate professor. In 1965, he became a professor at Frankfurt University. For nearly thirty years, he had been conducting his studies at the Institute for Research in the History of Arab-Islamic Sciences, affiliated with Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he was also the founder and director. At this institute, he published around 1400 books on the history of Islamic science. He learned bookbinding and bound the books in his library of 10 thousand manuscripts himself. Prof. Sezgin is also the founder of the Museum of the Institute for Research on the History of Arab-Islamic Sciences at Goethe University. In this museum, around 800 objects related to the history of Islamic Science, the focus of Fuat Sezgin's scientific studies was the history of natural sciences in the Arab-Islamic cultural environment and he did his habilitation work in this field in 1965. He continued his work on the history of Arabic-Islamic literature (Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums) from the 7th/14th century onwards, which he started while still in Istanbul, in Germany and published the first volume of his 13-volume work, which has become a source work for orientalist studies and has still not been surpassed, in 1967 and the last volume in 2000. Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, which deals with all the main and subsidiary sciences of the early period of Islam, from religious and historical literature to geography and cartography, Sezgin played a pioneering role in the opening of the Istanbul Museum of Islam, Science and Technology under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on May 25, 2008, by commissioning the replicas of the scientific instruments and equipment he prepared for the Institute of Arab-Islamic Sciences.
Prof. Sezgin was the first recipient of the King Faisal Foundation of Saudi Arabia's Islamic Sciences Award in 1978 and also received the Distinguished Service Award from the Federal Republic of Germany. He received many awards such as the Iranian Islamic Sciences Book Award. Prof. Sezgin still has collaborations with TÜBA, TÜBİTAK, the Moroccan Academy of Sciences and the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad.