The Faculty of Islamic Sciences is a faculty that aims to conduct research, produce knowledge and train scholars, adopting as its principle the understanding and interpretation of permanent and universal religious values in a way that also takes into account the needs of the individual and society.
Among the fundamental aims of our Faculty are to give new expression to enduring and universal religious/Islamic and cultural values through lived experience, and to develop a language and discourse that closely engages with the problems people encounter in their search for meaning, in order to understand and explain them and to produce reliable, humane solutions. Our Faculty approaches humanity, nature and existence in general from a holistic perspective that does not observe a fact-value distinction.
Education at the Faculty of Islamic Sciences extends over four years following a one-year compulsory Arabic preparatory class. In the Arabic preparatory class, courses are taught by expert Turkish and international faculty members and instructors. During the four-year undergraduate programme, 30% of the courses are also taught in Arabic. In addition, our successful students have the opportunity to benefit from “double major” and “minor” programmes.
Master's and doctoral programmes have been opened in the Division of Basic Islamic Sciences at our Faculty. Master's programmes have also been opened in the Division of Islamic History and Arts and the Division of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
One of the issues our Faculty emphasizes with importance and priority is ensuring that our students learn English to a sufficient level, bringing them to a level where they can comfortably follow and benefit from the foreign literature. To achieve this, various opportunities in Turkey and abroad are provided to students.
The main driving force behind the emergence of the Faculty of Islamic Sciences has been a perspective based on a deep-rooted understanding of religion and civilization. A proper understanding of our religious and cultural values, and the interpretation, in a language that will speak to people today, of the principles of faith and the conception of existence that gave rise to the manifestations of Islamic civilization in various places and periods, form the general framework of this Faculty's educational programme. Islamic civilization is a civilization built on the principles of Islamic faith. In this civilization's perception of existence, conception of truth, and aesthetic taste and understanding, the notions of being, knowledge and value display an inseparable unity. Based on this fact, the inseparability of being, knowledge and value will be an approach particularly observed in the general educational processes and activities of the Faculty of Islamic Sciences.
The goal is to educate young people who have internalized our permanent, universal religious and cultural values and the understanding of truth on which these values rest, who interpret these values while also seeing similar values in other cultural and civilizational worlds, and who produce reliable knowledge on these subjects. In short, it is to ensure that our students enter life as well-rounded people with a strong identity, character and self-confidence, and that they turn to academic research.
In order to understand and interpret these matters at the necessary and sufficient level, in line with the reasons for our Faculty's establishment and its aims, and to bring them together with life, education, teaching and research activities are carried out through the following programmes:
These programmes are as follows:
- Islamic Sciences (30% Arabic)
- Islamic Sciences (Arabic)
This distinction or naming has been made taking into account what the phenomenon of Islam is, the dimensions of its intellectual, philosophical and theological aspects, and the forms in which it has manifested itself in different times and regions.
In the courses of the Department of Basic Islamic Sciences, an effort is made to interpret correctly, with reference to the Qur’an and Hadith, the body of principles and rules that Islam has set out in the areas of faith, worship and ethics.
The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, on the other hand, focuses on what the ‘belief’, ‘thought’ and ‘lived experience’ dimensions of Islam, and of religion in general, are, how these dimensions are reflected in life in their aspects concerning the individual and society, and how they should be understood.