Special "Friend" Awards for Service to Islam

The Prophet, who was sent as a mercy to the worlds. The “Friend” Awards for Service to Islam, which are given every year to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his love that unites everyone under the banner of tawhid, were presented to their owners on December 25thunder the name of “Special” “DOST” Awards for Service to Islam as a special feature of 2015, the year in which a second Mawlid Qandil was observed. “Cân-ı Candır, Hz. Ahmed, Muhammad, Mustafâ” “Special” “DOST” Service to Islam Awards, which were presented at the night organized under the title Assoc. Dr. İbrahim Kalınand Rene Guénonfrom abroad.

Assoc. Dr. İbrahim Kalın He was deemed worthy of the award with his approaches that center the social imagination, the insightful perspective he offers to the way Islam is handled, and his international level works and academic studies that reflect the Turkish Islamic perspective on Islamophobia in depth. Assoc. Dr. İbrahim Kalın He is currently serving as the Presidential Spokesperson. Rene Guénon (1886-1951) (Abdülvâhid Yahyâ) deeply influenced the world of religion, thought and art, especially with his works in which he discussed all religions and criticized Western civilization in every aspect. As one of the most important Muslim thinkers of our time, Guénon was awarded the “Special “DOST” Award for Service to Islam”. The award was presented to his son, Abdülvâhid Yahyâ Guénon, at the evening.

The Prophet, who served Islam with his works. Within the scope of the “DOST” Service to Islam Awards, which was initiated in 2005 under the leadership of Cemâlnur Sargut, President of the Istanbul Branch of the Turkish Women’s Cultural Association, in order to show loyalty to the friends of the Prophet, 26 academicians, artists and intellectuals from Turkey and abroad have been presented with the “DOST” Service to Islam Award.

Organized by TÜRKKAD – Turkish Women’s Cultural Association and KERİM Education, Culture and Health Foundation, the 12. Dr. Ahmet Murat Özel “Truth-i-Muhammadi” on the theme of “The world is a place of peace”. The night ended with a concert given by the Lâ Edrî Sufi Music Ensemble after the awards were presented.

Sponsors of the Night: Nefes Publishing House Inc., Tuti Book, Creative Films.
Date: Friday, December 25, 2015
Location: Istanbul Congress Center – Harbiye Hall / ISTANBUL
Award Ceremony 19:00
Entrance Free / Open to the public
Tel: 0216 359 40 91

Ibrahim Kalin
Rene Guenon

Ibrahim Kalin

Ambassador Assoc. Dr. İbrahim Kalın

Deputy Secretary General of the Presidency – Presidential Spokesperson

Born in 1971 in Istanbul, İbrahim Kalın graduated from Istanbul University, Department of History in 1992. He received his master’s degree in Islamic philosophy from 1993-95 at ISTAC of the International Islamic University of Malaysia, of which Turkey was one of the founders. Kalın received his PhD in Humanities and Comparative Philosophy from George Washington University and was awarded the title of doctor in 2002 for his thesis on Molla Sadra’s view of existence and philosophy of knowledge. He has lectured on Islamic thought, Islam-West relations and Turkey at the College of the Holy Cross, Georgetown, Bilkent and TOBB universities. He conducted academic research at the Islamic Research Center of the Religious Foundation of Turkey.

İbrahim Kalın has published books and articles on Islamic philosophy, Islam-West relations and Turkish foreign policy. His book Islam and the West (Istanbul: ISAM Publications, first edition 2007; second edition 2013), which won the 2007 Writers’ Union of Turkey Idea Award, has been translated into Greek and Albanian. The Turkish translation of his work Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect and Intuition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), which deals with the problem of existence and knowledge in Mulla Sadra, was published by Klasik Publications under the title Varlık ve İdrak: Mulla Sadra’s Conception of Knowledge. Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), co-edited with John Esposito, addresses the recent resurgence of Islamophobia in the West and the question of pluralism. The Turkish version of the book was published by İnsan Publishing in 2015 Islamophobia 21. The Problem of Pluralism in the Century published under the title.

Kalın edited Foreign Policy in Turkey in the 2000s (Istanbul: Meydan Yayınları, 2012). He co-edited War and Peace in Islam: The Uses and Abuses of Jihad (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2013) with M. Ghazi bin Muhammad and M. Hashim Kamali. Kalın was also the editor-in-chief of the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science and Technology in Islam .

He has contributed to encyclopedic works such as DIA Encyclopedia of Islam, MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Encyclopedia of Religion, Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy, Holy People of the World: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World and Oxford Islamic Studies Online.

İbrahim Kalın was the founding president of the SETA Foundation between 2005 and 2009. During this period, he focused on research, reporting and publishing activities for policy making. Having served as the Prime Ministry Public Diplomacy Coordinator between 2009 and 2012, Kalın was appointed as the Deputy Undersecretary for Foreign Policy Affairs of the Prime Ministry on August 2, 2012. Mr. Kalın, who has been serving as Deputy Secretary General of the Presidency since September 2014, was also appointed as the Presidential Spokesperson in December 2014.

Kalın, whose articles, comments and interviews have been published in the national press as well as in many international newspapers, television and news agencies such as the Guardian, Financial Times, Washington Post, New York Times, al-Sharq al-Awsat, al-Jazeera Network and al-Arabiyya, writes weekly for the Daily Sabah newspaper. Kalın is very interested in music and performs Turkish Folk Music.

Kalın is married and has three daughters.

Rene Guenon

Rene Guenon, a French Sufi mystic and thinker known for his intellectual take on Islamic, Indian and Chinese Sufi doctrines and his views that criticize the modern world in every aspect, was born in France on November 15, 1886. He was born into a purely French and Catholic family.

He began his education by studying philosophy. In 1912, he converted to Islam through Abd al-Hādī, the caliph of the sheikh of al-Azhar, Mālikī scholar and sheikh of the Shāzeliyya order, Abd al-Rahman Ilīsh al-Kabīr, and became a member of the Shāzeliyya order and took the name of Abd al-Wāhid Yahyā.

In October 1917, he taught philosophy and French and Latin at the college in Sétif, Algeria. He returned to France in October 1918 and became a teacher of philosophy at the Augustin-Thierry College in Blois, his birthplace. The following year, he quit teaching and went to Paris. In the 1920s, he worked as a librarian at the University of Paris. During these years, he received Hindu, Muslim and Christian visitors at his home and held conversations. He also attended gatherings of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Christian youth in the homes of some of his friends.

In 1929, he settled in Egypt, where he brought Sufi works and translated them. In the winter of 1931, he informed his friends that he had given up returning to France and began to live in Cairo as “Sheikh Abd al-Wāhid Yahyā”, adopting all the customs and traditions of his new homeland. In July 1934, he married Sheikh Muhammad Ibrāhīm’s eldest daughter Fātima. The following year, he wrote to his friends and asked them to vacate his house in Paris and send him the books and documents. Sheikh Abubakir, a British Muslim who settled in Cairo, Valantine de Saint-Point, Lamartine’s young nephew who converted to Islam and took the name Rûhiye Nûreddin, and Sheikh Abdulkadir, an American Muslim, had conversations with him from time to time. On November 23, 1948, he applied for Egyptian nationality. It was only after long attempts and very high levels of intervention that this wish was realized. His health, which had deteriorated in 1947, deteriorated further in the last months of 1950. He died on January 7, 1951.

In his works, Abdülvâhid Yahyâ mostly analyzes Hindu doctrines and uses their terminology, but he occasionally mentions all religions. The sects he belonged to were the Shâzeliyya and the Akbariyya. In his article “Islamic Sufism”, he states that the difference between shari’ah and truth is most clearly expressed in Islam, and that shari’ah is common to all, while truth is reserved for a group of havas with sufficient ability. According to him, Islamic Sufism was not born under any external influence. Hz. It has a chain of initiation reaching back to the Prophet and is completely Islamic.

Abdülvâhid Yahyâ deeply influenced various religious, intellectual and artistic circles by mentioning all existing and past religions in his works and criticizing modern Western civilization in every aspect. The followers of his ideas gathered in the journal Études Traditionelles and continued this journal in line with his views after his death. Titus Burckhardt (Ibrâhim İzzeddin), Michel (Mustafa) Valsan, the Swiss Fritjof Schuon (Shaykh Îsâ), Martin Lings (Abûbekir Sirâceddin), and Ananda K. Coomaraywamy, despite some intellectual disagreements, have published valuable scholarly works on his main ideas.

Abdülvâhid Yahyâ’s works have been translated into Western languages such as English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German. He used the name René Guénon in his books, and only the articles he wrote in Arabic were published under the name Abdülvâhid Yahyâ. He wrote seventeen books and about 350 articles, five of them in Arabic, and his articles were compiled according to their subjects and published in nine volumes after his death. He has many works published in Turkish, such as East and West, The Depression of the Modern World, The Symbolism of Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions, Islamic Spirituality and Taoism, Man and His States According to Vedanta, Christian Mystical Thought, The Great Trinity.