Islam expert Martin van Bruinessen wins prestigious Turkish jury prize
Emeritus Professor Martin van Bruinessen (Islam and Arabic) has been awarded the Sakip Sabanci International Research Award 2015, a highly prestigious academic award in Turkey. The jury honoured him with this lifetime achievement award for his work on Kurds and Alevis.
This year the award’s theme was ‘Living Together, Dialog & Cooperation within Diversity in Turkey’. Martin van Bruinessen was awarded the Jury Prize for his outstanding work and lifelong commitment to using the science of anthropology specifically for living together, dialog and cooperation within diversity.
Martin van Bruinessen is Emeritus Professor of the Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at Utrecht University. He was trained as a theoretical physicist but later switched to anthropology and conducted many years of field research in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia. His published work is informed by a strong interest in history and politics. He has carried out fieldwork among the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria since the mid-1970s. His book Agha, Shaikh and State: On the Social and Political Organization of Kurdistan (1992) spearheaded the largely unexplored area of Kurdish studies and has been translated in many languages including German, Persian, Kurdish and Arabic. His recent focus is on religion and Islam in the transnational sphere.
Sakip Sabanci International Research Award
The Sakip Sabanci International Research Awards were established in 2005 in order to encourage research on all aspects of Turkish culture, society and politics, and to uphold distinguished examples of fresh research with a view to engaging intellectual attention on Turkey’s role in the contemporary world. The award has been endowed in honour of the late Sakip Sabanci, Honorary Chairman of Sabanci University’s Board of Trustees, and covers fields such as Turkish and Islamic Art and the History, Economy and Sociology of Turkey. Every year an international jury selects a number of promising young researchers for an Essay Award and a senior researcher for the Jury Prize.