Semiha Cemal: A Portrait of a Turkish Sufi Philosopher - Paperback

Yalcinkaya, Arzu Eylul: - Dr. Arzu Eylül Yalçınkaya is a theologian and historian whose work traverses the intersections of Sufi thought, Ottoman intellectual history, and the ethical architecture of modernity. Trained in Islamic sciences and the history of Sufism, she brings a philological eye and a metaphysical sensitivity to the study of late Ottoman and early Republican texts, with particular attention to figures who straddled spiritual and bureaucratic domains. She is a faculty member at Üsküdar University's Institute for Sufi Studies and the founding director of The Kenan Center for Turkish Cultural Studies in Boston. Alongside her academic appointment in Istanbul, she served as a visiting researcher at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where she conducted post-doctoral research on late Ottoman Sufi intellectuals and the bridging roles of Sufi bureaucrats. Yalçınkaya works across disciplines to examine how metaphysical inquiry, aesthetic form, and moral imagination were reconfigured in response to modern secular reforms. A published writer in her fields of expertise, she also contributes to peer-reviewed journals, critical translations, and public lectures, and performs Turkish classical and Sufi devotional music as part of her broader inquiry into embodied knowledge. Her current work explores alternative genealogies of Turkish philosophy through women mystics and thinkers such as Semiha Cemāl, whose writings she positions within a global history of metaphysical literature.