I am an incoming first year PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. My research interests include the transformation of Muslim religious and political discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire and colonial India. I am particularly interested in the responses of public intellectuals, activists, ulema, and Sufis to the intellectual challenges posed to Islam by modernity. My future research will utilize 19th to 20th century sources in Arabic, Turkish, Ottoman and English.   

I finished my undergraduate degree at Istanbul Şehir University and will complete my Master's at Boğaziçi University. I am fluent in Urdu, English and Turkish. My M.A. research explores the transformation of Sufi tarikats in the Ottoman Empire during the reigns of Selim III and Mahmut II and leading up to the Tanzimat era. I analyzed the impact of Sufi tarikats as agents during nineteenth-century Ottoman reform, which resulted in new configurations and contestations of political and religious authority within the Ottoman realm.   

I am interested in exploring the historical interactions between non-European intellectual traditions and modernity, and their political and religious impact.