Şerif Mardin (1927 – 6 September 2017) was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker.
[9][10] Mardin began his academic career at the Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University in 1954 where he worked until 1956.
[10] Next, Mardin joined Sabancı University in 1999 where he contributed to the establishment of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
For instance, he argued that in the Ottoman Empire, there was no 'civil society' in the Hegelian terms that could operate independently of central government and was based on property rights.
[16] Mardin also emphasized the importance of Jon Turks' thought, addressing the attention of the English-speaking world.
[18] Therefore, reductionism in the form of binary accounts that were resulted from Kemalism cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of Turkish modernism.
[18] On the other hand, Mardin maintained that the gap between center and periphery continued during the process of Turkish modernization.
[1] Mardin coined the concept of "Turkish Exceptionalism" to reveal the reasons for the Turks in dealing with Islam and their vision of the state in a different fashion in contrast to other Muslim countries.
[19] Mardin objected the idea that the separation between religion and the state in Turkey was a product of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's movement.
[19] Mardin asserted that religion, Islam in this context, and its representatives, including clerics, function as a mediator between the individual and the state.
[1] He argued that the Naqshbandi order was "an extraordinarily resilient revivalist movement, in which all of the successful elements of modern Turkish Islamic politics have originated.