He pursued his education in Kayseri and Istanbul, where he studied under Ahmed Asim Efendi and received his certificate of proficiency (icazetname).

He passed the Rüus-ı Tedris examination (teaching qualification exam) and became a teacher (müderris) at Fatih Mosque in Constantinople.

Although he thanked the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) and the army in an article in the first issue of Bayan-ul-Haq for ending the Hamidian regime, shortly afterwards he joined the opposition to the party.

Sabri first went to Romania and then to Greece, where he published an anti-Kemalist newspaper in which he violently attacked the new Turkish regime and its founder, Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938).

[6] One of the persons that he debated on scholarly issues was Mahmud Shaltut, who took office in various levels and rose to prominence with his reformist thoughts.

After the abolition of the Sultanate and the position of Shaykh al-Islām in 1922, he published his Al-Nakir 'ala Munkiri al-Ni'ma min al-Din wa-al-Khilafa wa-al-Umma (Arabic: النكير على منكري النعمة من الدين والخلافة والأمة).

Sabri presents the Kemalists as decadents, Turkish chauvinists who colluded with the British against Islam and the caliphate, and Kemal Atatürk as a concealed Jew.

The book is a direct response to Atatürk's attempt to have all prayers performed in modern Turkish rather than in their original form in Arabic.

His four-volume magnum opus Mawqif al-'Aql wa-al-'Ilm wa-al-'Alim min Rabb al-'Alamin wa-'Ibadihi al-Mursalin (Arabic: موقف العقل والعلم والعالم من رب العالمين وعباده المرسلين, lit.

'The Position of Reason, Knowledge, and the Scholar in regards to the Lord of the Worlds and His divinely Sent Servants') is devoted to a detailed analysis and criticism of many issues of twentieth-century Islamic modernism.