Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
What if history had been written without you? This was not merely a rhetorical question for Fuat Sezgin, it was the existential void he devoted his life to confronting.
In the modern age of performative scholarship and spectacle, there are those who seek visibility without substance. Fuat Sezgin stood in quiet contrast, an intellectual ascetic whose scholarship breathed life into civilizations dismissed as marginal or irrelevant by dominant historical narratives. He did not command stages or headlines; instead, he wandered silently through the archives, waging a battle not of arms, but of memory. His adversary was neither empire nor ideology, but erasure.
For centuries, a Eurocentric historiography had posited that science, reason, and rational inquiry were born and matured exclusively in the West. In this reductionist vision, the Islamic world was rendered a void, a civilizational hiatus between antiquity and modernity. Sezgin understood not only the inaccuracy of this claim, but its violence.
And so he wrote.
His commitment to writing was not born of ambition, though he possessed it; nor purely of brilliance, though he embodied it. Rather, it emerged from a deeper locus: grief and resistance. Grief at a legacy obscured and resistance against the silence that had congealed around it.
Following the 1960 military coup in Türkiye, Sezgin was dismissed from his academic post. For many, such a rupture would have marked an end. For Sezgin, it became the beginning of a second intellectual life. In exile in Frankfurt, he embarked upon what may be described as one of the most extraordinary acts of scholarly recovery in the modern era. He combed through Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts scattered across European archives, not to romanticize a past, but to document its reality.
What he found was staggering.
Through painstaking research, Sezgin reconstructed an intellectual tradition that spanned disciplines – astronomy, medicine, geography, optics, mathematics – emerging within Islamic contexts centuries before Europe’s so-called scientific renaissance. His magnum opus, “Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums” (“History of Arabic Literature”), comprises 17 volumes and stands not merely as a bibliographic record, but as an intellectual monument, a systematic refutation of the historiographical silences imposed on Islamic science.
Sezgin did more than resurrect individual names such as al-Khwarizmi, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Razi; he illuminated the broader epistemological ecosystem in which these scholars operated: one where the binaries between faith and reason, science and philosophy, art and engineering were non-existent.
And yet perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Sezgin’s journey was not what he discovered, but what he confirmed: The knowledge had never been lost; it had been withheld. The manuscripts he studied had long resided in European institutions. The erasure was not due to absence, but to neglect, sometimes deliberate.
Sezgin’s work did not end at cataloguing. In 1982, he founded the Institute for the History of the Arab-Islamic Sciences in Frankfurt. Later, he established the Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam in Istanbul. These institutions were not mere displays of cultural heritage. They were interventions in collective memory. Inside them, one encounters celestial globes, surgical tools and astronomical instruments, reconstructed not from conjecture, but from textual evidence. They are not symbols; they are counter-arguments.
These spaces, quiet yet radical, whisper a defiant truth: “You were here. You always were.”
Despite the scope of his achievement, Sezgin eschewed fame. He did not seek applause, only continuity. He understood that intellectual recovery is not completed in a single lifetime. His greatest wish was that others would take up the task; deciphering, translating, expanding and ultimately re-inscribing Islamic scientific heritage into global intellectual consciousness.
How does one chart a life like Sezgin’s? Not in titles or medals, though he received many, but in small, revolutionary acts: opening a manuscript untouched for centuries, decoding marginalia that revealed forgotten debates, or seeing the silhouette of a ninth-century insight in a 21st-century equation.
We speak too little of this kind of silence, the silence of unnamed translators, of erased maps, of misattributed theories. The silence that settles when a civilization no longer sees itself in the mirror of its own history.
Sezgin refused that silence.
He taught that memory is not nostalgia, it is justice. To reclaim buried knowledge is not an act of arrogance; it is an act of survival.
Now that he is gone, the temptation is to commemorate and move on. But Sezgin resisted commemoration for its own sake. What he demanded silently and consistently was pursuit. He wanted archives reopened, manuscripts studied, histories rewritten, not to glorify the past, but to recalibrate the present.
For when history is written without you, the world itself becomes illegible. But when someone like Fuat Sezgin writes you back into it, you begin to see clearly again.
We owe him no statue, no holiday. We owe him a question: “What will we do with the civilization he brought back to life?”
This is not a question to be answered quickly, nor should it be. But on 27 June 2025, the Turkish Presidency’s Directorate of Communications took a rare and necessary step toward confronting it, hosting a panel titled “The Legacy of Fuat Sezgin: Building Bridges through Science and Diplomacy.” This was more than a commemoration; it was a summons. A call to ensure that the silence surrounding an entire intellectual heritage does not, and must not, return.
