Şerif Mardin

Şerif Mardin (1927 – 6 September 2017) was a prominent Turkish sociologist, political scientist, academic and thinker. In a 2008 publication, he was referred to as the "doyen of Turkish sociology."

Early life and education He was born in Istanbul in 1927 as Ahmed Halil Şerif Arif Mardin. His father was Şemsettin Mardin, a Turkish ambassador. Şemsettin Mardin was a member of very long-established family and was uncle to Arif Mardin and Betul Mardin. Şerif Mardin's mother was Reya Mardin who was the daughter of Ahmet Cevdet, the founder of an Ottoman newspaper called İkdam.

Mardin attended Galatasaray High School, but completed his high school education in the US in 1944. Then he received his MA degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University in 1950. He completed his PhD studies in political science at Stanford University in 1958, and his PhD dissertation was published by Princeton University Press with the title of The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought in 1962.

Career Mardin began his academic career at the Faculty of Political Science, Ankara University in 1954, where he worked until 1956.

Then, Mardin worked as a research associate at the Department of Oriental Studies of Princeton University from 1958 to 1961.

In addition to these academic posts, Mardin also worked as a visiting professor at different universities, including Columbia University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, Oxford University, Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Syracuse University. Therefore, the lack of civil society led to a difference in the social evolution and political culture in Ottoman society in contrast to Western societies. Mardin applied the terms center and periphery to the Ottoman society, and concluded that the society consisted of city dwellers, including the Sultan, his officials and nomads. In his view, the centre included city dwellers, and the periphery nomads. The integration of center and periphery was not achieved. These two societal characteristics, namely the existence of centre and periphery, and the lack of successful integration of them, also existed in the modern Turkish society, which remained to be the major duality in Turkey. Mardin also emphasized the importance of Jon Turks' thought, addressing the attention of the English-speaking world. Mardin also analyzed the thought of Said Nursi, who was part of this movement in the early years of his life. Therefore, reductionism in the form of binary accounts that were resulted from Kemalism cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of Turkish modernism. Mardin objected the idea that the separation between religion and the state in Turkey was a product of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's movement. Instead, he argued that this separation began during the Ottoman period. Islam was also a unifying code for those in the periphery during the late period of the Ottoman Empire.

In 2007, Mardin coined the term “community pressure” to describe a sociological reality that has been experienced in the secular Turkish society as a result of the rise of Islamic lifestyle in the country.

Personal life and death Şerif Mardin married twice and had a son, Osman Mardin, from his first marriage.

Mardin died in a hospital in Istanbul on 6 September 2017 at the age of 90. The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, July 2000 Laicism in Turkey, İstanbul: Konrad Adenauer Foundation Press, March 2003 Center and periphery in the Ottoman Empire, New York: Syracuse University Press 2005 The nature of nation in the late Ottoman Empire, Leiden: ISIM 2005 Religion, society, and modernity in Turkey, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, July 2006

Membership Mardin was a member of the Turkish Social Science Association, which carried out a research project in İzmir in the early 1970s. The project was funded by the Ford Foundation.