Dear members of the academic community,
In today’s world, due to the scholarly activities of scholars from different backgrounds and the atmosphere and misperceptions created on media platforms, the importance of scholarly studies about the universal heritage of the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) has exponentially increased. It is the duty and responsibility of all members of the Muslim world to not only inherit the vast horizons of the classical Islamic scholarly tradition, which was built painstakingly by thousands of scholars and people of wisdom with exceptional effort throughout the centuries, and to be in synch with the language of our times at the same time, but also to continue to build on this tradition.
With this vision, Meridyen Foundation started a project in 2007 called “lastprophet.info”, and in a short time it exceeded the limits of the digital platform and turned into a website that sponsors and supports academic projects. We have tried to contribute to this field, increase the quality of scholarly studies and reward the successful ones by such activities as the “Hadīth and Sīra Awards”, which will be organized for the 8th time in the upcoming years, “The Sīra Workshop”, which has been taking place for the last five years with an interdisciplinary perspective approaching diverse themes, and the “Conference on Sīra Studies in Turkey in All its Aspects”, which has been the culmination point of the previous workshops.
We would like to share our happiness with you in presenting the first issue of Hadīth and Sīra Studies to the use of our scholarly and intellectual world, which we have undertaken in order to add a new project to our current ones and to prepare the ground for further studies. We are looking forward to the contribution of you valuable academics to our journal, which aspires to become an international publication.
I would like to take this opportunity to extend my special thanks to the members and volunteers of the Meridyen Foundation, who always support our projects both financially and personally; to the members of the Advisory Board of Hadīth and Sīra Studies, who will assist us with their guidance; to Dr. Fatma Kızıl, our editor; and to our team.
Saliha Büyükdeniz
Meridyen Society
Chairwoman of the Board