Associate Professor of Islamic Studies

[email protected]

B.A. – Ankara University, 1995
M.A. – Marmara University, 1999
M.A. – Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, 2006
Ph.D. – University of Chicago, 2018

Areas of specialization: Qur’anic Studies, Classical Arabic, Sufism, Islamic Theology, Islamic History, Ottoman History, World Religions> 

Dr. Halim Calis graduated from Ankara University (Ankara, Turkey) and completed his first M.A. in Islamic Theology at Marmara University (Istanbul, Turkey). He subsequently earned a second M.A. in World Religions from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

His doctoral dissertation focuses on Shams al-Dīn al-Fanārī (d. 1431), a major Ottoman scholar who critically engaged Akbarī hermeneutics in his Qur’anic commentary. In addition to his formal academic training, Dr. Calis has studied the classical sources of Islamic scholarship since the early 1990s.

Dr. Calis conducts research in English, Turkish, and Arabic, and has reading proficiency in French and Persian. His scholarship includes encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles published in both Turkish and English.

Selected Recent Publications

• “Mary’s Prophethood Reassessed: Overlooked Medieval Islamic Perspectives in Contemporary Scholarship.” Religions 15, no. 4 (2024): 461.
• “‘ʿAyn al-Aʿyān’: The First Prominent Qur’anic Commentary in Ottoman History.” Australian Journal of Islamic Studies 7, no. 1 (2022).
• “The Theoretical Foundations of Contextual Interpretation of the Qur’an in Islamic Theological Schools and Philosophical Sufism.” Religions 13, no. 2 (2022).
• “The Hadith ‘Four Aspects of the Qur’an’ and the Evolution of Sufi Exegesis.” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 22, no. 3 (2020).