Assistant Professor Abdullah Akgül

Analytic philosophy of religion has been built largely around propositional belief. It asks whether theistic belief is rational, how it is justified, and what follows from the divine attributes. What religious people actually do — pray, fast, prostrate, gather, repeat — has remained at the edge of the discipline, treated as material for the sociology or psychology of religion rather than as a philosophical problem in its own right.

My work argues that this is a genuine omission rather than a division of labour, and that worship is the case where the omission costs most. Two questions organise the research. The first concerns grounds: what is it about God that makes worship a fitting response, and how does a fittingness claim become an obligation? The second concerns form: granted that some response is owed, what determines which acts count as discharging it? My answer separates these, and locates the second in the will of the object of worship, understood as murād and kept distinct from divine command.

The Islamic tradition supplies conceptual resources for both questions that the current English-language literature has not used. The status-based relation of rubūbiyya and ʿubūdiyya, the distinction between compelled and chosen submission (taskhīr and ikhtiyār), and the lexical analysis of ʿibāda in al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī each do philosophical work that is difficult to reconstruct from Western sources alone. Recovering that work, and stating it in terms a contemporary philosopher of religion can assess, is the methodological centre of what I do.

Alongside this, I continue to work on al-Ghazālī: the structure of metaphysical knowledge in the Deliverance from Error, the epistemic role he assigns to prophethood, and his account of religious experience as a journey toward human perfection. In Turkish, my aim has been to establish philosophy of worship (ibadet felsefesi) as a named subfield with its own agenda.