Sheikh Muhammed Amin Serraj, the chief Turkish scholar specialized in the science of hadith, died in Istanbul at the age of 90, after a period of infection with the Corona virus, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his deputy Fuad Oktay and Parliament Speaker Mustafa Shantub mourned him.
Ömrünün her safhasında rızayı ilâhî için gösterdiği büyük gayretlere şahitlik ettiğimiz, çok kıymetli İslâm âlimi Muhammed Emin Saraç hocamıza Cenab-ı ediyum.
Muhterem hocamızın mekânı cennet, makamı âlî olsun.
- Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RTErdogan) February 19, 2021
Amin Serraj was born in a village belonging to the state of Tukad, North Anatolia, near the Black Sea, to a family known for its interest in religious sciences and knowledge, and he learned the Qur’an early and began recitation at the age of six, in an era when teaching the Qur’an was forbidden.
His father, Hafiz Mustafa Effendi, was sentenced to 6 months in prison because he taught his children the Qur’an and the Arabic language, and after a period his family sent him to study for 3 years in the state of Merzifon starting in 1940, and later he went to Istanbul and was sponsored by the Imam of the Al-Fatih Mosque, Umar Effendi for a period, before he went to Karagomrk School and taught Sahih Al-Bukhari on Sheikh Suleiman Effendi, who gave him his first degree in Hadith Sciences.
Until the year 1950, the boy was studying religious sciences and hadiths in Istanbul, and he studied Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Maraqi al-Falah, Sahih Muslim and other books of hadiths and interpretation, then he went to Egypt to study in Al-Azhar.
The late Sheikh narrated the difficult "migration" journey, as reaching Egypt was not as easy as he thought, and he was unable to obtain the required passport due to the circumstances of that stage, and he tried to make his way through Baghdad.
He took the train to Diyarbakir, then went to Mardin, but he could not complete the journey, so he returned to his hometown and then to Istanbul again, and later managed to obtain a passport with the help of a friend of his grandfather, and finally traveled to Egypt, where he studied at the hands of sheikhs and scholars of hadith, and got acquainted with Senior scholars of Egypt and the Levant.
The late Sheikh Muhammad Amin Serraj with some of his students in Turkey (Anatolia)
In Egypt, Serraj got to know Mustafa Sabri Effendi al-Tawqadi (1869-1954) who is also affiliated with Tuqad, and Sheikh Muhammad Zahid al-Kawthari (1879-1952) who also studied at the Al-Fateh Mosque in Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire, and because of his suffering with the policies of the Union and Progress Party during The era of the First World War and its negative attitude towards religious sciences. Al-Kawthari rode a ship to Alexandria in 1922, and lived between Egypt and the Levant, then settled in Cairo and worked on translating documents from the Turkish to Arabic in the Archives House in Cairo, and authored dozens of well-known books on the science of speech, belief and thought Islamic.
Serraj graduated from Al-Azhar at the end of the fifties of the last century, with the encouragement of his teacher Ali Haydar Effendi, and then returned to Turkey to marry and serve religious knowledge and hadith sciences in his country and in the Al-Fateh Mosque for more than 60 years.
Sheikh Amin Serraj completed his compulsory military service during the coup in 1960, and upon completion of his military service he was subjected to an appointment test, as he became an official sheikh in the country, but he wanted to stay in Istanbul and teach in it independently of the job.
He resigned from the endowments and went for the Hajj, and after his return he began giving scientific lectures in the endowments and educational societies.
The late Sheikh was known to be more interested in his students than in writing and writing. He took care of more than two thousand students, and over the years, along with other Turkish translators, he translated Arabic books into Turkish, including “In the Shadows of the Qur’an” by Sayyid Qutb, and others.