İsmail Kara is a Turkish academic born in 1955 in Rize, Turkey. His fields of interest include Islamic philosophy, history, and political science, and he is one of the leading authorities in Ottoman Turkish intellectual history, Islamism in the Ottoman Empire and the early Republic, and the process of modernization in the Ottoman Empire. He has authored several monographs and articles, such as The Notion of Islamism in Turkey (3 volumes, I: 1986, II: 1987, III: 1994); Political Opinions of Pan-Islamism (1994); Creating A Language of Philosophy: Entrance of Modern Philosophical and Scientific Terms into Turkey (2001); Reflections on the Matter of Commentaries and Glosses (2011); Between Religion and Modernization: Problems of Contemporary Turkish Thought (2003); The Mevlevi Lodge of Hania/Crete (2006). His writings also feature widely in newspapers and magazines. He is currently a professor in the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University in Istanbul. He is also one of the editors-in-chief of Dergah Publishing, where he oversees a number of publishing projects.