Ali Erbaş

Ali Erbaş (born 10 September 1961) is a Turkish Islamic scholar who was president of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in Turkey from 2017 to 2025. From that office — the state's highest religious authority in Turkey — his sermons, above all the Hagia Sophia sermon of 2020, and his statements reached a wide audience inside and outside Turkey, and some of them drew public controversy beyond Turkey's borders. ^{1 2}

His full name, as the Arabic article gives it, is Ali bin Abd al-Rahman Turgut Erbaş; he was born in Kabadüz, Ordu province, in 1961, and speaks Arabic and French. ^{2 3}

Erbaş attended elementary school in Yeşilyurt, and graduated from the Imam Hatip School in Sakarya in 1984. ¹

He received a master's degree at Marmara University in 1987, and achieved a PhD in the Department of History of Religions in 1993 at the same university. ¹

In 1993, Erbaş was appointed lecturer at the Theological Faculty of Sakarya University. He then carried out studies in his field as a guest member of the teaching staff of the Faculty of Human Sciences at the University of Strasbourg for a full year as of the beginning of the academic year 1996–1997. ¹

He returned to Turkey at the beginning of the 1997–1998 academic year and became an associate professor in November 1998 and professor in January 2004. In 2016 he was nominated as the rector of Yalova University. ¹

Ali Erbaş was appointed President of the Directorate of Religious Affairs in September 2017, succeeding Mehmet Görmez according to the Arabic article. The English article records his presidency as running from 2017 to 2025. ^{1 2 3}

As Diyanet president, Erbaş was the most prominent official voice of institutional religious discourse in Turkey: official Friday sermons, major religious occasions and public statements, a pulpit whose messages reach mosques and the public in Turkey and in Turkish communities abroad. The most prominent moment of this public presence was his sermon in the Hagia Sophia on 24 April 2020, presented in the following section. ¹

This section should be read as a presentation of differing positions reported in the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

Erbaş, in his capacity as head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, stated during a sermon in the Hagia Sophia on 24 April 2020 that homosexuality leads to illnesses, which drew criticism from the Bar Associations of Ankara and Diyarbakır. Both bar associations were investigated for insulting religious values over their critical remarks on Erbaş. During the dispute, Erbaş was supported by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who mentioned that an assault on the Diyanet's head would not be tolerated. Erbaş also claimed that HIV and all the evil and pandemics in the world are caused by homosexuality, as the article reports. A student at Istanbul Technical University faced disciplinary action after distributing a leaflet that called Erbaş "reactionary". ¹

Erbaş is married and has four children; the museum does not publish family detail beyond what understanding his work requires. ¹

Erbaş's presidency of the Diyanet lasted eight years. The Diyanet is the official institution overseeing religious affairs and mosques in Turkey, with a wide presence among Turkish communities abroad, so his discourse from that office regularly reached a large audience through Friday sermons, religious occasions and the media. ^{1 2}

• The defined sources cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• The Arabic article on Erbaş is a short stub; this page will be expanded as fuller documented articles become available.
• Later translations and edits of this article require periodic review with clear update dates.