Dr. Abdullah Demir was born in 1980 in Kırşehir, originally from Yozgat. He completed his primary and secondary education in Kırıkkale and graduated from Kırıkkale Imam Hatip High School in 1997. He received his bachelor’s degree in 2002 from Uludağ University, Faculty of Theology, and completed his master’s degree at the same university in 2006 with the thesis “Faith of the Imitator (Mukallid) in the Māturīdī School of Kalām”. He earned his PhD in 2014 at Sivas Cumhuriyet University with the dissertation “The Method of Kalām of Abū Isḥāq Zāhid al-Ṣaffār”.

Between 2003 and 2011, he served at the Presidency of Religious Affairs as an imam-preacher, Qur’an course instructor, preacher, and prison chaplain. During this period, he co-authored “Dini Değerleri ile Diyarbakır (Diyarbakır with Its Religious Values)” with Ali Melek, published in 2009, and “Ceza İnfaz Kurumları Din Hizmetleri Rehberi (A Guide to Religious Services in Penal Institutions)” with Harun Işık, published by the Presidency of Religious Affairs in 2012.

From 2011 to 2017, he worked as a research assistant and faculty member at the Faculty of Theology, Cumhuriyet University. In the 2014–2015 academic year, he also taught Religious Culture and Ethics at the elementary, middle, and high school levels at Cumhuriyet University College. Within the scope of TÜBİTAK 2219 International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Nottingham, UK, between 2015 and 2016. He served as editor of Cumhuriyet Theology Journal (indexed in Web of Science ESCI and SCOPUS) from 2016 to 2019.

In 2018, with the support of Sivas Cumhuriyet University, he developed the İSNAD Citation System, an academic writing and referencing system. İSNAD has been translated into English, Arabic, and Persian and is offered as a free academic tool. As of July 2025, İSNAD is used in thesis writing by 64 graduate schools and in article writing by 177 refereed journals both in Türkiye and abroad.

He has coordinated the Türkiye Editors’ Workshop, first organized in 2018 by Sivas Cumhuriyet University and later continued as the Türkiye Editors’ Workshop series. He is also the founder of the Türkiye Editors’ Group, established in 2018 as a platform for sharing experiences in scholarly publishing, which now has 1,025 members who are editors of refereed journals.

Since 2017, he has been serving as a faculty member in the Department of Kalām at the Faculty of Theology, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. He is also editor of Eskiyeni, a journal indexed in Web of Science ESCI (Q3).

In 2020, he founded the Oku Okut Association (www.okuokut.org), a non-profit initiative aiming to develop students’ reading skills, promote reading culture in society, and provide free educational services. In 2023, he served as coordinator in the preparation of the Guide to Writing Religious Culture and Ethics Concepts, published by the Board of Education and Instruction, which includes 2,622 concepts. He is also one of the principal investigators of the Students’ Vocabulary Identification, Development, and Monitoring Project, launched by the Ministry of National Education in 2024.

Dr. Demir has publications in two main fields: Hanafi-Māturīdī religious thought and academic research and scholarly publishing. He delivers lectures and seminars in these areas both in Türkiye and in the Turkic republics. He also serves on various commissions in public institutions related to his field of expertise. He is married and has three children.