Martin van Bruinessen

Martin van Bruinessen (born 10 July 1946, Schoonhoven) is a Dutch anthropologist and author, who has published a number of publications on the Kurdish, Indonesian, Turkish, Persian, and Zazas cultures, and also on aspects of Islam as a whole.

He taught the sociology of religion at the State Institute of Islamic Studies of Yogyakarta, Indonesia and has been teaching Kurdish and Turkish studies at Utrecht University, the Netherlands since 1994 as associate professor. He shifted his emphasis in 1998 to a broader scope, Islamic Studies, after becoming Professor of the Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies at Utrecht University.

He also wrote and researched some issues of the early stages of Islam in Java.