Hakan is a lecturer, and supervisor of HDR students at CISAC at Charles Sturt University. He completed his PhD at Australian Catholic University in 2015. His PhD research is on early modern exegesis of the Qur’an (Said Nursi, Muhammad ‘Abduh, and Sir Ahmad Khan).

His main interests are the classical and modern Qur'an exegesis, Islamic Ethics (akhlaq) and Virtue Ethics, contemporary Islamic thought, Islamic Legal Theories (usul al-fiqh) and Jurisprudence (fiqh), Islamic theology (kalam), and Comparative Theology.

He is interested in ethics in general, particularly virtue ethics in the medieval period, focusing on Islamic, Christian and Jewish virtue ethics, and their relevance in today's context. Religious ethics and virtue ethics, happiness, and the ethical virtuous life in various traditions from the classical to the modern period are his some of interests.