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Making the Quran Turkish: Translation and Power in the

Ottoman Empire By Micah Hughes


marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org /making-the-quran-turkish-translation-and-power-in-the-ottoman-empire-by-
micah-hughes/

Micah Hughes March 14, 2016

Micah Hughes on M. Brett Wilsons Translating the Quran in an Age of Nationalism


What could be more unassuming and unexceptional than translation? It is simply
everywhere and often taken-for-granted. From ancient, must-read classics to the
most groundbreaking works of world literature, translation infuses and is integral to
most educational curricula, religious rites, and cultural encounters today. But, the
commonsense nature of something so inconspicuous as translation is precisely the
kind of thing that makes it provocative, telling, and important for historical research.

Brett Wilsons well-researched monograph, Translating the Quran in an Age of


Nationalism, treats, for the first time in English, the history of translation of the Quran
into Turkish and the lively debates that surrounded it. Following the significant work of
Travis Zadeh in The Vernacular Quran: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis,
Wilson adds to a growing historical and theoretical engagement with the distinct
textual, legal, and practical histories of the Quran in specific linguistic communities.
M. Brett Wilson, Translating the
More than just a reception history, the book attends to a series of issues, concerns,
Quran in an Age of Nationalism, anxieties, and affective sensibilities that were evoked in the problem-space of
Oxford University Press, 2014, printing, translation, and commentary in vernacular languages during the nineteenth
352pp., $85
and twentieth centuries. I borrow problem-space from anthropologist David Scotts
masterful work, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. In
Scotts own words, a problem-space demarcate[s] a discursive context, a context of
language It is a context of argument and, therefore, one of intervention. A problem-
space, in other words, is an ensemble of questions and answers around which a
horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological-political stakes)
hangs (4). Scotts theoretical insight acts as a heuristic device to help bring to light some of the important political,
theological, and historical stakes that Wilsons book has done a fine job of uncovering and documenting.

Theoretically, the problem-space of translation can be viewed as a practice that has a history and a conceptual
genealogy in the Foucaultian sense, or following Alasdair MacIntyre, as a node in a nexus of arguments and
reasons within a tradition of inquiry and practice. The issue of translation is more than the problem of literal versus
literary the decision to render one word, phrase, idiom, or sentence from one language into a corresponding,
appropriate, or poetic equivalent in the target language. As the anthropologist Talal Asad has argued, translation
carries with it questions of power, culture, and context in addition to meaning and interpretation. Translation is thus
(like history) at once a sequence of human acts and a narrative recounting it, both being and representation. Asad,
himself a genealogist of anthropological concepts and forms of life, notes that translation historically referred not
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only to a discursive practice but also to a medieval religious action of physically moving saintly relics, and thus their
powers, from one location to another. It was never a neutral representation; it was situated within a particular way
of life and a particular set of practices. Similarly nineteenth-century modernization, reform, and nationalism might
also be read through the topos of translation one internal to discourses of the Islamic tradition as they were
practiced, debated, and ultimately translated from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic.

Translating the Quran takes the reader through the intricate debates, historical moments, and personages centrally
involved in the production of the Turkish Quran. Beginning with the movement away from hand-written manuscripts
towards large scale, mass printing, Wilsons book carefully describes the ritual, political, and social concerns that
surrounded new technologies of the book and book production. While this is a mainstay of the books historical
narrative, Wilsons central claim is that translation ultimately reveals something about what Ottoman Muslims in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw as crucial to their development qua Muslims in the age of
modernization and nationalism. Its proponents considered printing and translation a necessary step in securing the
modernity of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire in light of a swiftly changing imperial and socio-political landscape. In
short, this is the problem-space that Wilson opens to the reader.

The monograph is rich in detail from both secondary and archival sources in Turkish, English, and Arabic. Many
figures discussed deserve their own book-length treatments to do justice to the intricacies of their lives. Wilson
brings together a whole cadre of oppositional intellectuals, authors, poets, statesmen, and religious scholars such as
Namk Kemal, Ali Suavi, Abdullah Cevdet, and Mehmet Akif Ersoy who teetered on the brink of Tanzimat-era
Ottoman reform and early Republican modernization. These characters crisscross throughout the narrative forming
dense webs of argumentation for and against printing and translating the Quran at various moments often forming
unlikely alliances.

Debates about the nature of printing and translation were so central to questions of shifting authority within Ottoman
lands and beyond precisely because they raised the question of modernization and change in such stark terms.
With new technologies from the West, how could Muslims be sure that these printing presses and the materials used
to build them followed the various standards of purity that would make their use permissible? How could one ensure
that the printed or translated Quran was free from error if not under the supervision and controlled pen of a master
scribe or Muslim scholar trained in the arts of calligraphy or commentary? Those in favor of Quran printing and
translation into vernacular languages made the argument along reformist or nationalist lines, insisting on its
necessity for the growth of educated and nationally conscious publics. A Turkish Quran or Turkish commentary on
the Quran, while nothing like the inimitable, revealed Arabic text, could still serve a didactic purpose for the
common person who did not have the ability to read in the primary languages of Islamic education such as Persian
and Arabic. Furthermore, new production technologies served the purposes of modernization; all the while a Turkish
Quran created an educated public through the use of what would become the national language of the Republic of
Turkey in the 1920s, just as Turkish was made the official language of the Ottoman State bureaucracy in 1876.
These were the political and social stakes that hung in the balance.

These positions were not static. There was neither one consensus position from those who supposedly represented
the clerical class of Muslim scholars nor an equal, but opposite, position on the side of reform, modernization, or
nationalism. A historical taxonomy of this sort obfuscates more than it elucidates. Self-styled Islamists could be both
classically trained scholars as well as members of opposition parties against the Sultan or his representatives.
Furthermore, given the change in circumstances from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth war on
multiple fronts, changing constitutional regimes, insurrection, occupation, revolution, and counter-revolution it
was inevitable that the positions and the historical agents that held them would transform in light of events that were
impossible to predict.

Here is one example of such a shifting problem-space: Wilson recounts a story concerning some critical reviews
given of historian and philosopher zmirli smail Hakks Turkish rendering of the Quran (1927) during the early
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years of the Turkish Republic. Critics found the text to be a sound piece of scholarship that lacked only in terms of its
aesthetic appeal; it simply did not do justice to the rhythmic beauty of the original Arabic text. This critical reaction
was a notable departure from evaluations of other, contemporaneous translations that failed to transfer the
meanings of the verses faithfully according to various interpretive traditions. Throughout the book, Wilson discusses
these failed translators such as Sleyman Tevfk (1865-1939), Hseyin Kazm Kadri (1870-1934), and Cemil Sait
(1872-1942), who came under harsh criticism for their lack of training and inability to properly render the Arabic
Quran into accessible Turkish prose. While these criticisms were common amongst their detractors in the religious
and scholarly classes (ulema), they were remarkably absent from criticisms leveled at zmirli smail Hakk. Noting
that his text did lack the aesthetic dimension found in the Arabic Quran (something no one could replicate anyway),
he pointed out, in defense of his project, that what mattered was the reliability of the translated meaning. Was the
text sufficient for deriving Islamic legal rulings and giving the reader the guidance that he or she sought? If so,
thought smail Hakk, then the translation was a sufficient one.

Similarly, variegated practices and different modes of argumentation marked the problem-space of Quran
translation throughout the Muslim world at large. As Wilson demonstrates, debates and concerns about the
permissibility of Quran translation varied across geographical boundaries taking on different tones and expressing
particular anxieties accordingly. To give an example, while the denizens of the late Ottoman Empire and early
Turkish Republic expressed many concerns about the reliability of the Turkish Quran both in terms of aesthetics
and meaning/interpretation as with the case of Ismail Hakk, Egyptians who embraced translation and new print
technologies did so with the hope and expectation of making Egypt a new centre of Islamic authority, Wilson
argues that the geographical differences between reformist debates in Egypt and Turkey diverged along nationalist
lines: Egypt, which was under British control, sought to export Islam to non-Arabic speaking and non-Muslim
communities thus making Egypt a center for Islamic learning and missionary activity, while Turkish reformists
intended to nationalize Islam according to their desire to separate themselves from the larger Muslim world; yet,
there was protest from the cadre of Muslim scholars whose livelihood was under threat by such transformations.

This account illustrates just a few of the transformations that occurred in Turkish and intra-Muslim debates about the
translatability of the Quran in the transition period from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Furthermore, it
shows the discursive landscape that was never reducible to simple support for or opposition against printing and
translation. This, I think, is one of the most powerful findings of Translating the Quran. Issues of meaning,
translation, aesthetics, and usability in ritual acts were central concerns galvanizing both the desire to produce a
Turkish Quran as well as reactions to the Qurans that were produced, but support and opposition were never
easily definable based solely one ones position within the social, religious, or bureaucratic artifice of the Ottoman
and Turkish state. The scholar must be attuned to the ends and goals sought in each argument in order to discern
the logic that drove each position, something Wilson carefully undertakes throughout.

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Picture of Illuminated Quran page in Arabic
from Ottoman scribe via WikimediaCommons

Translating the Quran is not only a story about Islamic authority transforming within competing language games of
nationalism, but it is also about Pan-Islamic connections that fostered under, alongside, and through such nationalist
discourses that were made apparent in Ottoman/Turkish debates about printing and translation. Printed Qurans
were a valuable good and a tool for increasing loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph as well as policing the
boundaries of Ottoman orthodoxy by demonstrating the benevolence of the Ottomans towards their Sunni
counterparts through intra-Muslim connections especially in the Indian Ocean. In this way, the text adds not just to
the fields of Quranic or Turkish studies, but also to global approaches to Islamic history more generally.

It will come as no surprise that Wilsons book positively contributes to a growing body of work that seeks to ground
histories of Islam as a discursive tradition in the particular arguments and historical debates about exactly what that
tradition is and how it should be practiced. Concerns and anxieties surrounding authority, practice, and meaning
might have drawn on languages of universalism but were always articulated in specific locations, in the midst of
particular events that gave them a sense of urgency that inspired practitioners as well as critics. Historians of the
Ottoman and Turkish long nineteenth century as well as genuinely interested readers will find something useful in all
stages of Translating the Quran. Some questions do linger about the story of nationalism or implicit theories of
translation that sustain Wilsons narrative, yet remain unaddressed. We, the readers, are left to infer the ways in
which nationalism, modernity, and translation play out in the theoretical background of the book, except in a few,
sparse moments. Nationalism studies and translation studies have produced a strong body of literature on the
subject, yet the reader is left wondering where the author stands on a number of issues concerning the nature of
Ottoman modernity and Turkish nationalism, both as concepts and practices, historically and in the present. Yet, the
monograph continues to impress in terms of its breadth and detailed engagement with a complicated history.

More than a century has passed since many of these debates began. Translation no longer seems to be the
problem it once was in Turkey translations are easily accessible, even on smart phones. It is not uncommon to sit
beside a fellow passenger reading the Turkish Quran commentary Hakk Dini, Kuran Dili off an iPhone app on one
of Istanbuls many buses or tramways. This does not mean that issues or concerns around translation no longer
exist, but like any struggle within a tradition, the terms, actors, anxieties, and problems shift, take on new
articulations, and become something other, differentiated, a new problem-space. Translating the Quran in an Age of
Nationalism reminds us that things were not always as they are today and that concepts now taken for granted have
long and complicated histories, belonging to and forming problem-spaces of language where power, change, and
debate are the rule rather than the exception.
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