Ottoman History Podcast - Ottoman Qur'an Printing

Episode Date: March 3, 2013

with Brett Wilson hosted by Chris Gratien and Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise.   Download the seriesPodcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Printing in Ottoman Turkish first emerged during the eighteenth century. Yet, even when print had arrived in full force by the middle of the nineteenth century, it remained forbidden to print the text most sought after by Ottoman readers: the Qur'an. In this episode, Brett Wilson discusses the rise of print and Qur'an printing in the Ottoman Empire as well as the emergence of Turkish translations of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras. « Click for More »

Rahman ve Rahim olan Allah'ın adıyla. Övgü, alemlerin Rabbi, Rahman ve Rahim olan hesap gününün sahibi Allah içindir. Rabbimiz, ancak sana ibadet eder ve yalnız senden yardım isteriz. eder ve yalnız senden yardım isteriz. Bizi doğru yola, kendilerine nimet verdiğin kimselerin yoluna ulaştır. Gazabı uğrayanların ve sapmışların yoluna değil. And I'm Nir Shafir. Today our guest is Brett Wilson, an assistant professor of religious studies at Macalester College. Brett, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me. And it's a real treat for a lot of our listeners who have been following our almost 100 episodes and have noticed we haven't dabbled in any kind of religious topics or let alone touched on

probably the most important book in the history of the Middle East, which is the Quran. Our topic today is mainly going to be focused on the beginning of printing of the Quran during the late Ottoman period. We're also going to talk a little bit about early attempts at something that resembles a modern translation of the Quran into Turkish, and we'll end with some thoughts about the reception of this change and some of the issues with creating definitive or authoritative versions of the Turkish translation. So Brett, the first question I have really generally is how and when does printing enter the Ottoman Empire? A lot of people are familiar with the Mutafarika press during the early 18th century, but we have other

examples of printing in other languages. So what's the sort of arc here in terms of printing in the Ottoman Empire? Well, the printing press actually comes to the Ottoman Empire quite early. It comes in the 1490s with Jewish communities that lived in the Ottoman Empire. They're followed very shortly by presses from the other non-Muslim millets, the Greeks and the Armenians, both in subsequent centuries established presses and published throughout the empire, I mean, right through Butaferika to the present.

So there's actually a long history of printing in the Ottoman Empire. It's just that the Muslim community did not print until the 1720s. There were Ottoman statesmen who wanted to utilize printing, especially for maps, for historical texts, for books of geography and other kinds of non-religious purposes, especially for sciences, etc. But they had trouble getting permission to do so. It wasn't until this very interesting person, Ibrahim

Mutafedika, who is a convert to Islam from Transylvania, who is probably of Hungarian speaking origins, came and he also gathered political support to actually open a press. And the trick was when he did so, he had to agree not to print any religious texts. he had to agree not to print any religious texts. Now, this was important because religious texts were the mainstay, the bread and butter of the calligraphers and the ulama who basically controlled book production that time period. So basically, by saying that he wouldn't print religious texts meant he wouldn't take their business and their jobs, etc.

Now, the downside of that agreement for him was that it was very hard to run a profitable or even sustainable press not printing those kind of books because those were the most popular books by far. And we can see from state registries from that period that the most likely book a person would own would be the Quran or would be a book of prayers or catechisms. It wouldn't be a book, a work of history or a work of geography or something of that nature. Those were far more rare. So the

Mutafarika Press, it had a lot of troubles. It had financial problems. It had personnel problems. The books were often very expensive, and the press did not make any money. We can contrast this with the European experience in which Bible printing and printing of especially Protestant literature was, you know, the main item that was printed in some of the early decades. And this made it financially feasible, it made it spread quickly, and it was also connected with this surge in enthusiasm for this religious movement.

But Teferica didn't have that advantage, so he had a lot of trouble. So, I mean, there's this big debate, why did printing take off so late in the Muslim world? And it's a little bit controversial, and people who want to say that there was no intellectual culture in the Muslim world cite this as an example. But from what I gathered, there's plenty of demand for texts, it's just that the most popular texts were off-limits to the Mutafarqa press.

Right, we can't say, we can't deduct from the fact that printing came late that there wasn't a lot of intellectual activity going on. There are lots of manuscript texts circulating. There is a, you know, as the scholarship of several people is showing in the 18th century, there is a lot going on intellectually. So I think it's a bad assumption, yeah. As one of the crucial factors, as you mentioned, the barrier to printing that the ulama presented, keeping it sort of within this monopolized manuscript tradition, what changed in the 19th century that allowed the printing of the Quran, which is our topic of this discussion?

There are some tectonic changes that are occurring in the 19th century. One is the modernization of the state through the Tanzimat, through the expansion of the bureaucracy, through the opening of state schools, and these other kinds of processes which created a culture that needed more books and also had more literate people. And oftentimes, right, these weren't,

the new schools that were opening weren't just religious schools. Most of them were kind of, I wouldn't say secular schools, but they were state schools that had a bit of religious content, but also more, we might call secular content, for lack of a better term, languages, mathematics, history, geography, the kind of things that would be helpful for people in a bureaucracy or a military to know. So to provide a modern style of education,

a lot more books are needed, for sure. Now, the case of the Quran is related to this, but it's also a bit of its own kind of thing. So we see religious texts begin to be printed in 1803, when a catechism of Mehmet Birgivi is published. And it's published with a very specific purpose, and it sheds a lot of light on the process. It's published for the soldiers of the new military corps that are created, the Nizami Jadid soldiers of that period. And it's financed privately by Hatice Sultan, daughter of Sultan Mustafa III. And she says that it's for the edification of the soldiers and for the people in general, the ame. And it is

in a very clear Turkish. It has diacritical marks for the pronunciation. Now, we can't assume that most of those people were literate, actually. We can assume that probably only a few of them were. This book was being read out loud in some kind of educational context for these people. And also it's related to a particular shift in, yeah, there's a kind of push to heighten Sunni identity and consciousness in that period. Okay, and this is in opposition to the Janissary Corp, who are very powerful in this period,

who are causing a lot of problems for different Ottoman sultans. And so this new army division gets these kind of some overt Sunni identifications along with it. And this book is one of those things. But regardless of that, we don't see the Quran printed in this period. And it's for the same reason, right? Somehow religious texts have become legal, but the actual Quran or the Mus'haf, that is the kind of core of it. You know, that's the major book that's produced. That's the book that, you know, everyone would want to own or at least have a copy in their house, even if they didn't know how to read it, right? These could just be a kind of sacred object that was kept somewhere revered. These could not be produced in the Ottoman Empire, and in fact, they were

illegal even to circulate in the Ottoman Empire. And that goes back to the prohibition on the books, even from the Mutafarika time, even from before that time. And what was the control process? I mean, how could the state control and seize and stop people from printing or circulating printed texts? Well, printing was still very centralized at that time. For one thing, to get a press off the ground was very expensive, and it required a lot of expertise, which very few people had in that time period.

So the first press you have is the Mutafarika press, the Dara Tibba, you know, changes the name a few times. And then you get the Uskudar press, which is basically a military press and used to print things for the Ottoman military. And sometimes there are other things too. So it wouldn't be the kind of thing that you could just, you know, decide to open up shop and do it. First of all, you needed permission. But what was happening and what could be controlled was the illegal books coming from abroad. And we start to see in the 1850s

reports of Qurans showing up, schools at the borders, people crossing the border carrying crates of books. And where were these coming from? Like India, Iran, that area? The very first ones come from Iran. And Iran is the most commonly named source of the books. There are also prints from India and prints from Russia, especially,

as well as prints from Europe. There was the floygal version of the Koran that was printed, which was used very widely. Actually, the first Quran ever printed, I wanted to mention this, was printed in Venice. And it was intended to be exported to the Ottoman Empire and other ports in the Eastern Mediterranean. This was a part of the kind of growing print capitalism that was emerging in the early 16th century. And those books were actually brought to Istanbul to be sold and were seized and probably destroyed. We don't really know exactly what happened to them.

And how did they produce these printed Qurans in Venice? This is early period. They have movable type? Yes. They're movable type printed Qurans. And it's a very rudimentary stage of designing the actual letter blocks. So it's a very stilted looking text. It's not very flowing. And it has a lot of actual kind of technical mistakes as well. Do you know the price?

We have figures for the late 18th century and early 19th century still trying to hammer out how it emerges across the course of the 19th century. But for example, in the late 18th century, it would have cost the equivalent to about 10 days wages for a skilled worker in Istanbul. And that would be about roughly 20 days wages for an unskilled worker in Istanbul. So if you think about how many books you've ever bought that 10 days wages, probably not very many.

Those are very expensive books for most people. So they weren't particularly accessible. And that becomes actually the hallmark of the arguments that many people make about why they should print the Quran, because more and more people want to own them. And we have these copies, which are much cheaper than the manuscript copies coming from Iran, from Russia, and from elsewhere. And people are buying them, and people don't have any problem with them being illegal. We don't know, unfortunately, how much they cost. We can only assume that they were substantially cheaper than what was available.

In Iran, it seems that they didn't have a problem printing the Quran from the beginning. So I don't know all the facts in the Iranian case, but what I do know is that the way in which printing came to Iran was often by collaboration between Iranians and Bible printing societies. And it seems that there was some kind of response to seeing what these Bible societies were doing in the early 19th century. So, for example, in Iran, the first book printed is a Quran. Is that perhaps a response to the efforts of missionaries to send the Bible all over the world in that period, giving away massive quantities of the Bible, which we also see happening in the Ottoman Empire? So there's a different trajectory in Iran and in India,

but also because there are totally different political considerations there. And I don't know all the dynamics of that. But the issue in Istanbul seems to be more of the ulama had retained a very strong position here and a very strong control of that sphere. Whereas in Iran, for some reason, that wasn't the case. I don't know why that is the case. In India, of course, it's very different. Usually the press comes with missionaries or with colonial regimes. Printing has a very different kind of sense there. So what changed in the 19th century? I mean, what was the first attempt to print the Quran in the Ottoman Empire or by the Ottomans. When all these illegal foreign Korans

started circulating in the Ottoman domains, we see a period in which they confiscate them for about 20 years. And some statesmen say, this is ridiculous, we need to just start producing them on our own and cut out this problem because obviously people want to have these books.

The ulama does not give permission, however, for that. And what happens is then they arrange a deal, which is a very kind of traditional Ottoman deal, which is to give a concession to a foreigner to import the product exclusively to provide it. So in this case there was a person named Aristide Fanton who met Namik Kemal, the famous late Ottoman intellectual, poet, writer, extraordinaire, etc. They met in London and they figured out a way to obtain this concession to print Qurans in London and bring them to the Ottoman Empire. Now one of the main considerations about why foreign Qurans were illegal was they were

often accused of being inaccurate, or they hadn't been checked by the ulama, they didn't have a stamp of guarantee. So there was a particular technology that came around in this time period which made it possible to make an exact reproduction of venerable Ottoman manuscript Qurans. This technology is called lithography. And in the initial phase of lithography, lithography means stone printing, literally.

You know, in this particular type of stone, originally from Bavaria, that you could, you know, draw an image on or sketch an image on and reproduce it exactly for much cheaper than movable type printing. And obviously giving you a lot more leeway in terms of, you know, what you do. In Europe, it was used primarily for art, for reproducing pictures. And it wasn't possible until the 1850s or 1860s to take an image of something, to actually take a picture and then put that on the stone. That's what's called photolithography. So this came around right at this time period when the Ottoman-Quran debate was happening. So this was the technology that Namik Kemal and Fanton used. They

took the very famous mushaf of Hafiz Osman, which was owned by Mustafa Fazıl Paşa. Hafiz Osman is a very famous Ottoman calligrapher who refined the style of Sheikh Hamdullah and produced a kind of copy that's very widely revered as being one of the most beautiful in Ottoman history. So by taking that Quran and reproducing it, you could eliminate the questions about authenticity and accuracy. You could show a connection between the Ottoman calligraphic tradition

and the printed editions of the Quran. And you could also satisfy the aesthetic tastes of people who wanted to see that kind of flowing hand. So this occurs. They do get the concession. They do actually print these books in London. They do bring them to the Ottoman Empire. And they do cause a debate.

Several people say that printing the Quran is a bad idea. And why is it a bad idea? They have several different arguments. idea. And why is it about idea? They have several different arguments. One of them is that, A, it's being printed in a non-Muslim country by God knows who, and, you know, we should be producing these texts our own. It doesn't make sense. They also raise questions about the ritual purity of the printing process, basically along the lines of, well, we know what's used in producing a manuscript version. We've known for centuries. But what kind of oils are in the inks? What kind of materials are in the brushes and so forth? Is it respectful to put heavy pressure on a Quran,

you know, with mechanical violence and so forth? And there's also an argument that is popular that says this will eliminate the jobs of the calligraphers. It will make them destitute, and that's completely unethical. So these kind of things are going about. And of course, Namik Kemal and his group of people have their own arguments about why it's necessary. Basically, that it makes books cheaper. It makes the Quran more widely read.

It actually gives people an accurate version produced by one of the best Ottoman calligraphers, which before this time they never had access to. And they say, you know, it's ridiculous to say that the calligraphers are going to be made jobless by this. Actually, all of the calligraphers are buying copies of this because they want to copy Hafez Osman's script. They've never actually seen a copy of Hafez Osman before. And that everyone, you know, rich and poor, and he literally says from the porters in the bazaar to the highest statesman, want a copy.

So the situation you've set up for us here where the first lithographed Qur'ans are being imported from outside to the Ottoman Empire, you have some resistance from the ulema, but the pull factors, you know, the cost, the demand is going to be too much for the situation to go on. When does domestic production of Quran printing begin? Because of the controversies around the Namik Kemal version, and also because they weren't able to produce the volume that was actually needed in the Ottoman Empire, the state says, okay, we're going to do this. And they begin to organize the first Ottoman printing, which occurs in 1874. It's a photolithographic version of another famous Ottoman calligrapher, Shekherzade. And when they

do decide to do this, you know, despite all the hesitancy that they had had in the previous decades, when they go into it, they go into it in a very massive way. The first official order to print Qurans places an order for 500,000 copies or half a million copies of the Qur'an. And this would have been a massive undertaking. I mean, they had never printed this many copies of any book before and this number probably trumps any previous printing of the Quran anywhere in the world until that period. Whether or not they actually achieved 500,000 copies is hard to say. I've been studying different documents in the Ottoman archives which show the kind of frantic attempts to create more capacity to print in that period in order to meet that order.

But what I also see is that about 10 years later, they place another order for another 500,000 copies. So a part of me wonders if that's an exact number or if it's a way of saying we need to print a lot of Qurans. Maybe it's a kind of saying we need to print a lot of Qur'ans. Maybe it's a kind of formulaic thing. I'm not quite sure yet. And was this a private publishing company? I didn't get exactly. Is this a state press or? The first versions are printed in the Matbay Amire, which is the original Mutafariqah press. Okay, it changes names sometime in between. So it first happens there, but it's very clear from the archives

that that press didn't have the capacity. So you have orders to clear out certain parts of different buildings in Istanbul and orders to buy new printing presses to meet the demand for this order. But they bear the stamp of Matba-i Amire. So basically, once they begin to print these Qurans, we see massive distributions of these Qurans. Ottoman schools receive them. Ottoman ministries receive them.

Ottoman soldiers. But also as the Ottoman state begins to project its authority abroad under Abdulhamid II, we see an increasing number of sending these books abroad as presents or just gifts to local notables, to populations within the Ottoman Empire who are not very comfortable with Ottoman rule or not very familiar with Ottoman rule. So we see as the Ottoman state modernizes and wants to expand its influence and control over its own population and over worldwide Muslims, we see these books being given away in massive, massive quantities. And one thing we see repeatedly in all the documents and in the actual copies of the Quran themselves

are mentions of how the book should be available for everyone. And they said that it should be sold or given away. And if they're sold, they should be sold at a price that everyone can afford. And so studying this, we can really see that probably these books were costing the Ottoman state a lot of money. They were not making money off of them. And it was seen as a kind of just part of the budget that needed to happen, right? It was a kind of a public good.

And this notion of an accessible Quran and a Quran that everyone can own becomes very important as we start to get into talking about translating the Quran, and the idea that the Quran is accessible, not only as a book you can own, but also as a book you can read and understand in your own language. So there's a developing idea of accessibility that, you know, Quran wasn't that accessible in a previous period as a book, you know, probably you could learn to recite it in a lot of places easily. But to actually have your own copy, that's a kind of a modern notion that emerges in the late Ottoman period. Was it popular to have at least some kind of tafsir explanation of the Quran for people? Or was this also hard to obtain? Actually, tafsirs are printed long before Qurans are printed. That's one of the interesting kind of things that you see.

So you have tafsirs that are printed in the early Tanzimat, which have actually the Quranic verses in movable type print. Okay. But those aren't really considered the same as a mushaf, as a copy of the Quran. So there's not a big deal about that. But again, these look like they were expensive books, primarily for Ottoman statesmen, more educated readers, people with some money. They have nice bindings usually, and so forth. You know, most people would have gotten their

information about the Quran from, you know, mosques, from sermons, from discussion circles with the imam, this kind of thing. They wouldn't have been reading about them because they weren't literate. There were very few literate people. But over the course of the 19th century, that's changing. And we have a much larger number of people reading books, owning books, going to school. And of course, that only increases as time goes by. And the inevitable conclusion is that there should be translations of the Quran. Yeah, so actually, Turkish translations are very, very old. They've existed probably from

the 1300s, and at the latest from the 1400s. And these would have been interlinear versions, some of which were kind of like glossaries with the words underneath, kind of as a reading aid. But some of them actually have a flowing text that you can read as a text on its own. But they're always interlinear, and they're always kind of subordinated to the Arabic text. They're written underneath. They're usually in smaller letters. They're usually in an uglier script. So they're not something that's, you know, they're graphically dominated, you could say, on the page by the

original Arabic script of the Quran. And so they're clearly supplementary texts. They're not a text you would read, you know, or you could read on its own necessarily. But what's interesting is that in the late 19th century, when you have lots of Ottoman intellectuals being influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment and various modernization discourses that are circulating, they start to say more and more that people should understand the Quran and that that's really important. And really they should understand it directly.

And what they mean by that is, of course, without the ulama, in some sense, and using their own mind, their own rationality to think about it. Some of them seem not to really be aware that these interlinear translations existed. Yeah, what is the background? What would be the education of the type of person who would advocate that could you give an example of sure sure uh for example um a person like ahmed midhat who's a journalist who you know he's he's in the ottoman ottoman elite intelligentsia right he's a publisher etc uh folks like shamsateen Sami, basically promoters of reform and modernization, promoters of instilling modern values in Ottoman subjects, and also, to some extent,

arguing against the authority of the ulama, right, who, you know, pretty much dominated the control of that kind of discourse until this period of time. And so you really see in a way that for people who are literate and people who can have those books, in a lot of ways, those books are replacing the ulama for them, right? They're accessing interpretations of the Quran on their own. And this only builds over time. We don't see it really go away. And more and more people from different kinds of backgrounds start to support the translation of the Quran. We have members of the ulama who start to say, yes, it's much better to actually understand the Quran. And this is a kind of snowball that builds up until the Republic.

And the trouble is that you cannot publish something called a translation in the late Ottoman period until 1924. And we see examples of this where, you know, people wanted to publish a translation of the Quran and they just couldn't, and they're rejected by the oversight committee of the ulama. There were books that we would, you know, you and I would call a translation if we saw it, but they weren't called translations. They were usually called tafsir. Sometimes they were called me'al. There are some cases where you see, for example, a book that is called a tafsir, but then you look in the inside and it'll list a line of the Quran, original Quran, then underneath it'll have a T, which stands for translation, and then

it'll be a translation, but a kind of in a linear format again um so there's a kind of a you know it's hard to say you know when's the first translation when's the end of tefsir there's really kind of a spectrum in which you see a gradual shift from a a more uh expansive commentary more more complex and expansive commentary tradition, to increasingly succinct commentary to what we might call translation. So we've kind of talked about the leading role of the state in this whole process, trying to sort of control it a little bit and also promote the printing of the Quran. Moving into the Republican period, what is the stance of the state vis-a-vis publishing

Quran, publishing translations of the Quran? We know that it wasn't a period of particular interest in religious texts in general from a state perspective because of, you know, the struggle between the old ulema and the religious establishments in the new regime. So what happens there? Right, you have a lot of people who had been awaiting a kind of every man's Quran in Turkish for some time, and who had been actually writing them, composing them, but not be able to publish them necessarily. And, of course, if you think about what Zia Gokalp's

idea of creating a kind of national religion, right, or a religion that promoted and supported national values. He, you know, and he mentioned, of course, the phrase the Türkçe Kur'an and talked about prayer in the vernacular, the call to prayer in the vernacular, etc. You know, he really viewed a Turkish Islam as something that would be a great thing for the Turkish nation. It would build social solidarity. It would promote shared beliefs and so forth, camaraderie, all these kind of things. And a lot of people share his ideas. And in 1924, we're talking about just before a lot of the changes occur, the closing of the madrasas and all these kind of things,

the abolishment of the Sufi orders. So in 1924, they allow people to publish whatever they want in terms of religious texts. They really open up the kind of spectrum. And we see in Ramadan of 1924, three translations of the Quran being published. This is the first Ramadan of the Turkish Republic. And we have these translations coming out. None of them are written by a member of the ulama, which is an important thing, right? They probably didn't have as easy of a time getting them published at this time period. I don't know the exact story on that.

They were men of letters. They were, you know, from elite backgrounds and usually had an affiliation with the state, had worked for as teachers or as bureaucrats in some capacity. And when their translations came out, there was a real uproar among the reading public, mostly among more devout kind of intellectuals, people affiliated with the journals, Sibila Rashad and other kind of more devout journals. And they're accused of being very unqualified to do a translation because they don't have the proper education. They don't know Arabic well enough. And one of them is actually accused of doing his translation from a French translation, which turned out to be true.

So we have these various kind of interesting controversies happening in this time period. And they receive, you know, an amazing amount of scrutiny in the media. You know, you have dozens of people writing reviews about, you know, you did a terrible translation of this verse and so on. And we see also these wide-ranging conversations about the interpretation in the public sphere. So what happens is, this public outcry causes the Turkish parliament to say, well, let's sponsor an official translation. So it's a very similar kind of process that happened with the printing. There's a kind of entrepreneurial thing going on there, people importing Qurans, people printing them illegally. Then the state comes in and says, okay, this is a Quran. We have to do it really properly and we have to protect it. The same thing happens with translation.

And so the Parliament gives Diyanet a budget to sponsor an official translation. And it's clear that the parliament hoped they would create some kind of very accessible everyman's Turkish Quran, which would really symbolically wed this new moment in Turkish history with Islam in some sense, would create some kind of religious text for the new nation. And Diyanet chooses two different people to work on this. One of them is Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who was a very prominent poet and devout journalist who had written for many years in different journals. And he's chosen to do the translation. A member of the late Ottoman Ulama, Mehmet Hamdi Yazir Elmalula, is chosen to do the tafsir, to go along with it.

There's a long saga that goes along with this. But it's interesting that these people were chosen because neither of them really represented the values of the new regime in Ankara. These were both people who believed that Islam should play a prominent role in public life. They were against doing any kind of drastic reforms to religious life. They didn't like Zia Gokalp's idea of a Turkish Quran. They didn't like this at all. So it's interesting and kind of ironic that they're chosen to do it. interesting and kind of ironic that they're chosen to do it. Mehmet Akif Ersoy accepts a commission from Diyanet to compose a translation, which is hoped to be this formative text in the Turkish nation. He goes to Egypt in 1925, and he stays there for a little over a decade without coming

back to Turkey. And during this time, he's working on the translation. There are different theories about why he decides not to actually give this translation to Diyanet in the end. He decides in the early 30s to drop the contract, to pull out of it and cancel it. And so after these years of waiting for it, many people were devastated that he didn't give it to them. He was also seen as uniquely suited to do this because he was a very prominent poet. He had a very good command of Arabic. And he was a person that the devout intellectuals, he was one of them, right? They would have accepted his translation, possibly, had it been composed. When he pulls out of the project, it's given to the composer of the tafsir, al-Malul Hamdi Yazid, to do the translation also. And if you look at the introduction to this

translation, you'll see that he doesn't believe in Quran translation at all. And he seems to, in the way that he composed it, wanted to basically subvert the aims of the project of creating a very accessible translation, right? So the final product is a nine-volume tafsir. It does have translation followed by long portions of commentary, but the language of the translation is also a bit archaic and a bit difficult and wouldn't have been something that would have been really easy or even catchy for most people to read in that time period. So that's published in the 30s by Dianette,

and it does not become an everyman's Quran. It becomes more of a kind of scholastic textbook for people in the Ilahiyat schools and so forth. Now, an interesting thing is that people held on to the hope that Mehmet Akif's translation would still come out. So they obviously were not satisfied with the other one. And the story of Mehmet Akif's translation has become a kind of dramatic saga in contemporary discussions. So he had health problems and decided to come back to Turkey in the mid-30s. And he left his manuscript of his translation with a good friend in Egypt,

Mehmet İhsan, the father of Ekmeleddin İhsanoglu. He left the copy with him and said, if I return back from Turkey, I'm going to finish this translation, and then we can publish it later. If I don't return, I want you to burn it. I don't want anyone to have it. So after Akif's death, several people went to Mehmet İhsan and tried to obtain the translation. He told everyone that it had been burned, that he had burned it.

And people held on to the hope that this translation still existed until the 1990s. In the 1990s, someone who was actually present when Mehmet İhsan died said that they had actually observed the manuscript being burned in Cairo. That was in 1992 when he announced this. So everyone cut off their hope after that. Well, just last year, a part of the manuscript was found. One third of the manuscript was found and One-third of the manuscript was found and was published by a printing house here in Istanbul. And people have been talking about it a lot recently because it's been the kind of holy grail for people who wanted, you know,

the ideal Turkish translation of the Qur'an. Now whether it is or not is still up for debate, I suppose. People are still analyzing it. But it's been a big news in recent Turkish Quran translation history. Okay, so now I want to kind of go back to what's the larger impact of this? I mean, we have a general trend to increasing access to Quran, increasing access both through printing, making much cheaper to get it, much easier to read a Quran through translations. I mean, how does this change Islam in the late Ottoman Empire in the Turkish Republic? Is this a shift toward, I mean, we've talked a bit about a shift from an oral to textual culture does this also for instance show a shift from like uh to a more quran-centric islam it's a really interesting

question and you know one of the things that it's done is and what its opponents feared it would do is it's really opened up interpretation for a much wider variety of people and those people can also publish their ideas. So for example, even in the 20s, when these translations came out, there were interesting debates. One of them was based upon one of these translations and they said, you know, I've studied this verse in, you know, the Surah of the Cow and I think that it means that Ramadan fasting is actually optional, and that the verse says that you can either fast or you can feed a poor person instead. And this was published in a newspaper, right? It started a huge debate. And since then, there've been lots of things like this, right? And people actually using these translations rather than the original Quran

as a basis for reasoning about how Islam should be lived in modern Turkey. And this, I think, feeds exactly into what you're saying, that it is definitely a more book-centric, bibliocentric type of Islamic culture here. Some people talk about it as a kind of Protestantization of Islam in Turkey and elsewhere. But I think that's also a symptom of the larger Muslim world, that books have become far more important than the ulama in the modern period. Because the ulama have been politically marginalized in a lot of contexts, not all, but a lot of contexts. And also because their prestige has fallen a bit as well,

because they didn't embrace modern sciences, which were the sciences of power and progress and modernization. In many places, and especially in Turkey, their authority was in many times crushed or destroyed or marginalized. So, these books often fit into a kind of scheme which the early republic wanted to promote, which was an Islam which is more in the realm of private conscious and private study and private belief, rather than as a force of public power or something that really had a strong presence in the public sphere in a political way or intellectual way. Basically, be a modern person, a good citizen, and if you're interested in reading about religion, well, here are the books, and you can make of it what you want. In some sense, this is true. This isn't absolutely the case. Of course, Dianette is one of the largest ministries of religious affairs that exists, but it also promotes some similar trends. Previously I've heard about the Turkish, I guess the Diyanet,

coming up with new Hadith collections, and these rather extravagant plans to modernize, reform, collect these sources and present them in a new fashion, in a new authoritative fashion. Is there a trajectory like this? Is this the story or is it... In some instances, yes. The idea of Dianet, I think, throughout has been to create a suitably modern Islam, which works well in the context of our nation. I like this phrase, you know, an Islam suitable for the nation, for the Turkish nation. If we were looking at the story of printing the Quran in other Islamic nations in the 20th century,

like in Iran or India or Pakistan, I mean, do we see a similar story, a different story, if we're to compare it to the Arab countries or Malaysia or so forth? I mean, what is the story in comparison? I think that, yeah, there are very similar trends, right? The 20th century has been pretty disastrous for the authority of Sufis, right? Where if you think about where they were in the 19th or the 18th century and where they are now, where if you think about where they were in the 19th or the 18th century and where they are now,

usually Sufism has been defined as being somehow not suitable with modernity or representing some kind of superstitious past. In terms of books, I think there's also a very similar trend. Usually, these ministries of religious education in different countries are affiliated with a kind of modernizing and often sometimes secular state. The production of the Quran and of Quran translations has really exploded since the 1950s. see happening in the 70s, early 80s, is more and more regimes publishing not only Arabic versions, but also their own translations. So the biggest one, the most important one in the world is the King Fahd Complex for

printing the Holy Quran, which is in Medina. And they print not only more Arabic Qurans than anyone else, they print more translations than anyone else in the world. And we see some interesting kind of similarities between what happened in the late Ottoman period, in the early Republican period, and what is happening now is that the Qur'an was basically made in the modern period into a non-commercial item that was given away in massive quantities by either a sovereign or by an organization, making it incredibly accessible and in some ways ubiquitous, but also clearly having some kind of agenda attached to it, right? Whether it's promoting the religious authority of a particular group or a particular state, or whether it's expanding the influence of their interpretations of the Quran. Now you can get these books very, very cheaply or oftentimes just free,

right? Everyone who goes on the Hajj gets a free copy. You can write to or send an email to Saudi embassies and get a free copy in a translation in almost 50 languages. When people talk about the Quran nowadays, they have these books usually and they're using them and they come from a certain place and they have oftentimes a certain affiliation or interpretation attached to them. Well, Brett, this has been a very fascinating topic

and really a change of directions for us. You've touched on a lot of topics that we haven't dealt with yet on the podcast, issues of literary culture and printing, and also this intersection of the political and religious establishment with the larger intellectual transformations that are taking place during the 19th and 20th centuries. Thanks, Chris and Nir. It's been really fun

talking with you guys, and I look forward to more Ottoman podcasts. And so, for our listeners, Brad, of course, has no shortage of information, but we'd like to cut the podcast off here at this point. We've gone on long enough, but for those who want to find out more, we do have a select bibliography on the website. We can also leave your comments and questions. And also, you should look forward to Brett's book, which is coming out within the next year with Oxford University Press. Revealed for the Masses, Translating the Quran in the Age of Nationalism. Thank you for listening to the Ottoman History Podcast. That's all for this time. Until next episode, take care.