The expectation of perfection in Qur'an translation

Despite the pessimistic complaints we hear from time to time about how widely the Islamic identity has been embraced by the masses in Turkey, and how familiar people are, compared with the past, with Islam's basic knowledge, values and sources of knowledge, it cannot be ignored that serious progress has been made when serious comparisons are carried out.

In this context, how about reviewing the data on the course that familiarity with the Qur'an, as the basic source of knowledge of Islam, has followed from the Ottomans to the Republic? Was the Qur'an read more in the Ottoman period, or in the Republican period?

Let us answer the first question quickly, with a perhaps surprising answer, and move on to the real question: in the Republican period the Qur'an was read far more, and came onto the agenda far more. More precisely, a far greater number of people gained direct access to knowledge of the Qur'an, in both its Arabic and its Turkish. This was so even though the Republic's religion project carried an almost entirely anti-religious will to secularize.

So why and how did this come about? Because of this, we may also ask questions such as "Was the basic purpose of the secularization policies to serve Islam?" But, leaving these questions for later, it must be said that there is great benefit in repeating such reviews from time to time.

This idea of review awakens from time to time, and it should, but this time what awakened it is an important project undertaken by Vadi Yayınevi.

Vadi has begun publishing the Qur'an translations of the last period of the Ottoman Empire and the early period of the Republic. First, the translation called Nûrü'l-Beyân, made by a committee headed by Hüseyin Kazım Kadri, one of the Muslim intellectuals of the late Ottoman era, has been published in an extremely elegant edition. We say Qur'an translation, but the subtitle of the work is given as "Turkish Translation of the Exegesis of the Noble Qur'an," and as Hüseyin Kazım Kadri insistently states in the preface he wrote, the book is not a direct translation of the Qur'an but a translation of the summary of five classical exegeses made on the Qur'an.

Even so, H. Kazım, who was subjected to very harsh criticism as soon as it began to be published in 1924, both chose the title precisely to forestall these very criticisms that he had anticipated, and what he actually tried to do was exactly this. Moreover, in giving the translation of the summary of the exegeses, he did so by avoiding his own interpretations, and in particular by insistently avoiding bringing new "openings" to the Qur'an under the ideological pressures of the modernist point of view.

Of course, the format that emerged while trying to present the summary of five classical exegeses has come close to the parenthetical Qur'an translation format we encounter today at best. When some of the exegeses that each of these five gives on a verse contradict one another, it is also impossible that he made no choice. There it is seen that H. Kazım gave little weight to the fact that every translation inevitably contains an interpretation, rests on an interpretation, and arises from an interpretation.

In fact, not only he but also all the Islamist Sebilürreşad circle of the period, and even the Republican intellectuals (Rıfat Börekçi, for example), who evaluated his undertaking, seem to have expected from a Qur'an translation a quite literal, word-for-word perfect translation. The criticisms directed at this first Qur'an rendering attempt of the Republican period today make up a separate corpus, and the first thing that stands out beneath all of them is this expectation. It is as if the only thing missing for a perfect translation were that the translator have perfect knowledge of Arabic and the Qur'an and perfect command of the language to be translated into, Turkish. There is an expectation that, when these two come together, a perfect translation could somehow be produced.

Ömer Mahir Alper, who prepared Nûrü'l-Beyân for publication, has recorded at length the criticisms made from different quarters against this undertaking of H. Kazım, including the criticisms made through concrete examples of how words in certain verses were translated. From the sum of these criticisms and of H. Kazım's answers to them, it is seen that a very interesting state of consciousness regarding the possibility of Qur'an translation prevailed in this period.

What is interesting is this: in the Ottoman Empire there is no serious activity of Qur'an translation. The few existing translated copies are texts, with the meaning of each word written beneath each word under the Qur'anic lines, far from being a sentence-level rendering as a whole, and even these are works found only in very limited circles. If there were exegetical works, they reached the masses only through sermons in mosques and talks in madrasas or in the court lectures. The Qur'an held the position of a book read among the ulema, whose meaning could be conveyed to the masses, when necessary, through limited channels.

Yet both in the last periods of the Ottoman Empire and in the first times of the Republic, a very serious demand had formed for knowing the meaning of the Qur'an and for the importance of this being known by the masses as well, and this demand was largely met.

The intentions and expectations behind the demand were different, of course. In some it was a truly believer's demand to know the meaning, to know what God wants from us and what kind of guidance He means to give; in others it was a sly intention, assuming in advance that the Qur'an was already a superstition and that, if translated, its spell over the masses would vanish.

With these demands and intentions, how did Qur'an translations develop in the Republican period, become widespread, and what kinds of consequences did they have? Let us look for answers to these questions too.