An Ottoman Qur'an Commentary for the Republic; The Limits of Creating a Turkish Religious Canon
Prof. Gunasti received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2011, when she joined Ohio Wesleyan. She will be discussing one of the the earliest Qur’an translations and commentaries written in the Republic of Turkey (est. 1923) Hak Dini, Kur’ân Dili (The Religion of the Truth, The Language of the Qur’an), a Qur’an translation and commentary that captured the zeitgeist of the late Ottoman period, by the jurist, religious scholar, and politician Elmalılı Muhammed Hamdi Yazır (d. 1942). Her paper explores two main questions: how and why did Hak Dini achieve this distinction and what does its success say about the relationship between Islam, the Qur’an, and the modern state in the early republican period?
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