M. Brett Wilson's well-researched book reconstructs and contextualizes debates about printing and translating the Qurʾan into Turkish in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor state, Turkey. He compares them with debates over English-language Qurʾan translations in Egypt and British India to depict a global moment in which Muslims sought to reassert the authority of the Qurʾan in the face of disquieting political events.
Wilson begins with an overview of the history of Qurʾan printing in the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 1 insightfully demonstrates how an ulema-scribal bloc rejected printing in order to preserve class prerogatives. As a result of official bans, printed Qurʾans were smuggled into the empire, and authorities struggled to keep them off the black market, but demand increased and in 1871 Ottoman officials conceded that the ban was a failure.
Chapters 2 and 3 synthesize and expand on important Turkish research to examine Ottoman-language Qurʾan translations and commentaries published beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These chapters would benefit from a more sustained focus on popular attitudes towards the Qurʾan and its interpretation outside the scholarly community. Wilson shows how what was at first a concession soon turned into an embrace: shortly after lifting the ban on printing, authorities began distributing copies at home and abroad to assert the political and religious authority of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. Internationally, the dissemination of the Qurʾan became part of an imperial strategy to promote Islamic unity and the position of the sultan-caliph. Domestically, the widespread availability of print Qurʾans opened up a new chapter in the Qurʾan translation debates.
Political currents shifted in the tumultuous years between 1908 and 1919. Chapter 4 explores the political consequences of translation in the context of proto- and anti-nationalist thought. Arab nationalism emerged as a new source of opposition to Qurʾan translation. Rashīd Riḍā claimed that vernacular translations undermined Islamic unity. Missionary activity also affected attitudes towards Qurʾan translation, eliciting two different reactions: some saw translation as part of European designs to destroy the Qurʾan, while others supported it as a means to correct the errors of polemical missionary translations.
A turning point in the politics of translation occurred after the 1908 revolution, which opened up space for Muslim intellectuals of all stripes to discuss religion and thus called into question the authority of the ulema. This questioning had important implications for attitudes towards direct access to religious texts. It was in this context that translations of the Qurʾan began to appear in print labeled as commentaries, summaries, or explanations—which suggests that the religious establishment was not yet ready to acknowledge the broad and tacit acceptance of vernacular translations. The author points out that the distinction between translation and interpretation is not clear.
While the 1908 revolution marked a significant turning point, the most important event that facilitated Qurʾan translation into Turkish was the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923, when the interests of translation advocates and Turkish nationalists converged. Within a year, a number of translations were available, with some quickly acquiring notoriety. Chapter 5 examines these republican-period works and the debates sparked by these translations. In the wake of the 1924 controversy, parliament commissioned a Qurʾan translation and Qurʾan commentary; the former project was offered to Mehmet Akif and the latter offered to Elmalılı Muhammed Hamdi Yazır.
The abolition of the caliphate in 1924 also led to an increased focus on the Qurʾan as a guide to Muslim life—not only in Turkey but across the Muslim world. Chapter 6 traces a discernable shift in attitudes towards translation in Egypt. The absence of a clear center of religious authority made translation all the more important, with advocates from British India to Indonesia positioning the endeavor as a tool to defend Islam. Wilson shows how Egypt ultimately emerged as the Muslim state that would mediate debates on translation.
In chapter 7 the book returns to the Turkish translation and commentary project commissioned by parliament, focusing on Mehmet Akif's translation, which was never submitted to the appropriate ministry and for decades was presumed destroyed. The history of Akif's missing manuscript is interesting, and there is a small body of Turkish-language scholarship devoted to determining its whereabouts. The author notes that it came to light only recently, and even then not in its entirety. Its impact on Turkish Qurʾan translation was therefore negligible. Arguably, Elmalılı Muhammed Hamdi Yazır's Qurʾan translation, which was commissioned from him after Akif refused to submit his translation, was the most important Turkish Qurʾan translation in the pre-1960 republican period. Rather than engage with this translation, which attained a semi-official status, the author treats it as an example of conventional Islamic scholarship.
Overall, Wilson's book represents a valuable contribution to our understanding of Qurʾan translation, addressing key questions about the authority of religious texts in the modern period. One of the book's main strengths is its clear presentation of Qurʾan debates from the late Ottoman era to the Turkish republic, as well as in leading centers of the Muslim world. This topic has been neglected in English-language scholarship, and this book is an important and welcome study that will be of interest to scholars of Islam in the modern period and historians of the late Ottoman Empire.
