ABSTRACT
In 1971, an entry on “tefsir” was published in the Ministry of National Education’s Islam Ansiklopedisi, an encyclopedia that had the dual purposes of amending Orientalist scholarship and expanding and elaborating on the Turkish contribution to the Islamic tradition found in the first edition of Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Islam. Hak Dini was commissioned by the Directorate of Religious Affairs as a result of a motion passed in the Turkish parliament in February 1925, just sixteen months after the establishment of the republic. By this point in time, a shift in the understanding of translation occurred that had an impact on how the Qur’an was understood and fueled debates around it. The chapter examines the degree to which Hak Dini retained major aspects of the late Ottoman Zeitgeist by demonstrating the extent to which it was a product of the Ottoman and Islamic intellectual traditions and relating its content to the intellectual, social, and political cultures of the period.
