Overview

"The Qur’an between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic is one of the few book-length studies on an Ottoman Qur’an commentary. Its premise is that ""the Ottoman Empire"" did not come to an end until 1950 so far as Islam was concerned in Turkey. The work explores the relationship between Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary and the intellectual trends of the period, including the impact of materialism, the sciences, notions of civilizational progress, and philosophy. In doing so, this study emphasizes the ""local"" aspect of the Qur’an commentary, through a sustained focus on the Istanbul context in which it was written. This work demonstrates that Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary is a product of and reaction to the religious, intellectual, political, and social trends of the period. This work, in considering all the factors that led to the commissioning of Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary, also contributes to our understanding of the history of Islam in early to mid-twentieth-century Turkey. This intellectual history of modern Islamic thought contributes to our understanding of the genre of Qur’an commentary in the early twentieth century. It is a key text for students and scholars interested in Islam in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, modern Islamic thought, and the Middle East."

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This is the first book-length study in English on one of the most important tafsir works in modern history, Hak Dini Kur'an Dili by Elmalili Hamdi Yazir (1878-1942) . . . Gunasti has delivered an important contribution to our understanding of how the tafsir tradition continued into the twentieth century and how an exegete could navigate the gap between that tradition, the emergence of new fields of learning, and the demands of secular modernisers. Susan Gunasti's The Qur'an between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic: An Exegetical Tradition is highly readable, even the philosophical discourses she describes are easily comprehensible for students or readers without previous expertise in the field . . . It is no easy task to make sense of a multi-volume tafsir that is embedded in a centuries-old tradition of scholarship and to present its central features and concerns in a way that makes sense to readers inside and outside the field. Gunasti has masterfully achieved this task, and this makes her book a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in Qur'an translation and tafsir as well as religious debates in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Johanna Pink, Journal of Qur'anic Studies, University of Freiburg

"""This is the first book-length study in English on one of the most important tafsīr works in modern history, Hak Dini Kur’an Dili by Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır (1878–1942) . . . Gunasti has delivered an important contribution to our understanding of how the tafsīr tradition continued into the twentieth century and how an exegete could navigate the gap between that tradition, the emergence of new fields of learning, and the demands of secular modernisers. ""Susan Gunasti’s The Qur’an between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic: An Exegetical Tradition is highly readable, even the philosophical discourses she describes are easily comprehensible for students or readers without previous expertise in the field . . . It is no easy task to make sense of a multi-volume tafsīr that is embedded in a centuries-old tradition of scholarship and to present its central features and concerns in a way that makes sense to readers inside and outside the field. Gunasti has masterfully achieved this task, and this makes her book a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in Qur’an translation and tafsīr as well as religious debates in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic."" Johanna Pink, Journal of Qur’anic Studies, University of Freiburg"

Author Information

Susan Gunasti is an associate professor of religion at Ohio Wesleyan University. She obtained her doctorate from Princeton University from the Department of Religion. Her research interests are Qur’an commentary, Islam in the Ottoman Empire, and Islamic political thought.

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