Translating the Qurʾan in an Age of Nationalism

Brett Wilson’s Translating the Qur’an in an Age of Nationalism offers the first comprehensive political and cultural history of the translation of the Qurʾān into Turkish in the late Ottoman and early republican Turkey. The geographical and chronological scopes of Wilson’s excellent book, however, is much broader, as he traces debates about the translation and translatability of the Qurʾān into Turkish and other languages (including English) from the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries and from the Indian Subcontinent to Great Britain. Surprisingly, Islamic studies have devoted very little attention to the translation of the Qurʾān in the more recent past. Wilson’s study sets out to fill in this lacuna. Parts of the story that Wilson narrates in the book, such as the Turkification of the empire in the wake of the CUP revolution or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's nationalist project with its emphasis on purified Turkish, are well known. But Wilson succeeds in casting new light on these political projects by drawing attention to little known debates and changing sensibilities about translation of the divine text. Therefore, it will be of interest to students and scholars of the translation of the Qurʾānic text across the centuries. More generally, Translating the Qurʾan joins a growing body of literature about translation and Islam in different contexts. Furthermore, Wilson uses the debates surrounding the translation of the Qurʾān into Turkish to present a rich account of several interrelated issues, such as Islam and nationalism, language politics, the status of the ulema vis-à-vis other political actors, the nature of reform and modernity, and the implication of the emergence of new media in late Ottoman and republican Turkey

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