Recontextualizing Turkish Islamist discourse: Hilal (1958-1980) as a site of translational repertoire construction

Abstract

This study explores the functioning of translation in the recontextualization process of Turkish Islamism between 1960 and 1980. I argue that translation functioned as a crucial medium for the resurgence of Islamism in the early 1960s along with other decisive surrounding trajectories, which I propose to contextualize as an attempt to construct a domestic repertoire via importing key Islamic texts from around the world. The corpus of the study is a representative Islamist periodical Hilal, standing out with its remarkable dependence on translation. The analysis portrays a bi-faceted text- and agent-oriented methodology. The examination of the corpus is not limited to tercüme-çeviri [translation proper] and includes other distinctive translational text production practices such as hulâsa [summary], iktibas [borrowing], sadeleştirme [purification], etc. with a particular focus on the nucleus of translatorial agency, the translators. Coalescing the principles of translation history and Periodical Studies, this dissertation aims at introducing an exemplary study for translational research that is motivated to track the translation-oriented evolution of a discursive practice like Islamism through a particular periodical. As a further contribution, breaking the hegemonic orientations of the field of Translation Studies with its dependence upon non-literary and non-Western sources of translation, this study proposes an alternative “supranational/intra-ummah translation paradigm” for forthcoming studies on the translational practices under Islamic settings.