Qur'an between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic

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.

"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

• Introduction 1. A Religious Scholar’s Life in a Tumultuous Period 2. Qur’an Commentary in the Nineteenth Century 3. Commissioning a Qur’an Commentary Suitable for the Modern Period 4. The Philosophical Context of Elmalılı’s Religious Understanding 5. Hak Dîni and Its Contemporary Concerns Conclusion