TURKISH ISLAMIC STUDIES series (TISs)

REVERSING THE INTELLECTUAL TIDE

A Project Statement

The history of modern intellectual exchange between the Islamic world and the West has, for the most part, unfolded through an unequal and asymmetrical circulation of knowledge. Beginning in the XVIII century with the pioneering printing and translation initiatives inaugurated by İbrahim Müteferrika, and continuing through the reformist atmosphere of the Tanzimat era, the Ottoman intellectual sphere entered into an increasingly intensive engagement with European scholarship, philosophy, historiography, and scientific thought. This process was institutionalized more systematically during the early Republican period through translation movements and state-supported cultural programs, particularly under the framework of the Translation Bureau.

Over the course of nearly two centuries, an enormous corpus of Western and Orientalist scholarship was translated into Turkish and gradually integrated into the intellectual fabric of modern Türkiye. This engagement profoundly shaped the epistemological horizons, methodological structures, and academic curricula of the country’s universities and Faculties of Divinity. Through this process, Turkish scholars became deeply conversant with global academic developments and actively participated in contemporary scholarly debates across the fields of Islamic studies, theology, philosophy, historiography, and the humanities.

Yet this intellectual encounter remained overwhelmingly one-directional.

While Turkish academia demonstrated remarkable openness toward global scholarship, the extensive and highly sophisticated body of Islamic scholarship produced in Türkiye did not circulate internationally on a comparable scale. For decades, an immense scholarly accumulation—spanning Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Modern Turkish—remained largely confined within linguistic and regional boundaries. As a result, a major intellectual tradition shaped by centuries of interaction between classical Islamic sciences and modern academic methodologies has remained substantially underrepresented in global scholarship.

This silence is not the consequence of intellectual insufficiency, but rather of structural and linguistic limitations within the international circulation of knowledge.

Indeed, over the last two centuries, scholars in Türkiye have produced a remarkably rich body of research in fields such as ḥadīth studies, tafsīr, kalām, fiqh, Islamic philosophy, Sufism, intellectual history, manuscript studies, historiography, comparative religion, and contemporary Islamic thought. These works frequently combine rigorous engagement with classical Islamic sources and modern critical methodologies, offering original contributions capable of enriching contemporary global discussions within Islamic studies. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of these studies remain inaccessible to international audiences.

The Turkish Islamic Studies series (TISs) emerged precisely from the awareness of this historical imbalance and from the necessity of establishing a more equitable intellectual exchange.

TISs is an international translation and publication initiative dedicated to introducing the scholarly heritage produced in Türkiye to the wider academic world through high-quality English translations prepared according to international academic standards. The project seeks not merely to transfer texts from one language into another, but to facilitate the global circulation of an intellectual tradition that has long remained outside the central channels of international academic visibility.

The scope of the series encompasses works originally written in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Modern Turkish, ranging from late Ottoman intellectual literature to contemporary academic research. Particular emphasis is placed upon works that possess enduring scholarly value, methodological originality, historical significance, and the potential to contribute meaningfully to contemporary international debates in Islamic studies.

At the same time, TISs represents a broader intellectual and methodological intervention into the future of scholarly publishing itself.

The project adopts a hybrid model that integrates advanced Artificial Intelligence-supported translation technologies with rigorous human scholarly supervision. AI-assisted translation systems are employed as an initial infrastructural framework in order to accelerate large-scale translation processes and ensure terminological consistency across extensive corpora. However, every translation subsequently undergoes meticulous review, correction, contextual refinement, and stylistic editing by subject specialists, translators, editors, and linguists. In this respect, TISs does not perceive Artificial Intelligence as a substitute for scholarship, but rather as a transformative instrument capable of expanding the possibilities of scholarly production when combined with expert human oversight.

This methodological framework enables the realization of publication projects that would previously have required decades of labor-intensive work. It allows the series to maintain both scale and scholarly precision while preserving the philological sensitivity, conceptual nuance, and academic rigor demanded by the field of Islamic studies.

Beyond its translational dimension, TISs ultimately aspires to contribute to the reconstruction of a more balanced global intellectual order.

For too long, the production of knowledge within Islamic studies has been shaped by a predominantly unidirectional model in which intellectual authority and visibility remained concentrated within limited linguistic and institutional centers. TISs challenges this imbalance by affirming that the scholarly heritage produced in Türkiye constitutes not a peripheral extension of global Islamic studies, but one of its integral intellectual components.

The project therefore seeks to establish a genuine two-way dialogue between intellectual traditions, methodologies, and scholarly communities. By making the accumulated scholarship of Türkiye accessible to an international readership, TISs aims not only to enrich global Islamic studies, but also to encourage new comparative perspectives, methodological debates, and interdisciplinary collaborations.

The series is founded upon the conviction that the future of Islamic studies depends upon a more inclusive and genuinely international circulation of scholarship. No intellectual tradition can flourish in isolation, and no global academic field can claim completeness while large segments of scholarly production remain inaccessible beyond linguistic borders.

Through carefully prepared, peer-reviewed translations published in both print and digital formats, TISs seeks to ensure that the intellectual heritage of our geography assumes its rightful place within the shared scholarly memory of humanity.

Project Director
Dr. Sabri Kızılkaya