Turkish Religious Foundation Encyclopaedia of Islam

Abstract

This new Turkish encyclopaedia of Islam is an ambitious and wide-ranging project that will rapidly become an indispensable reference work for the study of social, political and cultural aspects of the Muslim world. As stated in the preface to Volume 1, the work is a statement of pride and confidence in the Islamic religious and cultural heritage, at a time when the Muslim world is overcoming, with great determination, its long-held inferiority complex vis-a-vis the modern West. Accordingly, the TDV Islam Ansiklopedisi was conceived and designed by - and is being overwhelmingly executed from within - a community of Muslim scholars, mainly Turkish. It is thus markedly different in scope and in tone from Leiden’s Encyclopaedia of Islam. This latter is seen by the editors of the new encyclopaedia as primarily a project of European orientalists.