Contemporary Turkish Academic Approach to Christianity (original) (raw)

The new Turkish Encyclopedia of Islam (DİA) was launched in 1988 as a corrective to Leiden’s Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI). In their introductory “manifesto,” the editors of DİA accuse EI of being a product of “religious, nationalist and Western bigotry,” in addition to having a “colonialist and missionary viewpoint” (“Önsöz” in DİA). Although DİA primarily focuses on religious phenomena mostly related to Islam, Islamic studies and Muslim countries, it includes entries related to other religious traditions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. In this paper, I examine the representation of the Christian tradition in DİA regarding Christian sacred texts, history and theology and explore the ways in which it is depicted. As a method, I scanned through the whole list of DİA entries and selected forty-six of them primarily related to the Christian tradition. I applied content analysis to each of these entries. I furthered my research with a postcritical approach in order to search for the “subtext” and “context” of the texts in question. In the end, I argue that DİA seems to be quite successful in presenting a scholarly attitude towards Christianity. However, it acquires a rather European-Catholic-centered attitude with respect to Christian history and theology.

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