Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab: A Cultural Monument of Islam in Europe. With a Latin-Script Transliteration of the BL Tatar Belarusian Kitab (or 13020) on CD-ROM.

• Author: Kemper, Michael
• Position: Book review

Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab: A Cultural Monument of Islam in Europe. With a Latin-Script Transliteration of the BL Tatar Belarusian Kitab (or 13020) on CD-ROM. By Shirin Akiner. Mediterranean Language and Culture Monograph Series, vol. 11. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 2009. Pp. xxvii + 457. [euro] 68.

This book is the slightly updated edition of Shirin Akiner's hitherto unpublished dissertation of 1980 on a manuscript in the Belarusian language but in Arabic script. The British Library copy dates probably from the early 1830s and belongs to the genre of kitab: a collection of Islamic narratives of various origins, mostly on ethics and including many stories of the prophets. The manuscript is thus a tine example of the religious literature of the Tatars, who started to settle in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth century and formed small Muslim communities in what is today West Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. While the Tatars had given up their Turkic language already in the mid-sixteenth century, most of them did not relinquish their belief, and the communities managed to maintain a minimum of Islamic literature. Since the Second World War increased attention has been paid to the Tatars' Islamic literature, but the present work is the first linguistic and semantic in-depth analysis of one particular source.

After an introduction that covers previous research and a first chapter on the history and religion of the Tatars in Lithuania, Poland, and White Russia, the core of the book is a diligent analysis of the BL manuscript, with sections on phonology (including how the Arabic script was adapted to accommodate a Slavic language), morphology, lexicon, and syntax. The centerpiece of Akiner's book is a compilation of the religious terminology of the manuscript (pp. 135-335); here the author lists and comments upon 1,094 terms that she groups into semantic fields of doctrine (with sections on God, angels, holy scriptures, doctrine, and others) and practice (prayer. Islamic law, community worship, etc.). Appendices include a list of Turkish loan words. A full transliteration of the manuscript, in the Latin alphabet, is attached to the book as a CD-ROM.

Akiner does not address Islamicists but rather specialists of Slavic linguistics, and curiously the author chose not to provide translations for many Belarusian, Polish, and even Church Slavonic and Latin quotes from historical texts. The British Library kitab is an...