Announcing the Freethought Wiki Project: Seeking Turkish translators for Turan Dursun - Türk çevirmenler ariyor!
Merhaba CEMB,
A month ago Shinsengumi posted about Turan Dursun, the Turkish mufti who after much study became an atheist and then, after considerably less study, a murdered man. Had his progression been the reverse he would have been considered a martyr, but that is beside the point.
Thanks to the Internet his books are available electronically (though I doubt legally). Unfortunately for most everyone here, they are entirely in Turkish.
Once again, however, we can thank the Internet. The Freethought Wiki is a project aimed at translating the works of Dursun (and Arab writers such as Faraj Foda) into the more accessible English.
But why Dursun? Unless your attention span is as short as mine, Tursun was a Muslim Islamic scholar, making him perhaps the most qualified 20th century türk ateist to critique this religion. Straight to the point, he did this in a series titled Din Bu (that would be "This Religion" for you non-Turkish readers).
Theology was this man's life. The sirat al-mustaqim the very air that he breathed. A mufti is not born out of simply browsing sunnah.com and quran.com, reading a few tafsirs, watching Hassan's videos, and understanding the difference between qira'at and ahruf, but through years of rigorous study (or so I'm told). Why would this man dedicate his life to a creed only to so forcefully abandon it at the end of his middle age? What change of principle could drive a man to throw everything away so as to relieve himself of cognitive dissonance? How honest must this man be, that he cannot even live with a lie to himself?
Dursun had everything to lose by publically losing his deen, and his silence through death cannot be his silence forever.
Turkish readers, this is where you are needed. With your efforts these books can be translated. With you and your friends' efforts they can be translated even more rapidly. This is an entirely volunteer and community driven project (ok, I'm overseeing it, but you get the point), and you are only asked to take on as much material at a time as you feel you can handle. Even vetting the accuracy of the work falls on the shoulders of your peers.
Currently the project is set up as a wiki, but other methods of participation can be arranged. Please PM me or reply to the post if you are interested in joining.
For those wishing to take a look at the Turkish text, here is an HTML version of Din Bu I:
http://www.gencalevilerharekati.de/Din%20Bu/Din_Bu%201%20Turan%20Dursun%201.htm
Topic: Türk çevirmenler ariyor! Seeking Turkish translators for Turan Dursun