The (ðA) () is a Turkish academic encyclopedia for Islamic studies published by Presidency of Religious Affairs. Other than Islamic learning, the encyclopedia is a valuable resource for the history of the Balkans and the Middle East during the Ottoman era.
The decision to begin the encyclopedia project was made at the 1st Turkish Publications Congress in Ankara on 2âÂÂ5 May 1939. In response to this Congress, the Turkish Minister of National Education Hasan ÃÂli Yücel sent a letter dated 9 May 1939 to the rector of Istanbul University requesting that the Encyclopaedia of Islam be translated into Turkish.
The project was initially led by , Dean of the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul University, but soon Abdülhak Adnan Adñvar was appointed leader of the project. The first fascicle of the Encyclopedia of Islam was published in December 1940. The project's first headquarters was in the Institute of Turkology's building, later used as the Istanbul University Professors' House. The headquarters was moved to Seyyid Hasan Pasha Madrasa in 1947. The encyclopedia was completed in 1987.
Initially, in 1939, the ðA was proposed to be a translation of the first Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI1, 1913âÂÂ1938) into the Turkish language because the EI1 had only been introduced in English, French and German.
However, while preparing the many articles of the EI1 were revised, expanded and corrected, and the work ultimately "had the dual purpose of amending Orientalist scholarship and elaborating on the Turkish contribution to Islamic tradition".
The result was that the became a work consisting of 15 volumes instead of the originally proposed five. Some articles of the ðA have been in turn included into the second Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI2, 1960âÂÂ2007), and EI2 articles refer to many articles of the ðA.
From 1966 until 1987, the editor-in-chief of was the Tahsin Yazñcñ, a Turkish scholar of Persian literature, who personally contributed more than 150 articles to the work. The previous editor-in-chief was Ahmed Ateà Â.
(TDV ðA or DðA) is sometimes regarded as a successor to . DðA is a completely original work, which was published in 44 volumes from 1988 to December 2013, with two supplementary volumes published in 2016. It contains 16,855 articles in total.
The academic quality of DðA is recognized by Turkologists and Turkish-speaking scholars of Islamic studies.
The transliteration system of the has become a de facto standard in Oriental studies for the transliteration of Ottoman Turkish texts. For phonetic transcription the dictionaries of New Redhouse, Karl Steuerwald and Ferit DevelioÃÂlu have become standard. Another transliteration system is that of the (DMG), which handles any Turkic language written in the Arabic script. There are few differences between the ðA and the DMG transliteration systems.