Turkish Equivalents of ʾAsmāʾ al-Ḥusnā in the Kara-Khanid Period

Abstract

Turks mostly adopted Islam in the 11th century. The first MuslimTurkish state was the Kara-Khanid Khanate that dominated this period.The works written during the Kara-Khanid period are considered as thefirst works of Islamic Turkish literature. Interlinear Qur'anic Translationof the Qur'an (Rylands copy), Dīwān lughat at-Turk, Ḳutadġu Biligand Atebetu'l-Haḳāyiḳ are the main works written in Kara-KhanidTurkish having reached today. In these works, Turkish equivalents aregenerally lexicalised for the Islamic terms. It is seen that the practice ofTurkicization of the concept names and terms belonging to other religionswhich had previously become a tradition in the Uighurs period continuedin the period when Islam was accepted. In a society that has recentlyadopted Islam, these works have been written with the understanding thatit is necessary to use a language they know in order to express, spread andadopt this new belief. Many of the Turkish terms lexicalised in this periodwere abandoned in later periods, and Arabic ones were used instead.Like other terms relating to religion, the beautiful names andadjectives of Allah, i.e. ʾasmāʾ al-ḥusnā, were generally met with Turkishones in the works of Karahanli period. These names, lexicalized duringthe Karahanli period, were also used in some works written in Turkishin the later periods. In some of the Turkish works, it is seen that thesenames are met with other Turkish words. In this study, the concept ofʾasmāʾ al-ḥusnā and the studies related to ʾasmāʾ al-ḥusnā in Turkish arebriefly introduced and the Turkish equivalents of Esma-hüsna, used in theworks written in Karahanli Turkish were depicted. In the reviewed works,sentences containing the words used as the name or title of Allah aregiven and their meanings and usage patterns are exemplified. As a result,it is seen that a large part of ʾasmāʾ al-ḥusnā was met with Turkish wordsderived in various ways in the works written in Kara-Khanid Turkish.