Encounter, Translation, and Affective Mediation in Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam Fatma Aliye’nin Nisvan-ı İslam’ında Karşılaşma, Tercüme ve Duygulanımsal Dolayım

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ALTUĞ F.

Kadim, sa.10, ss.207-230, 2025 (ESCI, Scopus, TRDizin)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Basım Tarihi: 2025
  • Doi Numarası: 10.54462/kadim.1733289
  • Dergi Adı: Kadim
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, Central & Eastern European Academic Source (CEEAS), Directory of Open Access Journals, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM)
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.207-230
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Fatma Aliye, Cultural Translation, Ottoman Feminism, Islam and Gender, Affect Theory
  • Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
  • Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This article explores Nisvan-ı İslam (1891) by Fatma Aliye as a layered site of intercultural and intersubjective mediation, where Ottoman Muslim womanhood is not simply represented but reconfigured through dialogic, translational, and affective encounters. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s theory of translation and Brian Massumi’s affect theory, the study examines how Aliye stages her conversations with European women, using narrative strategies that blur the boundaries between testimony and fiction, experience and narration. These encounters revolve around contested topics such as slavery, polygamy, and veiling, enabling a strategic translation of Islamic principles, including reciprocity, modesty, moral intention, juridical reasoning, into terms legible to a Western audience. Beyond conceptual reframing, the text also stages affective scenes of encounter, conveyed through spatial detail, bodily gestures, irony, and sensory resonance. Nisvan-ı İslam thus performs a form of “world-making translation”, a situated, relational practice that holds divergent lifeworlds in tension without collapsing difference. The article further analyzes the work’s French and Arabic translations, highlighting how its transregional afterlives extend and transform its mediating function. By framing translation as a precarious, affectively charged negotiation, the article repositions Nisvan-ı İslam as both a pioneering text of Ottoman Muslim feminist thought and an Islamic mode of intercultural address.