A JURISPRUDENTIAL BOOK WRITTEN IN CHAGATAI LANGUAGE MUʻALLIMU'L-ETRAK

An overview on the history of Turkic language indicates that religious works have a special place in this field. In particular, a considerable part of prose works have religious content. At the same time with adoption of Islam by Turkic people, numerous works were written about religion, culture and history of Islam. Among them, it can be refer to translations of Quran, commentaries, the history of prophets, lives of religious elders, jurisprudential books and the like, which have been written to promote Islam, the correct teaching of religious laws and their implementation. In Turkic language, the works with such contents have been often translated from Persian or Arabic. The purpose of present study was to investigate the Chagatai translation of Keydani jurisprudence as one of the important juristic books of Hanafi School. The original work has been written in Arabic by Lutfullah Keydani (d. 1349). This book had been considered as one of the important sources of jurisprudence during that era and afterwards and was later translated into Persian and Turkic languages. The translations are known by many different names because they have been translated by different translators. One of the considered translations is Muʻallimu'l-Etrak. This book is kept in the National Library of Iran under number 34234. In present study, the book has been introduced and some of its general features as well as its linguistic features have been discussed.