Months after the first official translation of the Quran in the Kurdish language was released in Turkey, Kurds are now hoping the state-run Presidency of Religious Affairs (DİB) would also launch translations of "tafseers" in their language.
Tafseers are basically interpretations and commentaries on the Quran by leading Islamic scholars.
Like most Kurds in Turkey, Mahfuz Açıkgöz, an imam at a mosque in the eastern Bitlis province, was full of praise for the release of the official Kurdish translation of the Quran in May.
"It was a significant, but a delayed action," Açıkgöz said.
But he said that the DİB needed to do more. "A translation of the Quran alone is not enough; we also want the translation of the tafseer [books]."
There are thousands of tafseers around the world, including many published by Turkish religious scholars. People like Açıkgöz say the Turkish body could start with a translation of any tafseer it believed was most authentic.
Mahmut Caduk, an academic at the Ankara-based Yıldırım Beyazıt University's Persian Language and Literature Department, also agreed on the necessity of a tafseer translation.
"A Kurdish translation of a tafseer will also contribute to understanding the translation of the Quran," Caduk said.
Zahir Ertekin, an academic at Bingöl University's Kurdish Language and Literature Department, said that while the official Kurdish translation of the Quran had added a "huge richness" to Kurdish literature, its current readability was lower than expected since the Quran itself was not a simple text to understand without the tafseers.
Ertekin said Kurds would not be able to read it unless they fully understand the Latin alphabet of Kurdish languages.
In May, the DİB printed 10,000 copies of the Kurdish translation of the Quran in Turkey. At least, 5,000 of these copies had both the Arabic Quranic text and Kurdish translation side-by-side. The DİB now plans to release 20,000 more such Kurdish translations in the near future.
Although this was the first time that Turkey's state institution had launched a Kurdish translation of Islam's holy book, there have been other Kurdish translations on the market.
Açıkgöz said the first such known translation was published by Abdullah Varlı in 1994. He believed that the newly-released official Kurdish translation would soon surpass other less authentic works in the market and people like him would have the peace of mind that it was translated by experts.
Zübeyir Aslan, who lives in Mardin, also said that other Kurdish translations of the Quran had been available for more than 20 years.
"[However,] this [state-body released] translation is kind of a revolution for the Kurds in Turkey," Aslan said.
Although the official Kurdish translation was a massive improvement on the previous works, translators admit there is still some room for improvement.
Hüseyin Gündüz, one of the two translators of the official Kurdish Quran, said that while the translation mostly prompted positive reactions, there were also some reservations expressed about certain word choice in the Kurdish translated text.
"Some said the language was too heavy to understand and expressed frustration about a word they did not know," Gündüz said.
Gündüz said that future editions would consider the feedback. In regards to the process of working on the translation, he said that experts with vast knowledge of Kurdish and Arabic had worked on the project.
"We worked like a commission; we also got editing support from experts in Kurdish language," Gündüz said.
Kurdish belongs to a northwestern Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is accepted as the fourth-most spoken language in the Middle East, after Arabic, Persian and Turkish.
Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs has expedited the translation of Quran into different languages in the last decade, with plans to publish in dozens of languages, including German, English, French and Russian.
