The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines Translated into Turkish

Dr Farhad Daftary’s The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines has just been published in a Turkish translation by Erdal Toprak, Ismaililer: tarihleri ve öğretileri. First published in English in 1990, this authoritative and groundbreaking work brought together the scattered findings of modern scholarship and extensive primary and secondary source materials on the Ismailis in one comprehensive volume...

The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines has since been reprinted five times in English and translated into Arabic (1994-1995), Persian (1996), Urdu (1997) and Tajiki (1999). The scholarly study of the history and doctrines of the Ismailis had until recently been based on the polemical and often distorted accounts of their detractors. Modern research, in the form of the publication of original texts or greater accessibility to manuscripts, as well as studies based on these texts has done much to enable a better understanding of their complex history and thought. Ismaililer: tarihleri ve öğretileri will, therefore, make an important contribution to the field by providing Turkish-speaking audiences with the first accurate portrayal of the history and doctrines of this second-largest Shi‘a Muslim community.

Dr Daftary is Associate Director of The Institute of Ismaili Studies as well as Head of the Department of Academic Research and Publications (DARP). This latest Turkish translation is his second work to be published in Turkish, following the 2005 translation of his Intellectual Traditions in Islam (2000).

As part of the Institute’s efforts to make its perspectives and scholarship available to a wider audience, translations of its publications are now available in more than 10 languages including Arabic, French, German, Gujarati, Hungarian, Indonesian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Tajik Cyrillic and Urdu.