A Hanafi law manual in the vernacular: Devletoğlu Yūsuf Balık ̣ esrī’s Turkish verse adaptation of the Hidāya-Wiqāya textual tradition for the Ottoman Sultan Murad II (824/1424) Sara Nur Yıldız 1 University of St Andrews/Koç University ANAMED saranuryildiz@gmail.com Abstract This study examines how Devletoğlu Yūsuf Balık ̣ esrī’s versified Hanafi law manual, written in Anatolian Turkish and dedicated to the Ottoman sultan Murad II (d. 855/1451), engages in a complex relationship between the nascent vernacular, Anatolian Turkish, and the Classical Arabic reli- gious textual tradition. Devletoğlu Yūsuf’s work, Manz ̣ ūmfık ̣ ıh, is a Turkish paraphrase of the Wiqāya, a popular abridgement of the major Hanafi law handbook, the Hidāya, in the form of a mathnawī (verse work of rhymed couplets). Several passages from the “Book on the Affairs of the Qadi” in Devletoğlu Yūsuf’s work are analysed in order to gain insight into how the work functions as a normative text in the Classical Hanafi tradition set within a localized context. Furthermore, this study explores how the work expounds upon the benefits of trans- mitting religious knowledge in the vernacular and justifies the use of Turkish for religious texts by drawing on Hanafi-approved Persian lan- guage practices of religious devotion. Of particular interest is how Devletoğlu Yūsuf grounds his argumentation on the rhetorical theories of the Classical Arabic grammarian, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī. Keywords: Islamic law, Hanafi law, Early Ottoman legal texts, Vernacularization, Islamization, Wiqaya, Arabic grammar and rhetoric, ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī Introduction Religious texts comprise the bulk of works composed in the newly emerging literary language of Anatolian Turkish in the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen- turies. These texts have been studied primarily by Turcologists interested in philological and lexical data, but have seldom been examined in the context of the wider Islamic tradition, or with attention to larger historical, 1 The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n.208476, “The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500”. Many thanks go to A.C.S. Peacock for his invaluable suggestions on previous drafts of this art- icle, and to Sooyong Kim for his advice on translating tricky passages of Old Anatolian Turkish verse into English. Bulletin of SOAS, 80, 2 (2017), 283–304. © SOAS, University of London, 2017. doi:10.1017/S0041977X17000477 First published online 17 April 2017 available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X17000477 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Koc Universitesi, on 30 Jun 2017 at 10:35:57, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,