HERMENEUTIC TENDENCIES IN MYSTICAL TEXT ANNOTATIONS: SCHLEIERMACHER'S GRAMMATICAL HERMENEUTICS AND THE OTTOMAN MASNAVI ANNOTATION TRADITION

Abstract

The human effort to understand or make sense of any phenomenon or thought has paved the way for the emergence of various explanation and interpretation activities throughout history. Theological hermeneutics, which emerged in the Jewish and Christian religions to ensure the Holy Book was correctly understood by its recipients, has its counterpart in the Islamic world as Tafsir, Ta’wil, and Annotation. Theological hermeneutics, which developed from an understanding based on the explanation and interpretation of sacred texts, utilized allegorical and literal interpretation styles, while annotators, especially those explaining Sufi texts, preferred an exoteric and esoteric understanding of explanation. Many Sufi works, which are considered classics in the Islamic world and are generally written in verse, have been explained within the Ottoman annotation tradition. Rumi’s Masnavi, in particular, with its layers of Sufism-based wisdom in terms of meaning, has been annotated by different scholars since the 15th century. In a significant part of these annotations, it is seen that the annotation method adopted by the annotators resembles the grammatical method used by Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of the important hermeneutics of the 19th century and the founder of modern hermeneutics, in his textual interpretations. In this study, we will first provide information about Schleiermacher's hermeneutics; then, we will emphasize the aspects of the Masnavi annotators that overlap with Schleiermacher's grammatical method during their annotation process.