Encounter, Translation, and Affective Mediation in Fatma Aliye’s Nisvan-ı İslam

This article explores Nisvan-ı İslam (1891) by Fatma Aliye as a layered site of intercultural and intersubjective mediation, where Ottoman Muslim womanhood is not simply represented but reconfigured through dialogic, translational, and affective encounters. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s theory of translation and Brian Massumi’s affect theory, the study examines how Aliye stages her conversations with European women, using narrative strategies that blur the boundaries between testimony and fiction, experience and narration. These encounters revolve around contested topics such as slavery, polygamy, and veiling, enabling a strategic translation of Islamic principles, including reciprocity, modesty, moral intention, juridical reasoning, into terms legible to a Western audience. Beyond conceptual reframing, the text also stages affective scenes of encounter, conveyed through spatial detail, bodily gestures, irony, and sensory resonance. Nisvan-ı İslam thus performs a form of “world-making translation”, a situated, relational practice that holds divergent lifeworlds in tension without collapsing difference. The article further analyzes the work’s French and Arabic translations, highlighting how its transregional afterlives extend and transform its mediating function. By framing translation as a precarious, affectively charged negotiation, the article repositions Nisvan-ı İslam as both a pioneering text of Ottoman Muslim feminist thought and an Islamic mode of intercultural address.