Abstract:
Professional, scientific studies of Tatars religious literature in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were initiated by Anton Antonowicz in the late 1960s. They were continued in two academic centers – at Vilnius University and at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. One of the results of the many years of research was the establishment of an international interdisciplinary team of scientists, in order to prepare a critical edition of the Tatar Tafsir, as part of the National Programme for the Development of Humanities, entitled Tafsir – a project of philological-historical elaboration and a critical edition of the so-called Tafsir of the Tatars from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, from the second half of the 16th century (the first translation of Koran into Polish) and creating – at the Faculty of Philology, Research Center for Kitab Studies, NCU – the world’s first research unit, engaged in initiating, conducting and coordinating inter¬disciplinary and international research in Kitab studies, a subdiscipline of philology, which combines Slavic linguistics with oriental linguistics (Arabic and Turkic studies), as well as with cultural and religious studies.
