Religious language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab

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Tatars from the Golden Horde settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the 15th–16th centuries, originating as Turco-Mongols and practicing Islam. Over generations, they lost their native languages, adopting Belarusian and Polish instead. To preserve their faith, they translated key religious texts into these languages, which were typically written in Latin and Cyrillic scripts—unsuitable for Islamic content. Consequently, the Tatars developed a unique orthography using Arabic letters to represent the phonology of Slavic languages and created a specialized religious vocabulary. They incorporated Belarusian and Polish for general ethical concepts while employing Arabic loanwords for Islamic doctrine, adapting them morphologically and phonetically. This linguistic blend showcases a significant cultural aspect of Islam in Europe. The work's first part outlines the six-hundred-year history of the Tatars in the Grand Duchy, now part of Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, utilizing diverse sources, including Latin, Old Russian, medieval French, Polish, Italian, and Turkish. The second part provides an in-depth analysis of a Tatar manuscript (Kitab) in the British Library, marking the first comprehensive study of such a text. The manuscript is primarily in Belarusian, featuring mixed standard and dialect forms, with a CD-ROM containing a Latin-script transliteration included in the book's sleeve.