Entry tags:

islam, religion, turkey

[BRIEF NOTE] Islamic reformation means ... ?
The Guardian's Ian Traynor has aptly summarized the interesting news that Turks are planning to apply textual criticism to Islamic texts.

A team of reformist Islamic scholars at Ankara University, acting under the auspices of the Diyanet or Directorate of Religious Affairs, the government body which oversees the country's 8,000 mosques and appoints imams, is said to be close to concluding a "reinterpretation" of parts of the Hadith, the collection of thousands of aphorisms and comments said to derive from the prophet Muhammad and which form the basis of Islamic jurisprudence or sharia law. "One of the team doing the revision said they are nearly finished," said Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul commentator who reflects the thinking of the liberal camp in Erdogan's governing AK party. "They have problems with the misogynistic hadith, the ones against women. They may delete some from the collection, declaring them not authentic. That would be a very bold step. Or they may just add footnotes, saying they should be understood from a different historical context."

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies, described the project as an attempt to make Turkish Sunni Islam "fully compatible with contemporary social and moral values.

"They see this not as a revolution, but as a return to the original Islam, away from the excessive conservatism that has stymied all reforms for the last few centuries. It's somewhat akin to the Christian reformation, although not the same."

Under the guidance of Ali Bardokoglu, the liberal Islamic scholar who heads the religious directorate and was appointed by Erdogan, the Ankara theologians are writing a new five-volume "exegesis" of the Qur'an, taking the sacred text apart forensically, rooting it in its time and place, and redefining its message to and relevance for Muslims today. They are also ditching some of the Hadith, sayings ascribed to and comments on the prophet collected a couple of hundred years after his death.

Brian Whitaker, at The Guardian's Comment is free, is somewhat critical of the project on the grounds of its lack of novelty and its state sponsorship.

It's not terribly surprising, therefore, that a critical review of the hadith has been taking place in Hanafi-dominated Turkey [where textual criticism was more common]. There would be more grounds for excitement if it was happening - say - in Saudi Arabia where the Hanbali school prevails and scholars produce the most conservative legal judgments, often based on literalist readings of the Qur'an and uncritical acceptance of the hadith.

One criticism of the Hanafi school is that its built-in flexibility has historically made its religious rulings susceptible to political influence. The Hanbali school, on the other hand, because it relies so heavily on the hadith, is relatively impervious to political influence; in Saudi Arabia it tends to control politics rather than the other way round.

In Turkey, the Department of Religious Affairs is not an independent body: it was established under the constitution to handle relations between the government and religious communities in accordance with the principles of secularism laid down by Ataturk. As a result of this background, no matter how academically sound the department's editing and revision of the hadith may be, there will always be a question mark hanging over it - in the minds of Muslims living outside Turkey as well as the more traditionalist Muslims inside the country. It probably won't cut much ice, either, with Turkey's Alawi Muslims - from the Shia branch of Islam - who are said to number around 12 million.

What interests me most about this news is the possibility that this sort of critical review could have the same effect on Islam (at least Turkish Islam) as higher criticism in Protestant and Catholic Christianities. If the core religious texts of a tradition are accepted as having multiple different but legitimate readings, and if preference is given to none of these readings or several of these readings, then many things become quite possible. Without higher criticism, would it have even been possible for (say) Dan Brown to write a novel exploring the heretical notion that Jesus survived the crucifixion to take Mary Magdalene as his wife and found a Frankish royal dynasty that survives to this day?