Turkey is engaged in a bold and profound attempt to rewrite the
basis for Islamic sharia law while also officially reinterpreting the
Qur'an for the modern age.
The exercise in reforming Islamic
jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic
government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is being seen as
an iconoclastic campaign to establish a 21st century form of Islam,
fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and western
philosophical methods and principles.
The result, say experts
following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim
discrimination against women, banish some of the brutal penalties
associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation, and
redefine Islam as a modern, dynamic force in the large country that
pivots between east and west, leaning into the Middle East while
aspiring to join the European Union.
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 Chatham House, 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.
A Roman Catholic Jesuit expert on Turkey and Islam, Felix
Koerner, is working with the Ankara professors, reportedly schooling
them in the history of western religious and philosophical change and
how to apply the lessons of historical Christian reform movements to
modern Islam. "This is really a synthesis of modern European critical
thought and Muslim Ottoman Koranic tradition," said Koerner. "There is
also a political agenda. With this government there is more confidence
in these modern theologians."
Erdogan insists his AK party, in a
country that is constitutionally secularist, is a Turkish Muslim
equivalent of a European Christian democratic party - traditionalist,
conservative, based on religious values, but democratic, tolerant, and
liberal. With Spain and the Zapatero government, he is pushing an
"Alliance of Civilisations" aimed at a rapprochement between the Muslim
and western worlds. After years of fighting the militantly secularist
Turkish establishment, he has just succeeded in lifting the ban on
Islamic headscarves for girls in higher education. His many opponents
decry it as part of Turkey's slide away from secularism down the
slippery slope of Islamism.
Sources say the Islamic reform project
is so ambitious and so fundamental it will take years to complete, but
that it is already paying dividends - abolition of the death penalty, a
campaign against honour killings, and the training and appointment of
several hundred women as imams.
At a glance
The Hadith are
narrations of the life of the prophet Muhammad and his companions and
are considered an important source of material on religious practice,
law, history and biography. Hadith relate what the prophet said, did or
liked. Most Muslims consider the Hadith to be an essential addition to
and clarification of the Qur'an. In Islamic jurisprudence the holy book
contains guidelines about the behaviour expected from Muslims but there
are no specific rules on many matters. Hadith influence around 90% of
sharia, or Islamic law, and the most controversial ones concern the
violent punishments meted out to adulterers and apostates, the role and
treatment of women and jihad.
Riazat Butt
·
This article was amended on Tuesday March 4 2008. Fadi Hakura is a
Turkey expert at Chatham House, not the International Institute of
Strategic Studies as we said in the above article. This has been
corrected.
