Rethinking the message of Islam
Published: February 28 2008 02:00 | Last updated: February 28 2008 02:00
Aficionados of the clash of civilisations are fond of the thesis that the Muslim world's problem is that it has not undergone a reformation. This imperiously ignores that Islam, by retrieving the classics of Greek science and philosophy, dragged Europe out of the dark ages and made possible the Renaissance.
It is nonetheless true that the articulation of modern Islamic thinking is hampered by a number of self-inflicted handicaps. News that Turkey's religious establishment is close to completing a modern reinterpretation of Islam is therefore a potentially huge - and highly controversial - development.
Theologians at Ankara University, backed by the Diyanet, Turkey's state authority for religious affairs, are re-examining the Hadith, the sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet Mohammed. The Hadith were not codified until two centuries after the Prophet's death in 632. While the Koran is held by Muslims to be the revealed word of God to the Prophet, the Hadith - initially an orally transmitted tradition of the Prophet's time - are the origin of the majority of Sharia law.
Modern scholars believe many Hadith betray cultural traditions and mechanisms of social control - particularly of women - alien to the original message of Islam. Practices such as female genital mutilation, common in Egypt, are African customs alien to the Arabian peninsula. Even the veiling of women is thought to be a borrowing from the Byzantine aristocracy.
The "Ankara School" plans to strip away the accretions and apocrypha of the Hadith, looking at the texts through the contextual techniques of hermeneutics. The idea, encouraged by Turkey's government of neo-Islamist reformists, is of a truly modernised Islam.
There have been lots of progressive Muslim clerics, who arrived at advanced positions on issues such as contraception or stem-cell research before many of their Christian counterparts. But Islam has also been handicapped by its clerical establishments' historic antipathy to theological and philosophical debate - in particular the practice of ijtihad , or reasoning from first principles to tackle questions unforeseen in the Prophet's time.
Turkey alone cannot overcome this. Wahhabi fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia and Muslim conservatives in Egypt will, furthermore, paint post-Ottoman Turkey as warped by secularism and confined to the periphery of Islam. But Islam too is undergoing a form of globalisation - and Turkey's success in coming up with a modern but identifiably Muslim politics should give its religious modernism an edge.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8ab349c8-e5a0-11dc-9334-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
Sema Karaoglu, Founder Meltem Birkegren, Director
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