Turkey's Islamic Reformation
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The Qur'an has no direct equivalent in mainstream Christianity; it is believed by Muslims to be a revealed text, literally the word of God conveyed to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel. The Muslim equivalent of the New Testament gospels are the hadith collections, which bring together descriptions of the actions and sayings of the Prophet during his ministry. Because Islam lacks a central authority, the hadith collections have never been officially certified in the way the bible was canonised at Constantine's Council of Nicaea, and the authenticity of individual hadith is accepted variously by different Muslim denominations (following a variety of classical commentators) on the basis of textual analysis and historical provenance (see for example this complex classification system from Turkish-based Sunni website Lastprophet.info).
Many of the more "culturally conservative" (eg. sexist and aggressively expansionist) ideas in Islam are derived exclusively from the hadith, and in June 2006 Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs announced a project to revise the hadith with the intention of purging it of what they saw as objectionable cultural baggage either fraudulently introduced during the early history of the religion to support a variety of outdated political and social viewpoints, or inappropriately retained due to misinterpretation of Muhammad's intent. Yesterday morning the BBC's Today program noted the completion of this undertaking, which it described as "a radical revision of the second most sacred text in Islam".
While attempts to reform Islam have been made in the past, this move-linked to the creation of a whole class of female imams intended as cultural missionaries to the Turkish countryside-comes as part of a concerted effort by the Erdoğan government to bring Islam into alignment with modernity, and Turkey into the EU. Despite the fact that the project's announcement was largely ignored in the West-and it looks like the US media at least is going to pay as little attention to its completion-as Guardian commentator Martin Kettle notes, this Neo-Kemalist Reformation is amongst the most interesting things happening in Europe right now.
The Qur'an has no direct equivalent in mainstream Christianity; it is believed by Muslims to be a revealed text, literally the word of God conveyed to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel. The Muslim equivalent of the New Testament gospels are the hadith collections, which bring together descriptions of the actions and sayings of the Prophet during his ministry. Because Islam lacks a central authority, the hadith collections have never been officially certified in the way the bible was canonised at Constantine's Council of Nicaea, and the authenticity of individual hadith is accepted variously by different Muslim denominations (following a variety of classical commentators) on the basis of textual analysis and historical provenance (see for example this complex classification system from Turkish-based Sunni website Lastprophet.info).
Many of the more "culturally conservative" (eg. sexist and aggressively expansionist) ideas in Islam are derived exclusively from the hadith, and in June 2006 Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs announced a project to revise the hadith with the intention of purging it of what they saw as objectionable cultural baggage either fraudulently introduced during the early history of the religion to support a variety of outdated political and social viewpoints, or inappropriately retained due to misinterpretation of Muhammad's intent. Yesterday morning the BBC's Today program noted the completion of this undertaking, which it described as "a radical revision of the second most sacred text in Islam".
While attempts to reform Islam have been made in the past, this move-linked to the creation of a whole class of female imams intended as cultural missionaries to the Turkish countryside-comes as part of a concerted effort by the Erdoğan government to bring Islam into alignment with modernity, and Turkey into the EU. Despite the fact that the project's announcement was largely ignored in the West-and it looks like the US media at least is going to pay as little attention to its completion-as Guardian commentator Martin Kettle notes, this Neo-Kemalist Reformation is amongst the most interesting things happening in Europe right now.