Some time this year 35 Turkish scholars will release the results
of a three-year project to reinterpret the hadith,
comments on the words and deeds of the prophet Mohammed. It is
likely to have the effect of dropping a bomb in the Muslim
world.
While the Koran is considered to be the word of God as revealed
to Mohammed, the hadith, which were compiled two centuries
after his death in 632, have long been subject to interpretation.
The team of theological scholars at Ankara University, working
under the aegis of the Diyanet, Turkey’s state authority for
religious affairs, have been closely examining the hadith
Much of Sharia law is based on the hadith. The scholars
have been doing their work with an eye toward reinterpreting or
eliminating those that are apocrypha or culturally inspired for
purposes of social control. Hadith have been used, for
example to justify the oppression of women and the stoning of
adulterers. Some scholars believe that the requirement that women
wear veils was inspired not by Islam, but by Byzantine
aristocrats.
Turkey, whose secular nature is written into its constitution,
has a religiously conservative government. The Justice and
Development Party (AKP) won a solid majority in last summer’s
election, but is now locked in a legal battle with the secular
establishment over its easing of a ban on veils on university
campuses. The AKP sees the easing of the veil restriction as a case
of the camel’s nose under the tent. Defenders of the measure
counter that the AKP wants to gradually impose religious rules on
the country. If the secular establishment — made up of military,
judicial and republican elements — wins the case, the AKP itself
may be ruled illegal.
Against this backdrop, the reinterpretation of the
hadith is seen as a way for the government to show that it
is modern and reform-minded. In a recent interview, Mehmet Gormez,
deputy director of the Diyanet, said that the reinterpretation was
intended to make the proverbs, sayings and commentary that make up
the hadith “more suitable to 21st Turkish people and more
scientifically and historically accurate.”
While the project’s immediate audience is the Turkish people,
one of the underlying reasons for undertaking it was to assist
Turkey in its bid to join the European Union. Putting a reformist
stamp on Turkey’s governing party seems to be a latter-day
objective.
Once it is made public, the scholars’ report will have an impact
well beyond Turkey’s borders. The reaction of Saudi Arabia’s most
conservative Wahabbist clerics is likely to be fiercely
disapproving, not to mention the reaction of various Egyptian
clerics and scholars, let alone the Osama bin Ladens and Ayman
al-Zawahiris of this world. These radical Islamists and their
allies are dedicated to imposing the strictest Sharia law by
establishing a Seventh Century theocracy — a caliphate — based in
Baghdad. As we have seen, their strategy for achieving this is to
use murder and terror to gain land. They will not take lightly the
“reinterpretation” by some Turkish scholars of their favored means
of social control.
