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Do Muslims Never Get to Have an Idea of Their Own? Reinterpretating Islam In Turkey

by KufiGirl :: posted 2 March 08

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by KufiGirl

The case of Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs “reinterpreting” the hadith to make Islam more palatable to modern sensibilities has been the big story in Islamic circles this week. It was reported in the British press and received with fanfare across the blogosphere. I admit I am perplexed.

With the huge, blinding, blinking-lights-in-neon caveat that I Am Not An Islamic Scholar, and that I welcome comments from those who are, I need to rant about this because the whole idea of “reinterpreting” the hadith from a modern standpoint just doesn’t make a lot of sense if you know how the hadith works. This is NOT because everything in Islam is set in stone and there can be only one interpretation and Muslims are conservative fanatics who believe a seventh-century code is the only proper guide to life in the modern era and therefore cannot bear the idea of new readings on old problems — it’s because the hadith is already considered potentially unstable. But there is an established way of dealing with this. All Muslims know that, hence the collective “huh?” at this becoming such a big story in the West over the last few days.

To make the first of what I’m sure will be a series of scandalous simplifications, a hadith can be compared to an ancient game of telephone. Unlike the Qur’an, which was considered divine and memorized word-for-word, hadiths were stories told about (not by) Muhammad and were intended to complement (not replace) the Qur’an. Some of these were told by multiple people, though wording and details vary from person to person. Taken collectively, the hadith describes the traditions and sayings of Muhammad (the sunnah), which is the second-highest source of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, after the Qur’an.

Of course, like any game of telephone, there is danger in a story becoming corrupted as it goes through a chain of narrators. Allowing for this, each hadith is verified individually according to several factors, such as the character of the original narrator and the reliability of his or her memory, whether or not the chain of narration is unbroken, the number of narrators telling the same story, and so on. What you get, in the end, is a collection of thousands of hadiths with varying degrees of reliability. It is perfectly possible to have a hadith told by one unstable guy whom no one liked who had an ulterior motive and no one to back up his story, a story which doesn’t even make sense anyway because no one believes Muhammad would really have done that thing this guy claims he did. Right? So that hadith would still be part of the conversation around Islamic law, but it would be classified as a fabrication or otherwise unsupportable by a variety of methods used to validate individual hadiths. In casual conversation these are usually referred to as “weak” hadiths (although the word for weak, da’if, has a specific meaning in this context).

By the same token, you can have a very “strong” hadith, let’s say one told by twenty different companions of the prophet who were all noble servants of God and had no motive to lie, telling a story that seems consistent with the Qur’an, followed up by an unbroken chain of narration — and still argue about the applicability of that hadith to modern circumstances. For cases like this there are a number of “lower” sources of Islamic interpretation,* such as reasoning by analogy, decision by consensus, and, at the lowest level, the acceptance of default cultural practice when it does not conflict with any of the above.

This process happens all the time. It is an assumed part of ‘official’ Islamic jurisprudence, as well as a common conversation that goes on informally among Muslims on a dead regular basis. This is a good example, or this debate about the hijab, or this post regarding Islam’s association with misogyny.

So when the BBC article says that the Turkish Department of Religious Affairs claims “that a significant number of the [hadiths] were never uttered by Muhammad”, that’s a serious case of non-news. Yet the tone of the article, and the tone of discussion around it, implies that this is a shocking new development in Islam, one that only a secular state like Turkey would have the courage to initiate and the kind of thing we could only see in our present world climate, now that Islam has been called on the carpet and ordered to modernize.

Okay, you say, so acknowledging the (sometimes) problematic sourcing of (some) hadiths is old hat, but what about the “strong” hadiths perceived to be incompatible with modernity? Isn’t Turkey so very brazen and forward-thinking to go there, too? From the article:

Prof Mehmet Gormez, a senior official in the Department of Religious Affairs and an expert on the Hadith, gives a telling example.

“There are some messages that ban women from travelling for three days or more without their husband’s permission and they are genuine.

“But this isn’t a religious ban. It came about because in the Prophet’s time it simply wasn’t safe for a woman to travel alone like that. But as time has passed, people have made permanent what was only supposed to be a temporary ban for safety reasons.”

The project justifies such bold interference in the 1,400-year-old content of the Hadith by rigorous academic research.

Prof Gormez points out that in another speech, the Prophet said “he longed for the day when a woman might travel long distances alone”.

So, he argues, it is clear what the Prophet’s goal was.

Fine… but still not new. Feminists in Tunisia, for example, successfully achieved a ban on polygamy by arguing that it was permissible in the seventh century as a means of protection for widows and orphans during wartime, but that monogamy was clearly the Qur’anic ideal. This law, passed several decades ago, would have been even more controversial than what Turkey is doing now because these women were arguing about the Qur’an, not the hadith, and the Qur’an is considered the literal word of God.

Likewise, we hear of women trained in this “new” thinking going to rural parts of Turkey to explain that honor killings are not Islamic:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

She says that, at the moment, Islam is being widely used to justify the violent suppression of women.

“There are honour killings,” she explains.

“We hear that some women are being killed when they marry the wrong person or run away with someone they love.

“There’s also violence against women within families, including sexual harassment by uncles and others. This does not exist in Islam… we have to explain that to them.”

Yet another noble effort. Yet again, nothing new. There are so many examples of this I’m not going to list them here; suffice it to say that sending educated women into rural provinces to explain “true” Islam to illiterate peasant women is a well-established tradition in the Middle East and Central Asia, one that goes back at least 100 years, to the beginning of the feminist movement, and arguably much longer if we widen the discussion to include the historic role of Islamic schools in the teaching of literacy. My daughter’s great-aunt, for example, born in 1920, got her first job as a teacher driving throughout Saudi Arabia, teaching girls in village schools. This was during a time of great upheaval, when the role of educating women was hotly contested. When this right was defended it was done so via the argument that women should learn “proper Islam” in place of “ignorant cultural practices.” As evidenced by the Turkish case, elements of that debate continue today, on remarkably similar terms. Whether or not you find that position sufficiently radical to result in real change for women, at least situate it historically and acknowledge that this is not an example of bold new thinking.

Okay, you say, so it’s not “new.” Whatever. It’s still good, right? This idea that Islam is subject to interpretation? Isn’t it exciting to see people take up a project like this, in the face of certain fossilized versions of religion?

My problem here is that the perception of “newness” IS the story. It conforms to the view that Muslims occupy an earlier point on the progress timeline, and must be ripped, by force if necessary, into the modern era. (The Guardian article on this subject is called “Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam” — in case we forgot that most OTHER Muslims are of the Dark Ages variety.) Sure, we may hate military intervention, but how else to foster change in a region where (we erroneously believe) people are still adhering to a form of religion unchanged and unquestioned for 1,400 years? That Muslims might — finally! for once! — be taking on this task through their own initiative is exciting only in the sense that we privately congratulate ourselves for having pushed them into it. When they stand up, we’ll stand down. And so on.

The Guardian article makes this connection explicit:

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.

“Muslim beliefs and tradition” are balanced against “European and western philosophical methods and principles.” They get to claim “stoning and amputation”; we get to claim “modern” and “dynamic.” To drive this point even further into the ground, both articles rely on the tired trope of this leading to the possibility of “an Islamic reformation”: an ahistorical idea rooted in the notion that Islam has remained stagnant.

In a related vein, the excitement here betrays a belief that extreme forms of Islamic conservatism begin with overly literal readings of Islamic texts. I’ve found this belief to be very popular with people who know a lot about, and are disgusted by, Christian fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism, they extrapolate, must be similar, only like using the Muslim Bible or whatever instead. I bet they hate science and abortion, too! In addition to ignoring some major theological reasons for this analogy not holding up, it’s a framework that ignores the role of political circumstances, particularly colonialism, in shaping Islam-as-political-project. That’s a separate and much longer discussion, but I’m noting it because I think, despite the fact that the word “terrorism” is never used, the read-between-the-lines hope being expressed here is that if Muslims only KNEW they had good, solid Islamic alternatives to Waging War On The Infidels, they would pack up and go home.

This is part of why the word “revised” is so problematic in this context. Read this sentence again:

One of the women, Hulya Koc, looked out over a sea of headscarves at a town meeting in central Turkey and told the women of the equality, justice and human rights guaranteed by an accurate interpretation of the Koran – one guided and confirmed by the revised Hadith.

There is no need to develop “revised Hadith” to make this point, since honor killings have never been an accepted part of Islamic practice. To note this is not to criticize the Turkish project itself, but to critique, again, its portrayal as daring innovation, because if anything such a portrayal lends credibility to the idea that actually honor killings ARE part of “real,” “authentic” Islam. Not only is this false, but it is exactly the opposite of the project’s intent. The implication is that, until last Tuesday, Muslims spent over a thousand years laboring under a medieval religious tradition; the only question now is whether or not they will accept “revisions” undertaken by a secular country like Turkey.

Which is an interesting subject itself. Had it not been for this rush of Western interest, I’d be optimistic. Turkey is secular, but its recent election was won by a (slightly) more conservative pro-Islamic party, and whatever the country’s modern politics, it still retains an association with the Ottoman Empire, which would have been the proper site for a major Islamic project such as this one. More problematic is that it is being undertaken by a government agency, and government-sponsored mouthpieces of religion (an unfamiliar concept in the U.S., but popular abroad, not only in Muslim countries) are prone to issuing verdicts that are inevitably taken with a grain of salt. Still, the aim of this project sounds like something akin to Google — not the creation of new content, but the organization of old. Although this is being described as an attempt to overwrite all previous forms of Islam, I think, among Muslims, it would have been taken for what it was: an unusually ambitious but ultimately common and therefore familiar attempt to apply Islamic jurisprudence to modern circumstances. I have no particular problem with that, so long as it is understood to be part of a much larger discourse (and not, say, a state-sanctioned Wahhabist-style attempt to render all other readings moot).

Now, however, Turkey has been put on the defensive. This week, Mehmet Görmez, the director of the project, issued a statement decrying the BBC article, saying the Directorate of Religious Affairs is going so far as “to take the appropriate legal measures for redress” because the project was so inaccurately portrayed:

“Our project is not aimed at effecting a radical renewal of the religion, as is claimed by the BBC. Our objective is to help our citizens attain a better understanding of the hadith. Though I underlined several times during our interview with a BBC reporter that our project cannot be considered a reformation of Islam, he distorted the facts, saying Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam — and a controversial and radical modernization of the religion.” ...

A fresh look at the hadith collections — the gathering of which began some 200 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed — and how they are utilized and interpreted within the framework of Islamic jurisprudence, while sure to generate a degree of criticism and controversy, is a far cry from attempting to change, in effect, some of Islam’s most important historical records…

“I had an interview with BBC reporter Robert Pigott around two months ago about the project. I underscored during our interview that it cannot be termed a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam. But, his article read ‘the very theology of Islam is being reinterpreted in order to effect a radical renewal of the religion.’ This does not reflect the truth.”

If this denunciation speaks louder than the original misreporting, the project may still find an audience. If not, I’m guessing it’ll be tossed in the pot along with other ideas assumed to be Western-tainted pseudo-Islam, inciting not “revolution” or “reformation,” but reactionary backlash and a further retreat into religious conservatism.

* This process is Sunni — Shi’a practices vary.

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