KEBABBLE Turkey seeks a more
modern Islam By Fazile Zahir
"We are not here as Turkish Muslims to
put ourselves in the service of Islam, but to put
Islam in the service of life." -
Fethullah Gulen, Turkish
Islamic scholar and writer
FETHIYE, Turkey
- The level of surprise with which the world's
media greeted the news that Turkey's highest
religious authority, the Diyanet, has instructed a
commission of scholars to re-evaluate the Hadith
(oral traditions relating to the words and deeds
of the Prophet Mohammad) with respect to modern
society, seems all out of proportion to the actual
exercise the Ankara school is conducting.
The Western media are of course keen to
promote moderate versions of Islam, but the
tradition of ijtihad (legal interpretation) is
nothing new to Turkish religious
thinkers. In 2006, the Diyanet had already started
a process to filter the Hadith to delete
misogynistic statements.
This new project
is an even more ambitious attempt to carry out a
fundamental revision of the Hadith and has taken
the theologically radical step of ignoring later
conservative texts in favor of earlier more
liberal ones and by being prepared to evaluate the
sayings of the Prophet within a historical
framework.
The Turkish state has come to
see the Hadith as having a negative influence on a
society that is in a hurry to modernize and some
scholars are convinced that it obscures the
original values of Islam.
Turkish Islam
has always had a very different face and practice
to Arab or African Islam for many reasons. Ottoman
expansion forced Muslims to embrace and co-exist
with Christian and other groups. This tradition of
diversity allowed for the inclusive societal
model, the millet system, a type of
religious federalism. The empire was a melting
pot, incorporating various ethnic and religious
groups including Kurds, Croats, Asiatic tribes,
Buddhists, Christians, Bektashi/Alevi and others.
Through years of interaction, relations have
softened between groups and Muslim ideals
continually evolved.
Turkish modernization
began at least a century before Kemalism. In the
19th century, the Ottomans produced a new secular
civil law, a constitution, a parliament in 1876,
and Western-style schools and universities for
both sexes. They also encouraged sophisticated
intellectual debate. In 1895, Descartes'
Discourse on Method was translated into
Turkish under the auspices of the sultan.
Many other Western classics, as well as
the political debates of the day in Europe, became
part of Ottoman intellectual life. All this was
embraced not just by the secular young Turks, but
also by more open-minded Islamists. Fethullah
Gulen, a modern-day key reformist and Sufi thinker
extends tolerance toward secularists and
non-believers in Turkey and sees this approach as
a way to revive the multi-culturalism of the
Ottoman Empire.
Prior to Islam, Turks were
shamanistic and it was these pagan shamans who
became the first proletyzing foot soldiers of
Islam among the nomadic Turkish tribes, they were
the Sufi order. Even at these early times, Turkish
Muslims accepted and embraced the pre-Islamic
traditions and combined them with their own in a
form of Sufi mysticism.
Turkey's Sufism
has a non-literal and inclusive reading of
religion and the Turkish understanding of Islam is
very much punctuated by the tolerance of mystical
poet Jalaladdin Rumi, love of Sufi poet Yunus Emre
and reasonability of the Ottoman "saint" Haci
Bektasi Veli. The main premise of this Turkish
Islam is moderation, Sufi tradition is based on
the philosophy that all creatures should be loved
as God's physical reflection and objects of the
Creator's own love.
There is no place for
enemies or "others" in this system. Gulen,
Turkey's best-known and most modern Sufi
philosopher, rejects the idea that a clash between
the "East" and "West" is necessary, desirable or
inevitable and frequently emphasizes that there
should be freedom of worship and thought in
Turkey.
Religious scholars in Turkey are
largely a different breed to their counterparts in
other Muslim countries. Rather than being
ulema (priests) or practical men like
engineers and medical doctors as they are in Egypt
and Pakistan, they are mostly writers, poets,
academics and artists who are open-minded and keen
to discuss new ideas. These writers are not
didactic in their writings but rather narrative in
style and eclectic in terms of their sources. As
early as 1951, an American scholar of religion W C
Smith made the following comment: "Whereas the
Arab dream is of restoration, the modern Turks
consciously talk of novelty."
Others
attribute Turkish moderation with the important
role of the 25% of Alevi Muslims who practice a
religion that is confessional and based on
adoration, but which does not seek to conquer. It
is a fusion form of Islam that considers a
person's relationship with God to be relevant to
the private sphere and which believes that women
are equal to men. The tolerant approach of these
people often referred to as "Islamic protestants",
allows them to maintain both a Kemalist tradition
and a progressive religious spirit alive within
the Turkish population.
Others see the
growth of prosperity encouraging a relaxation of
the religious laws.
Economic stability and
security give one the luxury of picking and
choosing while defining a personal identity.
Turkey has recently experienced previously unknown
economic growth for 20 quarters consecutively.
Islamic social movements represent the "coming
out" of now wealthy and visible conservative
business men anxious to combine their private
religion with the roles they now have in the
public sphere. They are keen for their values to
be reflected in Turkey's new secular constitution
and have been active in pushing forward human
rights and freedom of expression in the headscarf
debate that has gripped Turkey for the past six
months.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are
now confidently in control of Turkey. Until this
last election their power had previously been
predicated on their "giving up" or "delaying"
their "Islamic" demands on society in return for
being allowed to govern. Now, with the huge
electoral endorsement of 2007, they are moving
forward with a program to allow Turkey more
freedom of religious expression.
The
recent headscarf debate has been resolved in a
typically Turkish way, the government changed the
law so university students can attend wearing a
scarf - but their teachers still can't. Even then
only 30% of universities adhered to it and the
rest carried on doing their own thing. Chaos did
not ensue, there was some confusion and then the
stoical Turkish people just get on with the new
status quo, adapting as they always do to
religious evolution without hardly creating a
ripple in society. Turkey has the incredible
capacity to do nothing less than recreate Islam,
changing it from a religion whose rules must be
obeyed, to one designed to serve the needs of
people in a modern secular democracy.
Fazile Zahir is of
Turkish descent, born and brought up in London.
She moved to live in Turkey in 2005 and has been
writing full time since then.
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