For
months we have read news reports of an Islamic
reform stemming from the University of Ankara's
theology department. A widely-cited February 28
report by Robert Pigott, the BBC's religion
correspondent, claimed that Ankara would "fashion
a new Islam" along "revolutionary" lines. In less
flamboyant tone, the story resurfaced in the June
8 issue of Newsweek under the headline, "The New
Face of Islam".
This is the triumph of
hope over fact-checking. "Tin-opener theology" is
how the leading Western expert on the subject
dismisses the efforts at Ankara University to
date. Father Felix Koerner, a German Jesuit, has
taught at the university and published the
definitive source-book on the supposed reform. He
explains that the Ankara theologians want to open
up the Koran
like a tin can, and
take what they want out of it, without touching
the real problems of Islamic theology. On this
more below.
Oddly, it is not just the
Western media who have gotten it wrong. A
conspiracy theory is circulating among Muslim
traditionalists that the Jesuits are plotting with
Turkey's secularists to undermine Islam. In
February, a Muslim website in Britain,
Ummahpulse.com, denounced the Society of Jesus as
"the pope's special forces attempting to
infiltrate Muslim lines". (See The Pope's Special Forces by Muhammad
Tahir, February 29, 2008.)
The notion of a
"Jesuit plot" against Islam is a paranoid
hallucination, for there is no consensus among the
Jesuits regarding Islam, much less a plot. A
handful of patient Jesuit scholars are immersed in
Muslim theology, seeking a dialogue with
prospective Islamic reformers. That was the
subject of Benedict XVI's meeting on Islam at
Castel Gandolfo in Italy in the summer of 2005
(See When
even the Pope has to whisper Asia Times
Online, January 10, 2006.) Reports from the
meeting quoted the pope saying that Islam was
incapable of reform, to which other participants
took objection.
Christian Troll, a German
Jesuit, sent the following correction to the
website of Daniel Pipes on January 17, 2006:
The Holy Father is well-informed
enough to know that there have existed and that
there exist today, probably increasingly, other
interpretations of the Koranic evidence with
regard to a theology of revelation. These
considered Muslim views and approaches do not
(yet?), it would seem, inform the thinking and
approach of a sizable Islamic movement or
organization - and we do not know what future
problems lie ahead in this regard - but it does
exist and is vividly discussed in many places,
both in academia and beyond.
An open
debate on these matters does not yet seem to be
possible within the Arab world but Turkish and
Indonesian society grant relatively more room
for airing and discussing such ideas, and the
so-called Western countries offer even more
space.
It is true that the Jesuits
have someone to talk to in Turkey, but it is not
clear that they have much of substance to talk
about. Muslim traditionalists warn of a plot
cooked up by the Jesuits in cahoots with Turkey's
secular government.
Ummahpulse.com
fulminated:
It appears that Koerner has spent
the last few years befriending and "advising"
the Ankara school of would-be revisionists
whilst at the same time ministering in a
state-sanctioned church of Turkey (no high-up
government connections there then ...) ...
Specifically, Koerner concerns himself with how
to infect his Turkish "disciples" with the types
of discourse which have led to the current and
ongoing disintegration of the Christian
Church.
The Islamist website added:
And for those of you who might think
that we here at UmmahPulse are just paranoid,
please note that when the pope visited Ankara in
November 2006, we were watching and listening as
his colleagues declared that the "80-year-old
German theologian known for his sharp intellect
- has a much broader agenda than merely
improving ties between Catholics and Orthodox
Christians. Part of that agenda is an attempt to
help spark Islamic theological
reform".
It is all dead, flat wrong, a
tempest in an ibrik (Turkish coffee pot).
None of the reporters seems to have read the basic
source documents. The Ankara professors never were
going to launch an Islamic reformation; Koerner
and Troll were not going to put them up to it; and
the Turkish government wouldn't let it happen,
even if everyone else wanted it. Muslim
traditionalists denounce the Ankara professors as
instruments of the Turkish secularists, while the
June 8 Newsweek report claims that they enjoy the
patronage of Turkey's Islamist government. Both
claims are false, in fact; the Ankara theologians
have no real political patron.
Turkey's
Islamist government, led by President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, finds itself in mortal confrontation with
the country's secularist army and civil
institutions. Prosecutors have demanded that the
Constitutional Court ban Erdogan's Justice and
Development Party (AKP) party, an Islamist party
whose support depends on the popular Muslim piety
of the countryside. The Koranic hermeneutics of
the Ankara theologians will be ignored in the
confrontation.
"Turkey's moves toward
greater religious freedom, which some saw as the
sign of an evolving moderate Muslim society, have
been put on hold by a political crisis that could
outlaw the post-Islamist ruling AKP," according to
Reuters' religion editor Tom Heneghan in a May 23
dispatch. "Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, whose
bid to lift a ban on Islamic headscarves at
universities triggered the crisis, would probably
not champion further religious reform even if he
won the court case against his party, Turkish
analysts say."
As noted, Father Koerner
shows that what the Ankara theology department has
in mind is not a reformation in any sense of the
word. It is not even theology in the sense most
people understand the word. Following the late
Pakistani theologian Fazlur Rahman (1919-1988),
the Ankara group argues that some of the
revelation in the Koran was directed to specific
people at a specific point in time, and is subject
to revision. This includes such matters as
polygamy, the wearing of veils, and other matters
in which the Koran appears egregiously out of
touch with the times.
Koerner has
collected representative writings of the Ankara
theologians with convenient commentary in an
English-language volume. [1] Rahman and his
Turkish followers, he observes, "subsume the whole
of Koranic theology under the single intention of
influencing people's behavior. Consequently, they
are what should be called ethical
reductionis[ts]." [2]
These are
existential issues, not academic ones. The great
religions of the world command the loyalty of
their adherents because they offer a way to
encounter God. What is it about Islam that
commands the passionate loyalty of over a billion
people? And what is it that inspires so many
people to kill themselves, not to mention others,
in the name of Islam?
Sacrifice, as I
argued elsewhere (Jihad,
the Lord's Supper, and eternal life, Asia
Times Online, September 19, 2006) is the means by
which human beings approach a God who is beyond
human conception. In Judaism and Christianity,
divine love displaces the sacrifice so that the
worshipper may live.
To achieve life
beyond this world we must die to this world, by
sacrificing ourselves. That is true of every
religion. The religions differ only in the nature
of sacrifice. As Jon Levenson showed in his study
The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved
Son, the offerings of revealed religion are
sublimated human sacrifice. In Judaism and
Christianity, the God spares the victim out of
love, just as God provided a ram in place of the
bound Isaac on Mount Moriah. Christians believe
that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of
humankind.
In Islam, though every man must
be his own Christ. Sacrifice is not sublimated but
rather demanded of each individual. That is why
jihad is the central and most fundamental form of
Islamic worship, the only action that ensures the
believer's acceptance in the next world. The
jihadi who sacrifices himself in the violent
propagation of Islam goes straight to his heavenly
reward.
There is no mention of jihad by
any of the Ankara "revisionists", only the dry
contention that perhaps the Koran's endorsement of
polygamy or the veil might not necessarily apply
to every place and time. Nor could there be, for
by repudiating jihad, a Muslim would close off his
possibility of approaching God. Traditional
society closes ranks against encroachment from the
outside, and this fragility explains the
resurgence of political Islam.
Koerner
summarizes the results of his research in a way
that refutes the old canard that Germans have no
sense of humor:
The [Ankara University]
revisionists' vision is still restricted to one
type of question: ethics. If they ask only, "How
can we make the Koran ethically acceptable
today?", they are selling the Koran under price
... Hermeneutics has then a merely mechanical
function: we know what there is in the Koran,
ethics; and we know what must come out, modern
ethics. The only question left is, how do we get
it out? Hermeneutics has become a tin-opener.
We had seen the rich gardens of Muslim
tradition, and the locked gates before us. That
was why we set out on our expedition. It was the
quest for the lost key to the garden's fresh
fruits which made us go. And now we are busy
with tin-openers and baked beans. The expedition
can only succeed if we remind ourselves of its
initial intuition. Questions such as "Does God
exist?", "Who are we, who are we to be?", and
"What does it all mean?" had made us uneasy
enough to set out; questions which were promised
answers from beyond the gate. In that light,
"The Koranic rulings were meant to bring
justice" is rather disappointing a discovery.[3]
None of the Ankara theologians,
moreover, will discuss whether the Koran was
dictated word-for-word by the Archangel Gabriel to
the Prophet Mohammed, or whether it is an
historical document, collected and revised over
time, like the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. To
argue for a human element in the Koran threatens
the foundations of Islam.
Yet it is
impossible to conduct serious exegesis without
considering the possibility of later redaction or
alteration, especially considering the frequent
discrepancies, contradictions and occasional
incoherence of the Koranic text. That was the
reservation the pope reportedly raised at the
Castel Gandolfo meeting, and the exercise in
Ankara appears to validate his skepticism.
Koranic criticism remains taboo. Koerner
warned at the outset of his book that the
discussion will exclude consideration of the
following proposition: "Muslims can apply
historical criticism to the Koran without losing
their faith."[4] Whether this is the case or not,
he explains, belongs to the realm of theology,
which must take religious truths as a premise, as
opposed to what he calls "religious studies".
Modernizing Koranic ethics, sadly, is a
project as narrow as it is futile. The Islamist
party in Turkey draws strength from the remnants
of traditional society in the Anatolian
countryside. Its first demand was to permit women
to wear the Islamic head-scarf in public, a step
backward from the emancipation of women by the
secular regime. Turkey's Islamists have no
interest in tinkering with the ethics of
traditional society. The secular parties have no
interest in appealing to the Koran at all. The
Ankara "revisionists" will be crushed between the
millstones.
Koerner's glum evaluation of
the Ankara school's work to date is balanced by
his optimism that something may come out of it in
the future. "The theological workshop we visited
is promising more products," concludes his
account. I would not recommend holding one's
breath. Turkey's political crisis will finish the
debate long before the Ankara theologians work out
what to do next.
Notes 1. Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in
Contemporary Turkish University Theology:
Rethinking Islam (Ergon Verlag: Wurzburg
2005). 2. Page 84. 3. Page 204. 4. Page
16.
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