Turkey is engaged in a bold attempt to rewrite the basis for Islamic sharia law while reinterpreting the Qur’an for the modern age.
The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernising and mildly Islamic government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is being seen as an attempt to establish a 21st-century form of Islam, fusing Muslim beliefs and tradition with European and Western philosophy.
The result, say experts following the ambitious experiment, could be to diminish Muslim discrimination against women and banish some of the brutal penalties associated with Islamic law, such as stoning and amputation. It could 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.
Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, described the project as an attempt to make Turkish Sunni Islam “fully compatible with contemporary social and moral values.
“They see this not as a revolution, but as a return to the original Islam, away from the excessive conservatism that has stymied all reforms for the last few centuries. It’s somewhat akin to the Christian Reformation.”
A team of reformist Islamic scholars at Ankara University is working under the guidance of Ali Bardokoglu, the liberal scholar who heads the government body that oversees the country’s 8 000 mosques and appoints imams, who was appointed by Erdogan.
The team is writing a new five-volume exegesis of the Qur’an, taking the sacred text apart forensically, rooting it in its time and place, and redefining its message to and relevance for Muslims today. It is also ditching some of the Hadith, sayings ascribed to and comments on the Prophet Muhammad that were collected a few hundred years after his death.
A Roman Catholic Jesuit expert on Turkey and Islam, Felix Koerner, is working with the Ankara team, reportedly schooling them in the history of Western religious and philosophical change and how to apply the lessons of Christian reform movements to modern Islam.
Sources say the Islamic reform project is so ambitious and so fundamental it will take years to complete, but that it is already paying dividends: abolition of the death penalty, a campaign against “honour” killings and the training and appointment of several hundred women as imams. — Â