Controversy over the ’hadith reform’

The daily newspaper of Milli Görüş, the Islamist movement of Necmeddin Erbakan, which is currently represented by the marginal Saadet, or Felicity, Party, Milli Gazete acts almost like a party organ. It often tries to convince its readers that the 82-year-old Erbakan’s victory over the forces of "global Zionism" is imminent. The writers of Milli Gazete dislike two groups in Turkey. The first, as you can guess, is the hard-line secularists. The second group, which you might not guess right away, is what the hard-line secularists themselves most despise: the "moderate Islamists," such as the incumbent Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and Islamic individuals or groups with "modernist" attitudes. For Milli Gazete, these misguided Muslims are the enemies within who dilute the Islamic cause and make it subservient to the demands of the Western infidels.

Reform or reinterpretation?

One of the heavyweights of Milli Gazete is Mehmet Şevket Eygi. To his credit, Eygi has some good insights about pious Muslims in Turkey, such as his critiques of their "lack of a sense of aesthetics." But on matters of theology and jurisprudence, he is way too conservative. Any deviation from the classical sources and norms of Sunni Islam is, for him, a dangerous heresy.

For some time, Eygi has been harshly criticizing the "hadith reform," as he, and the Western media, call it. This is a project initiated by Turkey’s official Directorate of Religious Affairs (also known as the Diyanet) and its aim is to revise, re-catalog and re-interpret the sayings, or hadiths, of Prophet Mohammed. Right after it began in 2006, the project made global headlines because it aimed to deal with some of the misogynistic statements in the classical hadith literature, spurring Western media, from the BBC to the Christian Science Monitor, to start talking about a "reform" in Islam.

In the Western sense, that wasn’t an incorrect statement. One of the project’s goals was to put some apparently misogynist hadiths into their rightful historical context and thus keep them from being used in the modern world to suppress women’s rights. But the term "reform" does not sound nice to Muslim ears. When they hear this word, most Muslims think that it is about excluding a fundamental part of their religion for some secular, if not completely wicked, agenda. Therefore, from the very beginning, Diyanet officials took great pains to emphasize, "This is not a reform at all."

But they could not persuade Eygi. He has been repeatedly writing about "this treacherous project carried out by Orientalists, free thinkers and even atheists," and calling on fellow Muslims to take a stand against it. "They are deleting our Prophet’s words simply to succumb to the Europeans," he argued in one of his articles, continuing:

"O Muslims! You are in deep sleep. You sleep in bed, you sleep when you are awake, you sleep when you talk. You sleep on land you sleep on the sea. But they are not sleeping! They are working day and night to delete the prophet’s hadiths!"

This ranting went on for a while, and led Diyanet Deputy President Prof. Mehmet Görmez to write a long response, which Eygi published in his column last Friday. Prof. Görmez took great pains to argue that devout Muslims (rather than "Orientalists and Jesuit priests") were carrying out the project and that its aim was not to delete the hadiths of the prophet, but to interpret them rightfully. If Eygi continued with his "unjust accusations," Prof Görmez warned, he might be held responsible for this in the eyes of "divine justice."

Whether this will convince Eygi and other conservatives in the Muslim world remains uncertain. What is certain is their reaction to the idea of "reform." Since the 19th century, modernist Muslims have repeatedly faced this hostility: They have been accused of being paid agents of the West, crypto freemasons with sinister goals and apostates who sold their souls to the devil.

Two lessons

There are two lessons to be inferred from this. First, Muslim would-be reformers should be careful in how they frame their arguments. There are tools for change within the Islamic tradition, and using them is more legitimate and efficient than pushing for revolutionary steps.

The second lesson is for Westerners. They, too, should be careful with the language they use. And they should not engage in religion building that is really not their business. Their concern over extremely conservative, sometimes violent, interpretations of Islam is quite understandable. But they should also understand that they only empower those interpretations by appearing, at least in the eyes of oversensitive beholders, as the architects of reform in a religion they don’t subscribe to.