Turkey is engaged in a bold and profound attempt to rewrite the basis for Islamic Shariah law while also officially reinterpreting the Koran for the modern age.
The exercise in reforming Islamic jurisprudence, sponsored by the modernizing and mildly Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, is 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 EU.
A team of reformist Islamic scholars at Ankara University, acting under the auspices of the Diyanet, or Directorate of Religious Affairs, the government body that oversees the country's 8,000 mosques and appoints imams, is said to be close to concluding a "reinterpretation" of parts of the Hadith, the collection of thousands of aphorisms and comments said to derive from the prophet Mohammed and which form the basis of Islamic jurisprudence or Shariah law.
"One of the team doing the revision said they are nearly finished," said Mustafa Akyol, an Istanbul commentator who reflects the thinking of the liberal camp in Erdogan's governing AK party. "They have problems with the misogynistic Hadith, the ones against women. They may delete some from the collection, declaring them not authentic. That would be a very bold step. Or they may just add footnotes, saying they should be understood from a different historical context."
Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the 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," Hakura said.
Under the guidance of Ali Bardokoglu, the liberal Islamic scholar who heads the religious directorate and was appointed by Erdogan, the Ankara theologians are writing a five-volume "exegesis" of the Koran, taking the sacred text apart and redefining its message to and relevance for Muslims today.
Erdogan insists his AK party is a Muslim equivalent of a European Christian democratic party -- based on religious values, but democratic and tolerant.
Sources say the reform will take years to complete, but that it is already paying dividends: abolition of the death penalty, a campaign against honor killings and the training and appointment of several hundred women as imams.
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