Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (31 page)

“U
PDATING OUR
R
ELIGIOUS
U
NDERSTANDING
”

This changing social landscape, and the acceptance it created for new interpretations of religion soon found its echo when the AKP, six months after it came to power in late 2002, appointed Ali Bardakog˘lu as the head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). An erudite theologian, Bardakog˘lu was willing to infuse the institution with new dynamism and a new outlook. Symbolically, he dropped the boring black tunic his predecessors wore and donned a white one with golden leaves, modeled after the Ottoman royal style. In 2004, he spoke about the need for “updating our religious understanding,” according to changing times. “Except for the basic religious sources,” he said, “we must not adopt religious interpretations from the past as a model to be taken literally today.”
⁵³
The following year, for the first time in Islamic history, he appointed two women as counselors for mosques in Istanbul and Kayseri.

In 2006, Bardakog˘lu made news again with another statement: “There cannot be a Hadith that says, ‘The best of women are those who are like sheep.’ ”
⁵⁴
This was an introduction to the “Hadith Project” the Diyanet had launched, in order to create a new Hadith collection that would exclude some of the misogynistic statements in the classical literature, or at least to put them into their right contexts.
⁵⁵
Hadiths that banned women from traveling alone, for example, originated “because the desert in the Prophet’s time was too dangerous for a lone female traveler,” explained Mehmet Görmez, the then–vice president of the Diyanet, who would replace Bardakog˘lu in November 2010. “Unfortunately, this temporal concern turned into an ever-valid religious rule.”
⁵⁶
(The Hadith Project—based at Ankara University’s School of Theology—was still underway as this book went to press.)

The Turkish critique of the Hadith corpus had actually begun in the 1980s, but it initially lacked any real support. When a lone radical reformist, Edip Yüksel, challenged the Hadiths and proposed a “Qur’an only” formula, he was reviled by conservatives and even declared a heretic. But some of Yüksel’s criticisms were hard to dismiss. In the 1990s, a theologian-turned-televangelist, Yas¸ar Nuri Öztürk, voiced similar criticisms about the Hadiths and promoted the more progressive “Islam of the Qur’an” versus the “Islam of tradition.” His unscrupulous alliance with the Kemalists turned off the conservatives, but the notion that “some Hadiths are really problematic” became increasingly popular.

Criticism of the Hadiths accompanied the rise of feminist ideas in the Islamic camp—again thanks to social change. When faced with a Hadith depicting women as half-brained creatures whose only duty is to obey their husbands, a traditional Muslim housewife would have kept quiet. But now a middle-class Muslim woman who has a degree in economics and perhaps makes more money than her husband could say, “Wait a minute, this can’t be true.” In other words, the Diyanet’s effort to create a new Hadith literature free of misogyny would probably have been a nonstarter without the new social status Turkish women achieved with new economic opportunities.

In fact, even bolder ideas for “updating our religious understanding” developed, beginning in the 1990s, as theologians at the “Ankara School” emphasized the distinctions between what is
historical
and what is
religious
. Often inspired by the works of Fazlur Rahman, the most prominent “neo-Mutazilite” of the twentieth century, these scholars not only take a critical look at the Hadiths but also make an argument for the contextuality of the Qur’an, as opposed to literalism. Their books have taken critical approaches to the Islamic tradition, offering more rational and liberal interpretations. Among their titles are:
The Mutazilite Interpretation of the Qur’an
,
The Golden Age of the Mutazilites
,
Rethinking the Sunna
,
Rethinking the Hadiths
,
The Behind the Scenes of Ideological Hadith-Making
,
The Road to Individualization
, and
The Individual and His Religion
.

A growing emphasis on individualism was also very noticeable in the monthly magazine published by the Diyanet. Some of the articles from the late 2000s include such titles as: “Raising the Self-Governing Believer of the Open Society,” “The Responsibility of the Individual to Construct His Own Religiosity,” and “A Liberating Religious Education.” Their author, top Diyanet official Mehmet S¸evki Aydın, advises parents not to “impose their religious understanding on their children” and suggests that the believer “should consult religious authorities but also use his own reasoning . . . and be the active master of his own life.”
⁵⁷

Perhaps the most worthy defense of freedom by the Diyanet came from Ali Bardakog˘lu in April 2007, following a tragic incident in which three Christian missionaries were brutally murdered by a group of Turkish ultranationalists in Eastern Turkey. In a press conference, he denounced the murderers and said, “It is their [the missionaries’] natural right to preach their faith. We must learn to respect even the personal choice of an atheist, let alone other religions.”
⁵⁸
Three years later, Bardakog˘lu also advocated the reopening of historic Christian churches in Turkey, which had been closed down due to the secular state’s nationalist biases.
⁵⁹

For all these views, the new leadership of the Diyanet, and especially the theologians of the Ankara School, are considered in Turkey to be on the “modernist” side of the theological spectrum. But even some of the more conservative voices have offered fresh perspectives. Prominent Islamic pundit Ali Bulaç, for example, objected to the second-class
dhimmi
status that Muslim empires have offered to non-Muslims throughout Islamic history. This status, he argued, was intended by the Qur’an only for the non-Muslims who initiated war on Islam but was wrongly extended to all of them. The Islamic ideal, he wrote, should be a social contract based on equal statuses.
⁶⁰

Another conservative opinion leader, Hayrettin Karaman, professor emeritus of Islamic law and a columnist for the pro-Islamic daily
Yeni s¸afak
, has defended the views that Christians and Jews can be “saved” in the afterlife; that apostasy from Islam should not be punishable; that Islam rejects “an all-powerful state like that of the Nazis”; and that the “un-Islamic beliefs and practices” of non-Muslims should be free even in an Islamic state. He has also opposed the view that the pacifist verses of the Qur’an were abrogated, and argued that the right Islamic political vision is “not a world in which everybody is a Muslim, but a world in which Muslims protect all peoples and freedoms.”
⁶¹

In response to a question about the Islamic legitimacy of a handshake between members of the opposite sex, from which many conservative Muslims refrain, Karaman gave an answer that indicates the changes in society:

At the places and times in which there was no custom of handshaking, holding hands between young men and women was much more likely to have a sexual connotation. The old jurists can be right from that regard [in opposing this practice]. But today this custom is widespread, it has become natural, and thus its connection with sexual passion has been weakened. It has even become a necessity.
⁶²

The changes in society, in other words, leads to a reconsideration of old religious interpretations.

In 2008, a striking example of this change came from Fethullah Gülen, leader of the largest Islamic community in Turkey, the “neo-Nurcu” Gülen movement. When asked about spousal abuse, a practice some orthodox scholars are known to justify occasionally, Gülen gave a quite unexpected answer. “That would be a reason for divorce,” he said. “Moreover, it might be a good idea for threatened women to learn karate or judo—so if their husbands hit, they can hit back better.”
⁶³

L
ESSONS FROM
T
URKEY FOR
“R
EFORM
”
IN
I
SLAM

In all the new ideas and perspectives of Turkish Islam we see a commonality: a more rationalist and individualistic outlook toward religious texts. In 2004, an Islamic intellectual recognized what this means: “The Mutazilite perspective is becoming the dominant and widespread mind among today’s Muslims.”
⁶⁴
Five years later, another intellectual noted that the modernizing Muslims of Turkey now wanted to hear about “the Qur’an and freedom” rather than “the Qur’an and obedience.”
⁶⁵

It is important to note the loose, implicit, and informal nature of this “reform.” The masses are not signing proclamations saying, “By God, we are now Mutazilites.” Nor has a Muslim Luther nailed a revolutionary Ninety-five Theses on a mosque door. That scenario, which is more popular in the West than anywhere else, anticipates a doctrinal change before social change. But what is happening is the exact opposite.

This is an unprecedented experiment with phenomenal implications—not only for Turkey but also for the whole world of Islam. In its dynamic formative centuries, as we have seen in the earlier chapters, Islam was a religion driven by merchants and their rational, vibrant, and cosmopolitan mindset. But then the more powerful classes of the Orient—the landlords, the soldiers, and the peasants—became dominant, and a less rational and more static mindset began to shape the religion. The more trade declined, the more the Muslim mind stagnated. In the later stages, with the rise of powerful states such as the Ottoman Empire, modern-style bureaucrats entered the scene, followed in the nineteenth century by modern-style intellectuals. But even their valuable efforts to effect change continued as a top-down process in which the majority of the society remained uninvolved.

What was painfully lacking was a dynamic that would turn the society itself into an agent for change. The statist and socialist economic models toward which the Muslim world was mistakenly driven in the twentieth century—along with the political tyrannies of secularists and others—tragically blocked the way.

Only the Gulf states became wealthy thanks to oil money, but wealth wasn’t synonymous with free-market capitalism. The latter requires opportunity and objective laws. It also requires entrepreneurial individuals capable of making rational decisions and a well-educated professional workforce that can transform not just the economy but also the society. These forces can create a more merit-based culture and undermine patrimonial structures, such as tribal affiliations. The dynamics of capitalism soon demands the contribution of a female workforce, too, leading to the empowerment of women.

Oil money does none of this. “The wealth of the oil-rich states does not produce positive political change,” as Fareed Zakaria puts it, and their people remain “substantially as they had been before—uneducated and unskilled.”
⁶⁶
In other words, you can be an oil-rich sheikh in Riyadh, and drive a Rolls-Royce, yet still remain tribal in your social relations, continue to keep your wife at home, and arrange a marriage for your daughter with another sheikh. But if you are a Muslim businessman in Istanbul, constantly battling the dynamic challenges of the economy, you understand why your daughter wants to study business administration and make an effort to send her to an American university.

That’s why the seekers of “reform” in Islam need to focus not on authoritarian efforts to “Westernize” Muslim societies—let alone wars and conquests to “liberate” them—but on supporting two crucial dynamics: democracy and free markets.

In his 2009 book,
Forces of Fortune
, Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born American Muslim scholar and an adviser to the Obama administration, makes a similar case by rightly emphasizing the importance of commerce in laying the groundwork for liberal democracy in the Muslim world. He cites two countries as successful examples: Turkey and Dubai.
⁶⁷
Although Dubai is the more glamorous and eye-catching of the two, it is also a tiny city-state that only emerged a few decades ago. Turkey, on the other hand, has the history and current potential to become, in the words of American political analyst Graham Fuller, “a pivotal state in the Muslim world.”
⁶⁸

And, well, it is already heading that way.

T
URKISH
M
ODEL
G
OES
A
BROAD