Turkey introduces Prophet Mohammad's sayings for 21st century

Scholars around the Muslim world were alarmed five years ago by news reports that Turkey planned a new, possibly heretical compilation of the Prophet Mohammad's sayings that might scrap those it thought were out of date.

The new work, finally ready after six years in the making, is nothing like the 95 Theses in which Martin Luther condemned practices in the Roman Catholic Church and launched the Protestant Reformation.

Instead, its 100 authors have selected a few hundred of the about 17,000 reported quotes from Mohammad to examine Islamic views on God, faith and life in terms that the average modern Turk can understand.

What makes this one different is that it selects and explains the hadiths from the perspective of today's Turkey, whose mix of a secular state, dynamic economy and Muslim society has aroused considerable interest in the Middle East since the Arab Spring revolts two years ago.

What has emerged is a seven-volume encyclopedia of what its authors considered the most important hadiths. Grouped according to subjects, they are followed by short essays that explain the sayings in their historical context and what they mean today.

The collection is the first by Turkey's "Ankara School" of theologians who in recent decades have reread Islamic scriptures to extract their timeless religious message from the context of 7th-century Arab culture in which they arose.

Displaying the first green-bound volumes, the officials said the essays dealt with modern issues such as women's rights, but were not presented as a compendium of official positions that imams must preach or Islamic judges must implement.

"The aim was not to produce an answer to today's agenda topics like gender issues, punishment and jihad," Pacaci said.

For example, the question of schooling for girls comes up in the section about education, which starts with the hadith "Seeking knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim" in Arabic and a few supporting hadiths and Turkish translations underneath.

Several pages of commentary in Turkish follow and explain that since the hadiths say education is obligatory for all Muslims, it is a right for girls and women as well.

Another essay on women stresses that they attended mosques and ran businesses when Mohammad governed the city of Medina. "They were active in every part of social life," Pacaci said.

Hadiths calling for harsh punishments such as severing thieves' hands were put into historical perspective so they are not taken as models for modern times, Ozafsar said.


/Reuters/