Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts-hadith
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The professors at Ankara Theology Faculty are known for their critical position against hadith for a quite sometime. Though they never rejected hadith and sunna in toto (at least in public) but their scholarly articles always reflected mistrust to hadith.
My public debates and radical statements, I believe, made their unpopular critical position more acceptable than before. They will ultimately, revise Bukhari and other Hadith books, making them more palatable to modern Muslims.
But, there is and will be a very strong opposition from powerful religious orders and organizations. But, the Turkish public has been very receptive the message of the Quran alone. The Turkish translation of the Manifesto for Islamic Reform together with another Turkish book on women's dress code is currently in publication. I believe these two books, together with other books, especially the Turkish translation of the Quran, will add momentum to this effort to save hadith and sunna via revision and weight-loss.
Thus, I believe, we should consider the next conference in Istanbul, preferably by the September.
Below is one of the articles I wrote after my live TV debate with top Sunni scholars in Turkey. If you are interested, I will share with you another article about a more recent experience. The article has been published at http//19.org/index.php?id=14,51,0,0,1,0
If you type my name "edip yuksel" at youtube.com you will find the clips from two highly popular debates (the latest one was with the former chief of Turkish Religious Affairs, Prof. S?leyman Ate, who was filled with fear and anger, so much so that he could not engage in face-to-face debate and left the TV studio twice in frustration, and was brought back by the host with some apology and concession from me that I would be less "harsh" against his views.
After one of my debates during Ramadan, which got very high ranking in viewership, made front page news in the Turkish secular and religious media. After that debate, the head of Turkish Religious Affairs (another guy) begged the media not to discuss sensitive religious subjects with unauthorized people.
The Turkish People Received the Message and They Are Embracing It
Edip Y?kselI spent the last two weeks of the year 2000 in Turkey. This was a trip to promote several of my newly published books, including the long-awaited translation of the Quran, The MESSAGE. My people, being in the middle of great social and political turmoil, was ready to listen my words and question all their taboos and dogmas.
My first appearance on a popular and respected TV program took approximately 5 hours in late Saturday night of December 16th. I was against two religious scholars. The live show was receiving phone calls, faxes, e-mails from people and pre-arranged scholars and prominent figures were contacted. The debate was about The Message and my rejection of all Hadith, Sunnah and sectarian jurisprudence as other sources of my religion. The debate, starting from the beginning took heavy tall on the Sunni scholars. They lost numerous battles. They had trouble in defending their holiest Hadith books and each of their attempts to abuse the verses of the Quran to justify their reliance on Hadith backfired. Finally, the one who was also writing columns in a religious newspaper tried the well-known and well-used tactic. He wanted to sling mud on my personality. He seriously turned to me and told me
"We have learned that you are a member of Moon Cult. Did you indeed receive one million dollar from them?"
I said that "I was in the past accused of being Bahai, CIA agent, KGB agent and now I learn that I am also a member of the Moon Cult. Well, let me announce first time that I am also working for Martian aliens!" Then, I turned serious and told the accuser that I will sue him in the court of law for fabricating lies about me. My threat exploded in his face like an omelet! His color changed and he said that he never accused me of anything but asked me questions. The host interrupted and corrected him by telling him that his first statement was an allegation and the second one was a question. Well, in front of millions of people he swallowed his words and lost his credibility if he had any.
One of the most colorful events of the night was when I was asked by a religious union leader to observe the contact prayer (Salaat) according to the Quran. On the podium, I described how I take ablution according to the Quran and I took my shoes and started praying on the podium. (This event was later became news for being the first live broadcast prayer on Turkish TV). The caller objected to the order of my bowing and prostration. He said that I got the order from Hadith and Sunna, not the Quran. I told him that the Quran almost always tells us to "bow and fall prostrate" respectively. Besides, I told him, the Quran addresses those who use their mind. If you want you can hit your head to the ground!
The host of the show contacted me few days later and invited me to another show exclusively on the position of women in Islam. The previous show had received top rating and he was sure that the next one would be the most watched program in Turkey.
The second one was even better; I explained some of the points left from the first show and I presented the position of women from the Quran contrasting it to the of Hadith and Sunnah. Thank God, millions of people in Turkey learned their religion through the Quran alone and discovered the great discrepancy between God's religion and the sectarian teachings. I opened the show by piling the more than twenty volumes of the so-called authentic Six Hadith Books on the desk on top of the Quran. I told the audience that this tower of liturgy is just a fraction of sectarian teachings and they had covered the Quran by them. A religion derived from the Quran alone will be simple to understand by majority of people. Then, the clergymen and scholars will lose their job, since there will not be need for them to "solve" the complexities and contradiction created by endless volumes of teachings. That is the reason they are so upset with us. The second program took about 4 hours and received great public interest.
I was impressed by positive reaction of public. When I walked on the street or commute by train, which was risky, the people would approach me, or wave their hands thanking me for exposing the falsehood of sectarian teachings.
Other TV channels, newspapers and magazines reacted and echoed the issues. Several newspapers and magazines published positive interviews. A popular religious newspaper published articles full of insults and distortion about me and the translation. A columnist attacked my translation for eight days in his columns. The MESSAGE became the best-selling book since the show and thousands people have being visiting www.19.org each day. More than ninety percent of mails I receive from Turkey are supportive and encouraging.
The most interesting reaction came from the leader of Religious Affairs Department, a governmental organization that oversees all the mosques and the hundreds of thousands clerics. The religious leader the day after my first show petitioned the government agency that monitors and regulates TV channels, asking them to ban all religious discussions on private TV stations and restricting to only government's channels. In today's Turkey, thank God, this kind censorship seems impossible.
While in Turkey I participated in many meetings in several cities. There are thousands of highly educated young people embracing the message and ready to dedicate their energy for its promotion and success.
Within few years, Turkey might experience a real reformation in religion, becoming a model for all other so-called Muslim countries. Turkish people are experiencing very difficult times, economically, politically, and socially. However, I see God's message shining and their eyes appreciating it.
Now hundreds of thousands of people in Turkey are saying "La ilahe illallah," with full knowledge of what it means.
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Peace to all,
Dear Bro Edip, let me be one who openly thanks you and commends you for your courage and commitment to the Quran alone movement. I think that history will show that you were one of the first and few of the great reformers of True Islam, you have done more than many of us will ever have a chance to do, and you have faced huge challenges alone and suffered many trials, but you continue to wage the battle against ignorance. Again, on behalf of us here and others, I thank you for your dedication to truth.
Kurt
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Well said bro Kurt.
Peace Bro Edip,
May God reward you for your courage against the enemies of his religion. The ones who want it to remain covered in superstition and falsehood. God willing all believers will follow the example you have set, and truly strive with our lives. The people of most honour in God's eyes are those who are the most righteous. And risking your life for his cause is a great striving that many aspire to but may never meet. You have set the bar very high for the rest of us who stick to arguing on forums (me included) so keep it up!sincerely,
Al -
Edip, masha'allah, and may God bless and reward you. you are brave and awesome. masha'allah, masha'allah. thank you for bringing the Quran's message back to so many Muslims. you have been so busy in the name of faith and truth. may God bless you and be close to you always.
I told him that the Quran almost always tells us to "bow and fall prostrate" respectively. Besides, I told him, the Quran addresses those who use their mind. If you want you can hit your head to the ground!
peace
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I didn't knew you were exposed to public that much. That must bring the hatred of many many narrow minded people.
Thank God the message is being heard now.
That would explain his eventful biography...
It looks like the reform movement has finally hit the ski jump. There's always the slow start at the beginning but hey, what will come out of this?
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http//www.youtube.com/results?search_query=edip+yuksel&search_type=
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Even Telegraph is discussing it
Why Islam can enjoin stoning
By Christopher Howse
Last Updated 1201am GMT 01/03/2008
http//www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/01/do0109.xml
Sacred mysteries
The stoning of adulterers in Islamic law is not commanded by the Koran. It is found in the collections of the sayings and practice of Mohammed known as the hadith. In Turkey, we learn this week, an attempt is under way to construct a new compilation of hadith, and the question of stoning shows that this may be a life-and-death undertaking
While the Koran is regarded as a direct revelation from God, hadith are seen as human records of the sunna or behaviour of the Prophet, which it is necessary for Muslims to follow in their own sunna. But the Turkish initiative is being sponsored by the state Department of Religious Affairs, and although Turkey is ruled by a pro-Islamic government, its constitution remains secular. Islam has no central authority, but some scholars are respected more than others; Muslims look not to Turkey to leadership but, for example, to the judgment of the ancient al-Azhar university in Egypt.
The scholars at Ankara university involved apparently want to jettison some hadith that seem unjust to women. "Some messages ban women from travelling without their husband's permission," said Professor Mehmet Gormez, of the Department of Religious Affairs. "But this isn't a religious ban." It was a prudent advice in an unsafe world, he suggests.
Some media reports have made hadith sound like a book, like the Koran. But the hadith is a dispersed body of hundreds of sayings. There are six main collections, made in the ninth century AD, 200 years after the death of Mohammed. To non-Muslim scholars, many are obviously anachronistic and unreliable. But most Muslim discussion about their authenticity has focused on the chain of transmission from Mohammed and his companions, not what is said or done in the hadith. In Islam, it is scarcely a reason for rejecting a hadith that it is objectionable to liberal non-believing Westerners.
The magnitude of the Turkish undertaking is in no doubt. "This is akin to the Christian Reformation," Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey from Chatham House commented on the BBC. But such a parallel seems peculiarly inapposite, because the Protestant Reformation placed an emphasis on the literalness of Scripture. "Sola scriptura" - Scripture alone - became the central criterion for belief. That is already the status, and more, of the Koran in Islam, and nothing proposed can change that.
There was an attempt at a kind of rationalist reformation once, and it was definitively crushed. That was in the ninth century AD. The main question was whether the Koran was a created thing, and therefore subject to interpretation and change, or whether it was the uncreated word of God, and therefore eternally valid and literally true.
Rather surprisingly (to modern non-Muslims), the very firm conclusion was that the Koran was uncreated, and as God's revelation was immutable. Politics played a part in all this. For 20 years (813-33 AD) the Abbasid caliph, reigning from Baghdad, was the philosophically minded Abu Jafar al-Mamun. He favoured the theological movement known as Mutazilah, which advocated the exercise of human reason on the Koran as a God-given but created text.
The Mutazilites were resisted by the pious, hardline and resolute scholar, Ahmad ibn-Hanbal. He was persecuted by the caliph al-Mamun. But the caliph died, as caliphs do, and then it was the turn of the Mutazilites to be persecuted, and for Ibn-Hanbal to be feted, not that he cared for that either. But the historical consequences were that the followers of Ibn-Hanbal went on to form one of the four recognised schools of Islamic religious jurisprudence.
Their legacy is of the greatest importance today, for if the dominant Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia or the radical religious underpinning of al-Qaeda look to any school of law it is to Hanbalism. This puts a very large question mark over the Turkish enterprise. It is not rationalising but the radical tendency that has the momentum.
As for stoning, there was an attempt by the caliph Omar, a companion of Mohammed who ruled only two years after the Prophet's death, to assert that a verse commanding the punishment really belonged in the true version of the Koran. He failed to insert it in the Koran, but there is no doubt about the immovable status of the hadith that hands down stoning from his time.
peace -
Their legacy is of the greatest importance today, for if the dominant Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia or the radical religious underpinning of al-Qaeda look to any school of law it is to Hanbalism. This puts a very large question mark over the Turkish enterprise. It is not rationalising but the radical tendency that has the momentum.
Laughable ignorance. The Wahabbis owe their existence to the British and the Americans who financed them. They would have been extinct without them. As al-Qaeda was created in a US courtroom, I have to assume the author means the taleban, again another group whose support comes from the west.
The author obviously wants and 'Islam' that suits his own agenda (i.e. western supremacy) and has the standard high level of education, low level of self criticism that most westerners seem to have (Ron Paul is one exception).
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http//spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=13139
The Hadith Bomb
By Peter Hannaford
Published 5/1/2008 120715 AMSome time this year 35 Turkish scholars will release the results of a three-year project to reinterpret the hadith, comments on the words and deeds of the prophet Mohammed. It is likely to have the effect of dropping a bomb in the Muslim world.
While the Koran is considered to be the word of God as revealed to Mohammed, the hadith, which were compiled two centuries after his death in 632, have long been subject to interpretation. The team of theological scholars at Ankara University, working under the aegis of the Diyanet, Turkey's state authority for religious affairs, have been closely examining the hadith Much of Sharia law is based on the hadith. The scholars have been doing their work with an eye toward reinterpreting or eliminating those that are apocrypha or culturally inspired for purposes of social control. Hadith have been used, for example to justify the oppression of women and the stoning of adulterers. Some scholars believe that the requirement that women wear veils was inspired not by Islam, but by Byzantine aristocrats.
Turkey, whose secular nature is written into its constitution, has a religiously conservative government. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won a solid majority in last summer's election, but is now locked in a legal battle with the secular establishment over its easing of a ban on veils on university campuses. The AKP sees the easing of the veil restriction as a case of the camel's nose under the tent. Defenders of the measure counter that the AKP wants to gradually impose religious rules on the country. If the secular establishment -- made up of military, judicial and republican elements -- wins the case, the AKP itself may be ruled illegal.
Against this backdrop, the reinterpretation of the hadith is seen as a way for the government to show that it is modern and reform-minded. In a recent interview, Mehmet Gormez, deputy director of the Diyanet, said that the reinterpretation was intended to make the proverbs, sayings and commentary that make up the hadith "more suitable to 21st Turkish people and more scientifically and historically accurate."
While the project's immediate audience is the Turkish people, one of the underlying reasons for undertaking it was to assist Turkey in its bid to join the European Union. Putting a reformist stamp on Turkey's governing party seems to be a latter-day objective.
Once it is made public, the scholars' report will have an impact well beyond Turkey's borders. The reaction of Saudi Arabia's most conservative Wahabbist clerics is likely to be fiercely disapproving, not to mention the reaction of various Egyptian clerics and scholars, let alone the Osama bin Ladens and Ayman al-Zawahiris of this world. These radical Islamists and their allies are dedicated to imposing the strictest Sharia law by establishing a Seventh Century theocracy -- a caliphate -- based in Baghdad. As we have seen, their strategy for achieving this is to use murder and terror to gain land. They will not take lightly the "reinterpretation" by some Turkish scholars of their favored means of social control.
Peter Hannaford is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger.
