An end to the Islamic Crisis ?

I thought of Saddiq the moment I heard the news, the imminent release of a document that could mark a turning point in the long, devastating crisis of Islam. 

      Saddiq was a Saudi agent, sent to shadow me 24 hours per day during a six-month assignment on the Arabian Peninsula in 2002. For a week or so, we were coldly wary of each other. Then, with a mutual shrug, we dropped the pretence of hostility and worked together to make my reporting as accurate as possible – better informed from my perspective, less western-biased from his. We often talked deep into the night, about almost everything.

      The document, to be published by Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs, is the result of a three-year project to re-examine – and revise – the Hadith, one of the founding texts of Islam. Its announcement was scarcely noticed in the U.S. media, but it is an epochal, front-page story across the Middle East and Asia.

      “I cannot impress enough how fundamental [this change] is," Fadi Hakura, a Turkish scholar, told the BBC when the story broke on February 26.  

      There is no doubt in my mind that Saddiq would agree. Like the vast majority of Saudis, he is a fervent Muslim. And like many Muslims, he is locked in a profoundly frustrating struggle to reconcile his intense faith with the demands of a rapidly changing world.

      This struggle goes far to explain the crisis: the paralysis most Islamic countries have experienced in the face of contemporary political and economic challenges, and the corresponding temptation to withdraw into the glories of the Islamic past.

      “We are told, over and over, that our civilization was the most advanced on earth a thousand years ago,” Saddiq said one night. “But what about today?”

      The answer, or at least a major part of it, lies in the Hadith.  

RISE AND FALL OF THE GOLDEN AGE

In layman’s terms, the Hadith is a record of the conversations and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed after the revelation that produced the Koran – the moral  “recitation” that is the theological bedrock of Islam.

      The words of that revelation itself cannot be changed. For Muslims, God’s final, sacrosanct instructions to humanity are expressed in the Koran, as related directly to Mohammed by the Archangel Gabriel in what is now western Saudi Arabia.

      But the Hadith is categorically different, an oral history composed by human beings. It serves as a collective tool for interpreting what God’s words meant, based on the Prophet’s own efforts to understand them.

      It is from the Hadith that most principles of Muslim daily life – its customs, its laws, its social attitudes, even its dress and grooming codes – are drawn.

      In the first four centuries after Mohammed, these principles were subject to constant evaluation and reinterpretation. This was the Golden Age of Islam, the era of extraordinary intellectual debate and inquiry that Muslim leaders never tire of evoking. In addition to the massive culling of the Hadith – from more than 600,000 initial entries by some counts – Muslim scholars preserved the learning of ancient Greece and Rome during the barbarian invasions of Europe. Muslim researchers devised the scientific method of experimentation and pioneered key discoveries in medicine, astronomy and chemistry. Muslim mathematicians invented algebra and trigonometry.

      But by the eleventh century, with the distance from Mohammed’s conversations with his disciples growing ever greater, the “editing” of the Hadith was declared complete.

      In effect, the door was shut to further interpretation.

      With the Mongol assault that ravaged Arab and Muslim civilization in the thirteenth century, almost every kind of inquiry ground to a halt.

      It is impossible to exaggerate the level of intellectual stagnation in the cradle of Islam since then. In a 2002 report, the United Nations found that the number of foreign books translated into Spanish in a single year is now greater than the combined total of all books translated into Arabic in the past ten centuries.  

THE PRICE OF STAGNATION

The evolution of Muslim society also stagnated, tied as it was to a closed debate. Nowhere is the result more evident than in Saudi Arabia, Mohammed’s birthplace and the site of Islam’s two holiest shrines, the mosques at Mecca and Medina. And nowhere is the struggle between inflexible custom and modern reality more visibly debilitating.

      Nearly every day of our partnership, Saddiq felt the need to apologize for the behaviour of the Muttawa, the 5,000-man religious police force formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Their “criminal” prey included anyone, Saudi or foreigner alike, who violated anachronistic social constraints spelled out in the traditional Hadith.

      “They’re thugs,” Saddiq would say from time to time, as we watched the Muttawa sweep through Saudi shopping centers, Starbucks and fast-food joints, arresting men who smiled too openly at women or women who allowed a lock of hair to escape their veils. “They’re comical, absurd, a bunch of clowns masquerading as cops.”

      That’s a very common point of view in Saudi Arabia, expressed only when the Muttawa are out of earshot. But like them or hate them, the religious police are a metaphor for larger contradictions in Muslim life, most glaringly in attitudes toward women – for rules that have little or nothing to do with the Koran, and almost everything to do with a rulebook that stopped evolving a millennium ago.

      The tension is palpable in affluent Saudi Arabia. But in two decades covering the Islamic countries, I encountered it everywhere, from Indonesia and Malaysia to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Egypt and Jordan.

      Everywhere, that is, except Turkey, with its eight decades of secular rule, its home-grown industrial revolution, its adroitly managed economic boom – and equally important, its current moderate Islamic government. 

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11

In public, Ankara’s Department of Religious Affairs downplays its work, and is quick to issue corrections when the word “reform” is too loosely employed to describe the revision of the Hadith.^[1]

      “We are not reforming Islam,” insists Ali Bardakoglu, Turkey’s senior religious official. “We are reforming ourselves, our own way of religiosity.”

 
     The unease over provocative terminology, in an era of suicide bombings and in a country that shares lengthy borders with Iraq and Iran, speaks for itself. But so does the actual project undertaken by the department’s 80 historians and theologians, as well as its timing.

      The Ankara revision would eliminate such medieval injunctions as "The best of women are those who are like sheep," and “Your prayer will be invalid if a donkey, black dog or a woman passes in front of you."

      Koranic scholars have long argued that there is no proof Mohammed ever made these statements, or that the loss of context distorts their purpose.

      It cannot be an accident that reconsideration of the Hadith – after a 1,000-year lull – was initiated in the grim wake of September 11, 2001, when the Islamic crisis exploded into unprecedented violence, and the West reacted with terrified bewilderment and its own brand of disastrous violence.

      Like Saddiq, most Muslims know, painfully well, that they have fallen out of the mainstream of history. They know that al-Qaeda will not return them to the glories of the past. In private, they discuss and agonize about their weaknesses endlessly.

      Yet they also believe, deeply, that their religion belongs at the forefront of history. To ask that they blame Islam, or see its core message as “a problem,” is asking them to renounce everything. 

      Whatever the Turkish authorities say for public consumption, they have reopened the door to debate over social behaviour – to a coherent modernization of daily life –  without impinging on the central, sacrosanct values articulated in the Koran.

      Reforming Muslims’ “way of religiosity,” rather than their religion, is precisely the point.

– Frank Viviano – barganews staff reporter – World View CBS5

^[1]  Press release from the Office of the Presidency of Religious Affairs- The Republic of Turkey 29th February 2008 –  Describing the Hadith project through such words as “reform”, “revision”, or “revolution” is entirely wrong. This mistake appears to developed because of defining Islam and the scholarly dynamism in the Islamic world through the historical and cultural heritage of Christianity. Consequently, our Presidency is surprised and deeply saddened by the description of this project with such baseless allegations as “sorting out the Hadith”, “interpreting the Hadith within the framework of moderate Islam”, associating the project with politics”, “hiring a foreign advisor”, “performing reform in the field of Hadith”,”making the Hadith consistent with the 21st. century”, “changing the theological bases of Islam”, etc.,. Such descriptions are not only against the stated intent and goals of the Hadith project but may also lead to misperceptions in our country as well as the rest of the Islamic world. – article here