Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.
The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.
The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad.
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An adviser to the project, Felix Koerner, says some of the sayings - also known individually as "hadiths" - can be shown to have been invented hundreds of years after the Prophet Muhammad died, to serve the purposes of contemporary society.
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"You can find messages which say 'that is what the Prophet ordered us to do'. But you can show historically how they came into being, as influences from other cultures, that were then projected onto Islamic tradition."
But ah, say the Muslim equivalents of the Gedolim, couldn't Mohammed have written the Hadiths so they just look like they were invented hundreds of years later? Eh?
On a side note, it's always funny to see other religions try to rationalize some of their holy texts the way Orthodox Judaism does with its:
Some messages ban women from traveling without their husband's permission... But this isn't a religious ban. It came about because it simply wasn't safe for a woman to travel alone.
Riiiight. And the Torah condones slavery because sometimes people just needed to be slaves.
