Revising the hadith

A rather excited report last week on the BBC's Today programme hailed a development that "could signal the start of a reformation" in Islam.

The possibility of an "Islamic Reformation" of the kind that launched Protestantism in Christianity sounds attractive – at least superficially – and it has been promoted with enthusiasm by non-believers such as Salman Rushdie. But Muslims who are actually involved in trying to liberalise and reform their religion usually regard it as nonsense.

What excited the BBC was the news that Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs will shortly issue a revised version of the hadith, a collection of sayings and deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. The hadith plays an important role in Islamic jurisprudence, particularly on matters where the Qur'an itself is silent, and it is on the hadith rather than the Qur'an that most of the silliest fatwas – or religious opinions – by religious scholars are based.

In the earliest days of Islam, words attributed to the Prophet were passed on by word of mouth until they were eventually written down. How many of them may be genuine is a matter of opinion, but some are certainly fakes. In his book, Progressive Muslims, Scott Kugle writes:
"... It is very difficult to establish the authenticity of most reports that circulate in the name of the Prophet Muhammad. But clearly, many reports were projected retrospectively back upon the Prophet without being reliably attributed to him.

Muslims are confronted with hadith in which the Prophet reportedly speaks about issues that did not exist in his lifetime: such as the Shia-Sunni schism, various theological 'heresies', and even the systematic collection of hadith."

The dubious material includes condemnations of homosexuality often quoted by scholars today which, according to Kugle, did not appear until long after the Prophet's death:
"Forged hadith reports condemning same-sex sexual relations began to circulate in earnest during the Abbasid period (750-1258 AD), when it became aristocratic and courtly fashion to own young male slaves, employ handsome wine-bearers, and flaunt same-sex romances. Many hadiths were circulated in the name of the Prophet to address these practices, as part of the traditionalist cultural war on the cosmopolitan elite of Abbasid-era cities."

In the light of such examples, Kugle argues that "reassessment of the authenticity of hadith reports is the key to legal and social reform among Muslims".

That, basically, is what Turkey's Department of Religious Affairs has been doing. It has worked through the old collections of hadith, eliminating material that is "out of date, misogynistic or anti-Christian" (to quote the BBC's correspondent). It has also been removing "cultural baggage" which it considers to have no sound basis in religion – for example, the practice of female genital mutilation and a ruling that women should not travel without a man's permission. The latter, it says, was simply a safety measure at the time that has no relevance today.

In principle, this is a valuable exercise, but it needs to be treated with a bit of caution.
In the Sunni branch of Islam (to which most Muslims belong), there are four main "schools" of law – Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii and Hanbali. Their relative influence varies from country to country but the dominant one in Turkey is Hanafi.

One of the key differences between these schools is in the reliance they place on the –hadith. The Hanafi school tends to be more wary of the hadith than the other schools, with the result that its judgments are often more flexible.

It's not terribly surprising, therefore, that a critical review of the hadith has been taking place in Hanafi-dominated Turkey. There would be more grounds for excitement if it was happening, say, in Saudi Arabia where the Hanbali school prevails and scholars produce the most conservative legal judgments, often based on literal readings of the Qur'an and uncritical acceptance of the hadith.

One criticism of the Hanafi school is that its built-in flexibility has historically made its religious rulings susceptible to political influence. The Hanbali school, on the other hand, because it relies so heavily on the hadith, is relatively impervious to political influence; in Saudi Arabia it tends to control politics rather than the other way round.

In Turkey, the Department of Religious Affairs is not an independent body; it was established under the constitution to handle relations between the government and religious communities in accordance with the principles of secularism laid down by Kemal Ataturk. As a result of this background, no matter how academically sound the department's editing and revision of the hadith may be, there will always be a question mark hanging over it – in the minds of Muslims living outside Turkey, as well as the more traditionalist Muslims inside the country. It probably won't cut much ice with Turkey's Alawi Muslims either – from the Shia branch of Islam– who are said to number around 12 million.

It's a pity that this very necessary process of re-appraising the hadith has been tainted in Turkey by the state's involvement. Separating the state from religion doesn't just mean keeping the muftis out of politics; it means the government keeping its hands off religion too.