In der neuen Ausgabe von Newsweek schreibt Christopher Dickey über die nachlassende Unterstützung der Kaida durch islamische Theologen.
Und er beschrteibt ein Projekt türkischer Theologen, die daran arbeiten alle bekannten Hadithen (ca. 170 000) in einer neuen Ausgabe herauszubringen. Ihr Ziel ist es, die Texte wieder in ihren historischen Kontext zu stellen, dem sie entsprungen sind und auf dessen Fragen sie antworten:
„Intellectually and theologically, a lot of the most ambitious work is being done by a group of scholars based in Ankara, Turkey, who expect to publish new editions of the Hadith before the end of the year. They have collected all 170,000 known narrations of the Prophet’s sayings. These are supposed to record Muhammad’s words and deeds as a guide to daily life and a key to some of the mysteries of the Qur’an. But many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context, and those who told the stories or, much later, recorded them, were not always reliable. Sometimes they confused „universal values of Islam with geographical, cultural and religious values of their time and place,“ says Mehmet Gormez, a theology professor at the University of Ankara who’s working on the project. „Every Hadith narration has … a context. We want to give every narration a home again.“
Mehmet Aydin, who first conceived the Hadith project four years ago, when he was Turkey’s minister of state for religious affairs, says it is obvious that in the seventh century, the time of the Prophet, life was very different. One Hadith, for instance, forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia, this and other sayings are given as a reason women should not be allowed to drive. „This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security in a specific time and place,“ says Gormez. In fact, the Prophet says elsewhere that he misses those days, evidently in his recent memory, when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca. In its first three centuries „Islam was interacting with Greek, Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions,“ says Gormez. „They were not afraid to rethink Islam then.“
Liberal Muslim thinkers have made similar arguments in the past, but they were outliers and often not theologians. The Turkish project, on the other hand, has the quiet backing of the ruling AK Party, the world’s most successful, democratically elected party with Islamist roots.“