7 - Contesting Ḥanafī Thought in a Twentieth-century Turkish Hadith Commentary

Summary

In a widely circulated 2008 article the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported on a Turkish hadith project that promised to be ‘a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam’. This project, spearheaded by the Diyanet and intended to be a hadith compilation suitable for the modern period, was still in the works at the time of the BBC story, which invoked the ‘revolutionary nature’ of the project and claimed that the compilation would bring about the ‘reformation of Islam’. The Diyanet responded to the story in two ways: in the short term, its head issued an official statement to counter and reject the claims of the BBC article and, in the long term, it reissued (in 2019) an early republican (1923–1938) hadith project, a Turkish translation entitled Sahih-i Buhari Muhtasarı: Tecrid-i Sarih Tercümesi (An Abridgement of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: A Translation of al-Tajrīd al-Ṣarīḥ), first published between 1928 and 1948. The ‘revolutionary’ hadith project was completed in 2011; work to reissue the early republican hadith translation project began at the end of 2012.

This incident reflects the BBC's and the Diyanet's understanding (or lack of understanding) of the relationship between texts and religion. The BBC story betrays a Protestant understanding of religion and a Western attitude that if only Muslims had access to the proper texts Islam would be compatible with modernity. The BBC's invocation of a reformation reinforces this textual attitude toward religion, an attitude that obscures the importance of the many vibrant religious cultures throughout the Muslim world; further, it overlooks the fact that while texts are important to its intellectual tradition, Islam is more than its texts. The Diyanet's defence, that is, its focus on an early republican project, is peculiar. With this response, the Diyanet sought to reassure its domestic audience by demonstrating that it was not embarking on a revision of the hadith, and that the Turkish state had already engaged in a similar compilation of the hadith for the modern period. The Diyanet invoked the authority of a twentieth-century text for its twenty-first-century project – the published hadith compilation made this continuity explicit – to assuage concerns about textual revisionism.