Tuesday, 26 February 2008

Is this the start of an Islamic Reformation

My first guess would be "doubt it", but one never knows. Anyway, from the BBC comes this story of Turkish attempts to modernise the religion;

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.

I really can't see this getting very far, the Vatican was able to update (somewhat) Roman Catholicism because
  1. There is a single head of the organisation
  2. It already had the Protestant examples to pick from
  3. It was already 300 years overdue
Clearly this revision is picking from modern humanist principles a.k.a. "The Secular West" so I can't imagine any firebrand mullah worth his salt won't be able to shoot this down as an evil zionist plot or something. Still, the match has to be light somewhere.