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  Muslim Martin Luthers: The Theologians Working Towards a Euro-Islam

Muslim Martin Luthers The Theologians Working Towards a Euro-Islam

By Dieter Bednarz and Daniel Steinvorth

Part 4: 'We Muslims Have Been Left Behind'

Yasar Nuri Öztürk, who lives in Istanbul, is the most well known and certainly the most influential representative of Turkish reformist theology. Whether he’s walking along the banks of the Bosporus or through the bazaar, many Turks immediately recognize this small, rather unassuming, nearly bald man from his numerous TV appearances, from his columns in the daily newspaper Hürriyet and from his over 30 books, which have sold more than a million copies in Turkey alone. Many of them have been translated into Arabic, Farsi, English and German. Given Öztürk's high profile, people tend to overlook the fact that he also happens to be the dean of the theological department of the University of Istanbul.

Öztürk’s thinking is mainly aimed at the fundamentalist elite in regimes of the Islamic world that oppress their people in the name of God. He says, however, that the Muslims only have themselves to blame for this state of affairs because they understand “almost nothing” about the “real Islam” as it stands in the Koran. Did not Allah himself declare that the system of monarchist rule was unacceptable? This, at least, is how Öztürk interprets verse 34 of the 27^th Sura: “Surely the kings, when they enter a town or a country, lay it to waste and make the noblest of its people into the lowest. That is their way.”

And Öztürk, with reference to the holy book, clearly rejects the position of bigoted mullahs and zealots who still dream of reinstating the Caliphate. “The Koran proclaims that the prophethood is over,” he says. “And one of the fundamental demands that that entails, is that the age is over when people are led by individuals claiming to derive their authority from God.”

While the Bible and the Torah promise the rule of God on Earth, Öztürk sees the Koran as “the only book that proclaims that theocracy should have no role in the lives of people.” This “key truth” of the Koran is, however, “kept secret and concealed in Islamic societies.”

Öztürk preaches this vision of Islam and politics with his own mixture of theological authority and populism. His understanding of a secular state, however, is not the traditional division of religion and worldly matters. Öztürk's version of secularism is based more on a kind of "democracy imperative" which is based on the Koran and which should force rulers to base their authority “not on God or divine right, but on the will of the people.”

The so-called Ankara School of reform-minded theologians has even spread beyond Turkey’s borders to Germany. Ömer Özsoy, 44, one of the reform movement’s most renowned scholars, has become the first Muslim professor of theology at a German university. At his inaugural lecture, held last November at Frankfurt University, he addressed “modern interpretations of the Koran.”

What this graceful man with fine features and a high forehead says tends to strike many Muslims -- who see the Koran as the eternal word of God -- as simply unbelievable. Özsoy asserts that the holy book of the Muslims is not a timeless message.

The professor of theology sees the Koran as a “speech by God” directed toward a specific group of people at a specific time and under specific circumstances. According to Özsoy, this is shown by the fact that the revelations to the Prophet occurred over a period of approximately 23 years, first in Mecca, then in Medina. Every statement by God relates to a special situation that Muhammad and his followers faced, as fighters, believers, refugees or conquerors. He says that we can only understand the message behind God’s word if we know the circumstances under which the Prophet received the revelation.

Özsoy is convinced that only a fraction of what the revelation intends to convey to mankind is actually spelled out in the Koran. The majority of the actual messages can only be elucidated by studying historical events as they transpired 1,400 years ago -- and then reinterpreting them for the present. Since this “transfer” -- this adapting of the Koran to the current situation -- was held in disdain for so long, Muslims now lack “the answers to the questions posed by modernity.” This has had disastrous consequences, he feels: “We Muslims have been left behind.”

In order to make the jump to the present, at least on a theoretical level, the Turkish religious agency is funding the professorial chair for Muslim theology in Frankfurt, which is part of the university's Department of Protestant Theology. In addition to the Germans who attend his lectures, Özsoy’s students reflect the entire multicultural spectrum of the city, from Muslim Macedonians and Christian Egyptians to Turkish-German women in traditional headscarves.

Up until now, only a minority of Muslims in Germany have embraced such reformist approaches. The Islamic researcher Bassam Tibi estimates that perhaps two-thirds of the over 3 million Muslims in Germany would claim to profess a Euro-Islam version of their faith, but he thinks that no more than 10 percent of the Muslim population “genuinely follows” this liberal form of Islam. “Sipping a glass of wine does not necessarily constitute acceptance of European values,” says Tibi.

Tibi attributes little practical importance to the initiatives launched by Ankara, at least for the time being. He says that while the critical thinking of Özsoy and his colleagues is commendable, the vast majority of Turkish Muslims are not open to this line of thinking. In his opinion, “the organized religion is Islamist or orthodox.”

Although Tibi promotes Euro-Islam in his lectures and among his academic colleagues, he has his own doubts over whether the concepts embodied by Euro-Islam hold the key to the future of over a billion Muslims around the world or whether the traditionalists will maintain the upper hand.

However, Tibi is certain that there is no alternative to an Islam that recognizes the “cultural, social and political realities” of modernity. Based on that conviction, the professor from Göttingen will continue to fight for the vision of an Islam without sharia -- and not just in Europe.

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