A reader points to an article on IslamOnline, which pours cold water on the suggestion that the Hadiths are to be revised, to remove misogynistic or other hateful material.
“Make no mistake, we are not after modifying or revising the Hadith,” Mehmet Gormez, deputy director of the religious affairs authority Diyanet and supervisor of the project, told IslamOnline.net in a phone interview.
“What we are actually doing is re-classifying, re-categorizing the Hadith and translating it into Turkish, no more no less.”
…
He shrugged off media suggestions that Turkey was re-writing the Hadith and creating a new Islam.“They made too much fuss and took the project out of its real context.
“We are neither fashioning a new Islam nor dare to alter the fixtures maxims of Islam,” Gormez said emphatically.
“The Western media have read what are doing from a Christian perspective and understood it in line with their Christian and Western cultures.”
When it comes to Islam, Gormez said, the Western media is used to focusing on women’s status and jihad.
Several British newspapers on Wednesday, February 27, ran stories on the Turkish project .
The Guardian headlines the story as “Turkey strives for 21st century form of Islam.”
A day earlier the BBC reported the project under the headline “Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts.”
Gormez also refuted claims they would and edit out some hadiths, especially about women.
“No Muslim in the right mind would dare delete any hadith or tamper with the Prophet’s heritage.”
Oh well.
