Why Erdogan Called For Updating Islam

Public remarks by Turkey’s powerful President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have often raised eyebrows in the West in
recent years. However, in a March 8 speech on International Women's Day, Erdogan broke this pattern and said
something that could only be music to liberal ears: He condemned misogynist clerics who degrade women, and
even said, “Islam must be updated."

The speech was made to hundreds of Turkish women from various walks of life who were invited to the
presidential complex in Ankara for International Women's Day. In his address to the women, Erdogan implicitly
referred to a few ultraconservative scholars in Turkey who recently outraged society by defending misogynist
practices such as wife beating. "Recently, some people claiming to be clerics issued statements contradicting
religion,” Erdogan said. “They have no place in our times. They don't realize how Islam needs to be updated and is
updated accordingly. You can't apply the practices applied 15 centuries ago today. Islam changes and adapts to the
conditions of different ages. This is the beauty of Islam.”

This progressive take on religion, especially the very suggestion that “Islam needs to be updated,” came as a cold
shower to some of the typically pro-Erdogan commentators. On social media, many of them stood silent, whereas
others offered mild criticism, repeating the usual mantra that “Islam is perfect,” it needs no “update” and it is
only Muslims who need to improve themselves by living up to Islam’s fixed commandments.

A day later, Erdogan refined his initial remark about updating Islam and said he seeks no "reform in religion.”
("Reform” is a dirty word in conservative parlance.) “Our holy Quran has and will always have words to say, its
commandments will never change,” Erdogan affirmed. However, he added, “The independent reasoning derived
from the Quran” — in other words many clauses in classic jurisprudence would “surely change according to the
time, the conditions and the possibilities.”

Why has Erdogan taken this not-so-conservative position on Islam? And what does it mean for the state of affairs in
Turkey?

First, we need to recall the background of Erdogan’s remarks. In the past few years, Turkey’s religious
conservatives have found a level of free speech that they have not seen in a century. While free speech overall has
dramatically declined in Turkey, as noted by Freedom House, this decline has affected only the anti-Erdogan
camp. While secularists in the state, media and civil society have been largely swept aside, the vacuum was filled
by religious conservatives and Islamists of various kinds, who now both had the self-confidence to speak their
minds, and also influential media forums to use such as state TV.

Some of these newly empowered conservatives were people with deeply archaic understandings of Islam. As a
result, it became common for Turks to hear one dreadful “fatwa” (religious opinion) after another. One scholar
suggested that pregnant women should not freely walk around, for example, while another threatened “women
who wear pants” with hellfire.

Most recently, Nurettin Yildiz, a traditional scholar and a columnist for the Islamist Milli Gazete, sparked even
more outrage by declaring that it is permissible in Islam for children of the age of 6 to get married. He defended
wife beating as well, even suggesting that women who are beaten by their husbands should be “grateful” for this
blessing.

Here is the key point: These terrible views were shocking to Turkey’s secularists, almost all of whom are against
Erdogan. But they were also shocking to most moderate religious conservatives, many of whom vote for Erdogan.

This is the case, because as polls show, hard-core Islamists who would like to see a Sharia-based Turkey — one like
Saudi Arabia, where sexes are segregated and adulterers are stoned — makes up a small minority in Turkey. As Pew
Research polls have shown, those Turks who wish to see Sharia as “the law of the land” make up some 12% of the
whole population, whereas the same number is 84% in Pakistan and 74% in Egypt. To the question of whether sons
and daughters should have equal inheritance rights, an impressive 88% of Turks say “yes,” where the same number
is only 53% in Pakistan and 26% in Egypt.

In other words, Turkey’s 150-year-long Westernization that goes back to the late Ottoman Empire, and the
century-long experience of the secular republic, has ingrained certain modern values in society, even in the more
conservative camp.
No wonder Yildiz’s shocking statements on wife beating and child marriage have been strongly criticized by
commentators in the conservative, and pro-Erdogan, media as well — in newspapers such as Sabah or Yeni Safak.
Most recently, Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the Nationalist Action Party and a key Erdogan ally, slammed Yildiz as
a “pervert” for saying men and women should not get on the same elevator.

Erdogan’s reaction to “clerics who degrade women” should be seen in light of this social context. It should also
remind us that Erdogan, at the end of the day, is a populist politician and not a doctrinaire cleric. He follows
social trends carefully, with regular polls he reportedly gets conducted, and does his best to capture the zeitgeist.
No wonder his political narrative is based on not a rigid Islamism that would have limited appeal, but an Islam-
infused nationalism that appeals to the majority of Turkish society. (The main political trait in Turkish society has
always been nationalism more than anything else.)

Whatever his political reasons are, Erdogan’s support for the idea that “Islam needs updating” will come as a
breath of fresh air for Turkey’s modernist theologians, who have lately been concerned with the rise of the
ultraconservative scholars, some of whom also have been called "Salafi.” In a country where the president’s words
are definitive almost on everything, Erdogan’s green light for new interpretations of Islam will be helpful.

However, there is also a downside: the very definitiveness of the president — and, by extension, the state — over
religion. Turkey has always been a very statist country where the government has controlled religion and has left
very little room for civil society. Erdogan’s attempt to define “the right Islam” will only deepen this state-centric
culture.

A modernist theologian laid this out well in a newspaper column. The main problem in Turkey's religious sphere,
the theologian said, is that “different groups are willing to have their own interpretation of religion embraced by
the state, and imposed on society.” And there is little hope, he added, that this vicious cycle will be broken in the
near future.