An article printed Saturday in a U.S. magazine highlighted the current study of Turkish Islamic scholars on narrations of the Prophet's sayings in a cultural context and said Turaaa's theologians are in a unique position to question “jihad” and be heard thanks to their position in the Muslim world.

Important Muslim thinkers are rejecting Osama bin Laden's vision of jihad which has convinced the Islamic world that the Koran grants its followers license to kill innocent people – and themselves. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed an immutable tenet of faith challenge what had been taken as literal truth and open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) Newsweek reported.
Newsweek called the work of the Ankara-based group of scholars who are expected to publish a new edition of the Hadith before the end of the year as "most ambitious work" in the area. The scholars have collected all 170000 known narrations of the Prophet's sayings. Many of those anecdotes came out of a specific historical context and those who told the stories or much later recorded them were not always reliable.
Sometimes they confused "universal values of Islam with geographical cultural and religious values of their time and place" said Mehmet Gormez a theology professor at Ankara University who is working on the project. "Every Hadith narration has ... a context. We want to give every narration a home again."
Mehmet Aydin – who as Turkish minister for religious affairs conceived the Hadith project four years ago – told the magazine that life was obviously quite different in the seventh century the time of the Prophet. One Hadith for instance forbids women from traveling alone. In Saudi Arabia this and other sayings are given as reasons why women should not be allowed to drive.
"This is clearly not a religious injunction but related to security at a specific time and place" Gormez said.
In fact the Prophet elsewhere says that he misses those days evidently of recent memory to him when women could travel alone from Yemen to Mecca.
In its first three centuries "Islam was interacting with Greek Iranian and Indian cultures and at every encounter [scholars] reinterpreted Islam according to new conditions" Gormez added. "They were not afraid to rethink Islam then."
Liberal Muslim thinkers have made similar arguments in the past but the Turkish project has far-reaching potential given the credibility of the source Newsweek reported. The project has the quiet backing of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) which the publication called the world's most successful democratically elected party with Islamist roots.
The professors involved are quick to deny that their work represents some sort of Islamic Reformation. They call what they're doing a "rethinking" or a "re-understanding" of the sacred texts "according to modern concepts like democracy human rights women's rights and universal values" Gormez told Newsweek.