What is expected of the theologian

Can today's Faculties of Theology fulfill the mission of training the religious scholar that a Muslim society needs? If we say religious scholar, we of course mean it in the full sense of the word: one who knows and believes in Islam and who, even at a basic level, teaches and instructs in present-day conditions the knowledge, history, fiqh and kalam of the faith of the community that shares the same belief, enlightening society in accordance with this knowledge, leading it, guiding it when asked. That is quite a lot of mission definition, isn't it? Or is what is expected a leader rather than a scholar?

The Faculty of Theology is a center of academic activity. The academy, however, is an institution that can only rarely, perhaps by chance, deliver what is expected of scholarship. What is the essence, the framework, of this?

In my Master's thesis titled "Intellectual and Political Debates on the Academicization of Religious Knowledge," which I completed at ODTÜ in 1993 under the supervision of Prof. Bahattin Akşit, I was trying to find answers to these questions. As fieldwork I was examining the founding history and the current functioning of the Ankara University Faculty of Theology.

There is a fine transition between religious knowledge and its turning into academic knowledge. This transition does not necessarily occur in everyone, but there is a clear difference between the mission of academic knowledge and the knowledge of a person who, believing in a religion, takes that religion's sources of knowledge as a command, a maxim. It is a difference like the one between the attitude of someone who reads the Qur'an only after performing ablution, reading every letter in it as the unchanged, unchanging word of Allah and as a living message addressed to him, and someone who reads it like any text and performs every kind of analysis on it.

There have been many academic readings that, reading in this second way, discovered in the Qur'anic text semantic dimensions, linguistic or rhetorical features, textual relations and characteristics that even believers had not noticed. They too are works that in some way deserved to be included in the Qur'anic sciences. Moreover, some of these studies were carried out without believing that the Qur'an is the word of Allah.

The Qur'an is in the hands of all humanity, open for everyone to read and examine. Some will understand it in one way, some in another. Some will read it believing, some without believing, denying it, with their own prejudices.

The reactions to the orientalists who read in this way and draw very different conclusions are in fact a matter of serious disagreement among those of differing beliefs. In any case, what kind of knowledge could one expect a person who does not believe in a religion to produce about that religion? In our day, when intercommunal, and therefore intercultural, communication traffic runs ever more intensely and differences confront one another intensely, a community of faith's perceiving such possibilities of different understanding as a surprise or a betrayal deserves more attention. Doesn't this in fact show how unprepared it is for opening to the world or conveying its message to the world?

Turning to the academic side of the matter, a believing academic is expected to objectify that body of knowledge, that is, to put a certain distance between himself and it, in order to do academic work on a religion he believes in. How possible is this? There the process of the academicization of religious knowledge begins to be felt with all its difficulties. Some, in trying to put this distance, can go as far as considering themselves independent of that faith; others, without even noticing the interpretive path that is unavoidable for reaching the truth of that knowledge, can see their own prejudices, their own pre-interpretation, as part of revelation. One may see an objection to one's own interpretation as an objection to religion, and one's reaction to it comes in a very religious language. Thus the fine distinction between the language of the academy and the language of religion gradually disappears.

This part of the matter can in fact be repeated at every level of academic work, in non-religious language under the guise of "scientificity." A series of practices observed by the renowned historian and philosopher of science Paul K. Feyerabend under the heading "The Church of Science" is nothing other than the theologization of science. The fact that evolution has found its place as a matter of belief rather than a subject of science is a perfect example of this too, but that is not our subject now.

Our subject today is what we expect of the Faculty of Theology and its academics or graduates. What do we expect of the theologian? Do we expect him to be a teacher to us in belief and in practice? If we have such an expectation, are we open to this teacher's instruction and advice? The reactions the theologian meets when, through his research and inquiries, he reveals now and then that what we know as religion has gradually become nothing but our own historical interpretations or has become tainted with innovations and superstitions, and preaches this, show that the congregation is not empty either. The organic relationship between the theologian and his congregation becomes a serious matter at this point. The theologian must see this, and of course so must the congregation that expects a teacher according to the book.

Yet at the point of fulfilling the task the Muslim people expect of the theologian, there is the pressure of two much more important missions that the theologian feels the weight of. The first is the history of the Faculty of Theology in Turkey and the mission definition loaded on them, which functions very differently from what is seen or expected today.

The second is its mission as a scientific institution within a university roof where, again, the positive science paradigm prevails. It is very clear that today the faculties of theology, not only in Turkey but in the Christian and Jewish worlds too, stand at a point quite different from this mission.

Before expecting anything of the theologian, I think one needs to understand him a little better. So we will continue.