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 Jane's, the world's premier provider of military and strategic intelligence, describes Special Forces personnel (e.g. the SAS) in the following terms:
"These soldiers are different: they have to be intelligent, lateral thinkers, superbly fit and have the mindset that keeps them going when others would give up." Such soldiers have historically been used to go "behind enemy lines" in order to assist indigenous groups to organise rebellions, insurgencies and the like. Using their knowledge and expertise (and staying well out of sight), they are often able to leverage local resources to achieve goals that an outside power could never accomplish by deploying a standard invading army. While Special Forces personnel are often celebrated once their objectives have been accomplished, as was seen in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Taliban in 2002, usually their presence during active operations is well concealed.  So the media launch of a certain Felix Koerner on the BBC came as something of a surprise. He is a prime mover in the Turkish secularist establishment's latest attack on Islam.
First of all, some background. You will have done well to miss the media frenzy surrounding the announcement by the "Ankara school" of Turkish orientalists of their intentions to revisit the entire corpus of hadith literature in order to determine which ahadith (plural of "hadith") are truly authentic. Apologies at this point must go to Imam Bukhari and those many thousand other muhadditheen (hadith experts) who have tirelessly dedicated their lives to this task over the past 1400 years (the Turks should have the whole job wrapped up in a year or two...). How might these esteemed Turkish academics be able to finish the job so quickly? The answer is simple: instead of getting bogged down in the multiple sciences pertaining to the chains of hadith transmission and all of the elaborate criteria that have been established and agreed upon by the consensus of 1400 years worth of Islamic scholarship, they have discovered a new, streamlined criterion for assessing the soundness of ahadith: "...[these texts] must be understood in the historical context of the seventh century. Since they date from this period, today they must be read anew word by word for the twenty-first century." Or, stated more bluntly, "the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise," (emphasis added) and has therefore commissioned this group of academics to attempt to reinterpret or indeed remove those ahadith that might impede the project of modernisation. So what does this have to do with Special Forces? An anecdote may shed some light on the situation: Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach was once strolling in the Vatican Gardens when he spotted Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger beckoning to him. He hurried over, only to be introduced to a clutter of feral cats fussing around the feet of the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. "You see, Father-General, this is the audience that listens to me," joked Ratzinger. The story might seem banal, but it illustrates the close relationship between Ratzinger, now the Pope, and Kolvenbach, the then leader of the Jesuit Order. Ratzinger and Kolvenbach are also known through their offices as the "white pope" and the "black pope" - the former being the Pope we all know and love, the latter being the shadowy leader of the most powerful and influential order of the Catholic Church (even though the order has fewer than 20,000 members worldwide). Who are the Jesuits? One revealing description states them to be "what was effectively an elite force of intellectual missionary priests... always at the service of the universal Church." John Ralston Saul, in his book Voltaire's Bastards, describes the Jesuits as "intellectual mercenaries", whose intellectual talents were placed at the Church's disposal to achieve whatever ends the Church required. He argues that they are the originators of the "tyranny of Reason" - the modern day trap of horrible outcomes (the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, the global arms industry) which arise from perfectly sound logical thought processes. Any guesses as to Felix Koerner's religious affiliations? It appears that Koerner has spent the last few years befriending and "advising" the Ankara school of would-be revisionists whilst at the same time ministering in a state-sanctioned church of Turkey (no high-up government connections there then...). In fact, Koerner's recently published book, "Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics in Contemporary Turkish University Theology: Rethinking Islam", focuses on the current status of post-modernist methods in Turkish intellectual discourse about Islam. Specifically, Koerner concerns himself with how to infect his Turkish "disciples" with the types of discourse which have led to the current and ongoing disintegration of the Christian Church. Revealingly, Koerner praises Mehmet Paçaci for being "admirably courageous... in taking up the ideas of non-Muslim authors. He has thus substantially opened up the dialogue between modernity and Islam" (pp 107–8, Revisionist Koran Hermeneutics...). Paçaci should be more appropriately praised for being admirably unimaginative. Even Koerner himself complains that his Turkish counterparts still need to move beyond Fazlur Rahman and his 20-year old ideas about "Islam as Ethics". Apart from the fact that Fazlur Rahman was an Oxford-trained orientalist who was schooled in the arts of criticising the Quran and Islam by H.A.R. Gibb and Van Der Bergh, if there was any doubt that this latest episode was a western, foreign-run invasion of Islam's intellectual territory, Koerner's comments reveal the truth. Koerner also inadvertently reveals some other important truths at play: specifically that this particular "initiative" to revamp Islam is nothing new. The ideas and methods being discussed are over 20 years old. What is new is the attempt to pass them off as genuine indigenous attempts at Islamic renewal by coaching and promoting "Muslim scholars" to champion them. This of course ignores the fundamental fact that the established and complex discipline of al-jarh wa al-ta'dil (the science of rigorous scrutiny and authentication) arose out of the need to refute attempts to manipulate the hadith literature by anti-Muslim forces. Koerner is sorely mistaken if he thinks a bit of chit chat with (at best) marginal Muslim orientalists, heavily influenced by the "Oxford school" of failed Islam deconstruction attempts and a sad lot to begin with, is going to unravel 1400 years of solid Muslim scholarship that has been dealing with this very same issue. The "real story" in this week's media extravaganza has in fact not been the plan itself, but Koerner's prominent role in the whole charade. It has been surprising to witness the sheer arrogance which has been shown by his sponsors, who have openly advertised the fact that the Church's "special forces" are actively at work in Turkey to drive forward a centuries-old dream of both major churches: deconstruct Islam from within by its own hands so that it disintegrates into millions of "individualised" versions irreconcilable with one another. The coterie of academics that Koerner has gathered around himself is unremarkable and are nothing new: self-hating Muslim orientalists (there's a real oxymoron for you). What makes them different is the help they're getting from none other than the Pope himself. And for those of you who might think that we here at UmmahPulse are just paranoid, please note that when the Pope visited Ankara in November 2006, we were watching and listening as his colleagues declared that the "80-year-old German theologian known for his sharp intellect -- has a much broader agenda than merely improving ties between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Part of that agenda is an attempt to help spark Islamic theological reform." We were also listening when his loyal lieutenant Felix Koerner explained that he believes the talks mark a sort of milestone. "This will be a new level of dialogue, which will also certainly be institutionalized during this meeting," he said. "We will then bring together our various committees together on a regular basis and things like that." Before the Western press gets too giddy about the prospects of a Muslim reformation emanating from Turkey and propagating around the world, it should reflect on the irony in the pall these Turkish orientalists have attempted to cast over the legacy of a hundred thousand muhadditheen: "[The] Leaders of the Hadith Project say successive generations have embellished the text, attributing their political aims to the Prophet Muhammad himself." Interestingly enough, I couldn't think of a better description for Koerner and his disciples. "They (the disbelievers) wish to extinguish Allah's light with their mouths, but Allah will only allow that His light should be perfected, no matter how much the disbelievers may detest (it)." (Quran 9:32)
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The Pope's Special Forces
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