Mustafa’s convictions

On June 6th began the Islamic festivities of Eid al-Adha, known in Turkey as Kurban Bayram (the Feast of Sacrifice). It commemorates Abraham’s faith and his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael as a sign of surrender to God. To be worthy of standing before the God of mercy and compassion requires an act of abundance. This is the meaning of the animal sacrifice, performed within Muslim families also for the benefit of the poor.

His name is Mustafa Öztürk, a sixty-year-old Turkish theologian and academic, born in the province of Giresun on the shores of the Black Sea, well known for his research in the field of exegesis and Qur’anic studies. Öztürk has published several scholarly works since his 2003 thesis, with its highly evocative title: The Qur’an and Extreme Interpretation (Kur’an ve Aşırı Yorum), in which he develops his historicist vision, according to which everything related to Islam—particularly its Sacred Text—must be historically contextualized for a proper interpretation. In short: for Mustafa Öztürk, many passages of the Qur’an dealing with topics such as slavery, concubinage, and punishment reflect the mentality of the era in which they were written. Therefore, those specific prescriptions of that time cannot be regarded as foundational to the religion and must be abandoned.

Öztürk has for years published videos of his lectures and talks on a YouTube channel with over 220,000 subscribers. Recently, one of his video statements caused a major uproar: he announced his intention to burn his own translation of the Qur’an, the fruit of years of hard work infused with spiritual research. Strictly speaking, there is in fact no possible “translation” of the Islamic holy book, since the word of God cannot fully live in any language other than its native classical Arabic (what exist are rather “interpretative attempts”). His provocation was an implicit response to Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and thus to the country’s current political leadership. With the approval of a new law on June 4th, the Diyanet was granted the authority to censor Turkish translations of the Qur’an deemed contrary to the “fundamental principles of Islam.” Long criticized for his exegetical positions, the professor had already withdrawn from Turkish public institutions in order, as he said, to avoid official inquiries into the content of his research. In reality, his positions distance themselves much more radically from a conservative and reactionary Islamic state vision, fundamentally illiberal and resistant to any form of pluralism.

It is not the first time he has expressed solidarity with the thought of his colleague İhsan Eliaçık, leader of the Anti-Capitalist Muslims movement, who has for years sought to reveal Islam’s potential to inspire a radical economic transformation. Mustafa Öztürk, for his part, is a Spinozist who, in his understanding of the “unity of being” of God, seeks harmony between Islamic ethics and the contemporary notion of universal human rights. Öztürk, like Eliaçık (himself the author of a Qur’anic translation entitled The Living Qur’an, censored by the authorities), denounces the deficits of the country’s current leadership in freedom and economic justice, arguing that the form of Islam promoted by the current regime is morally bankrupt. According to the two theologians, the fact that such a powerful state body as the Diyanet can be controlled by an idiosyncratic and conservative religious order completely ignores the existence of vibrant secular segments of contemporary Turkish society—those who, in 2016, had been made to believe they were safe, when the Islamist Gülenist movement, known for its deep infiltration of state institutions, was banned.

Mustafa Öztürk’s dramatic decision to burn his own translation of the Qur’an is rooted in the pain of being hindered in his effort to spread a more tolerant, even loving, understanding of religion. His first instinct has always been to withdraw, to retreat into a deep contemplative state, in order to continue his exegetical (tafsir) work and to seek—Spinoza-like, beyond the text—the signs of divine grace in nature. An ignored yet authentic expression of contemporary Islamic thought.

NP August/September 2025
Claudio Monge