ISTANBUL — The grainy video was secretly recorded, and it turned Hamza Aydin’s* life completely upside down. He has no idea who’d filmed it. The footage shows him discussing the Quran in an office. The Islamic holy book is his field of expertise. When the video surfaced online in 2019, Aydin was still a professor of Islamic theology at a prestigious university in Turkey.
Today, Aydin can no longer teach in his homeland, nor does he wish to. Die Zeit has met with him several times. At first, he’d agreed to have his name published, but reconsidered as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pressing ahead ever more ruthlessly with the transformation of Turkish democracy into an authoritarian state.
Since the beginning of the year, numerous opposition figures have been arrested. When hundreds of thousands of Turks took to the streets in the spring to demand freedom of expression, the government responded with water cannons and mass detentions. Since then, Aydin has preferred to keep his real name private. He also declined to share details of his biography, such as the name of his university.
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Aydin has written several books on Quran exegesis, the interpretation of the book that Muslims regard as divine revelation. The Quran as the literal word of God, which must be understood word for word: this is still the way Islam is predominantly taught at major universities in the Muslim world. Aydin sees this as one of the main reasons why fundamentalists wield such influence today, including in Turkey.
In that 2019 video, he analyzes individual verses of the Quran which, in his view, cannot be the words of Allah. They are, rather, the words of someone lashing out in anger. And then Aydin utters something considered taboo among most Islamic scholars: he questions whether the Quran, in its precise wording, comes from Allah. The Quran, he argues, is inspired by Allah, but not dictated word for word.
Once the video was made public, events moved quickly. Islamists across Turkey erupted in outrage against the theologian. Within hours, a hashtag calling for Aydin’s dismissal was trending. A popular preacher with several hundred thousand followers declared that Allah will hold Aydin accountable for poisoning young people with his ideas. Among the flood of hate comments came death threats — and when Islamists finally gather in front of his university to protest, the professor resigns.
Aydin’s case illustrates how Erdoğan’s government uses religion as an instrument of power. It shows how Turkish fundamentalists deploy state institutions to enforce their interpretation of Islam, and how they also shape the sermons preached in mosques in Germany, where Turkish immigrants and their descendants are an influential minority.
A few months after his resignation, Aydin is standing in an airport in a major Turkish city. In his suitcase: a laptop, some clothes, and a carton of Turkish cigarettes. That is how he recalls it in an interview with Die Zeit. He was on his way to Germany, accepting an invitation from a university there to work as a visiting professor for a semester. It worked out. That led to further academic stays abroad. Aydin would end up spending several years in exile.
Theological circles
At his first new home in Germany, he kept to himself, spending hours wandering the streets and parks alone. Looking back, he speaks with enthusiasm about the “peace, the freedom” he found then after all the turmoil. He also began to enjoy his work again. Instead of simply memorizing, theology students in Germany were expected above all to master methodological skills.
What struck Aydin most, however, was the attitude of his colleagues: “They saw themselves as scholars, not missionaries.”
Aydin was part of a confident circle of theologians in Turkey who had long sought to approach Islam and its sacred texts from a scholarly perspective. They no longer saw the Quran as an inflexible code of law, but rather as a historical text that had to be understood in the context of its time.
Verses that call for hostility toward people of other faiths, for example, would have no place in a peaceful, pluralistic society. The fact that this historical-critical approach meets fierce opposition is nothing new in the history of religions. Christianity, too, only slowly made room for it. In Turkey, this way of thinking has faced growing pressure since Erdoğan’s rise to power.
Today, many Turks feel their faith is being controlled.
This is particularly tragic in a country that can look back on several thousand years of religious history, and where in recent decades more and more people had come to see freedom of religion as a natural part of freedom of expression. Today, many Turks feel their faith is being controlled, because under Erdoğan a harsh religious policy has taken hold. It is not only opposition politicians and critical journalists who are targeted, but also academics like Aydin who question the government’s conservative interpretation of Islam.
During his time in Germany, those restrictions seemed a world away for Aydin. He kept his distance from the Turkish-dominated Ditib mosques. Looking back, he says, they were home to the very same people who had made his life miserable in Turkey.
German mosques
The Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institution for Religious Affairs, or DITIB, is the largest Islamic organization in Germany and runs roughly a third of the country’s 3,000 or so mosques. It was established in 1984 as an offshoot of the Turkish religious authority, the Diyanet. At the time, German policymakers assumed that Turkish guest workers would return home. So why build independent Islamic institutions when Turkey was already sending its imams to DITIB mosques as civil servants?
Forty years later, DITIB’s dependence on Turkey has become politically explosive. A religious advisory board (13 men, no women) still decides who sits on the board of DITIB’s federal association. The members are not German Turks, but Diyanet officials who live in Turkey, including the current president, Ali Erbaş. In 2020, he claimed that homosexuality causes “generations of people to rot.”
The advisory board’s structure ensures that German mosques follow Ankara’s line. After the failed coup in Turkey in 2016, for instance, DITIB imams compiled lists of government critics living in Germany. Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, mosques even became stages for the AKP’s campaign.
The tight link between politics and religion in Turkey has a complicate history, reaching back to the secular founder of the state, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In 1923, on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, he created modern Turkey as a secular, Western-oriented nation-state. Yet Atatürk also recognized that Islam would remain important to many citizens. So he founded the Diyanet. The religious authority was meant to promote a moderate form of Islam and keep extremist groups from infiltrating the new republic. To this day, many Turks still believe the Diyanet plays that role.
Yilmaz describes herself as a “traditional Muslim.”
For her, anyone like Aydin who questions the Quran is not a Muslim.
Selin Yilmaz*, also a pseudonym, sits in a book café at the faculty where Aydin worked until his resignation. She completed her theology degree four years ago and still recalls the Aydin scandal vividly. “When we saw the video, we students were very angry,” she says.
Yilmaz describes herself as a “traditional Muslim.” For her, anyone like Aydin who questions the Quran is not a Muslim. But she rejects the death threats made against him. She also stayed away from the protests outside his office, because fundamentalists were present.
Those groups are gaining ground in Turkey and are pushing the government toward an Islamist religious policy. The Ismail Aga community, in particular, stirred up hatred against Aydin. The group is notorious in Turkey for having its critics murdered.
Liberal Muslims
Yilmaz, a theology graduate, fears them as well. But she draws a different conclusion from that fear than secular students do. “These brotherhoods exist in Turkey. That is why it is important for the Diyanet to prescribe a specific interpretation of Islam. Otherwise, even more people would follow them.”
Liberal Muslims reject that reasoning as both false and Islamophobic. By implying that all Muslims must be controlled, they argue, the Turkish religious authority is simply cementing its own power.
Is the Diyanet a flaw built into modern Turkey from the very beginning? Since Erdoğan took office in 2003, his religious policy has grown steadily more conservative, with consequences that have also reached Germany. One example: in 2006, the Diyanet was still funding Ömer Özsoy’s professorship in Frankfurt am Main. The theologian, who holds the chair in Quranic exegesis at Goethe University, advocates a historical-critical approach: most of the Quran requires interpretation. In this, Özsoy follows the tradition of the famous “School of Ankara,” which arose from a demand made by the Turkish parliament in 1948 to establish a theology modeled on Western scholarship. Reform-minded Islamic experts gained influence, viewing the Quran as the Word of God that must constantly be reinterpreted, and daring to offer a contemporary reading.
Life in Hiding
Today, they are under pressure. The Diyanet is working hand in hand with the very fundamentalists it was originally meant to rein in. The Ismail Ağa community holds key positions within Turkey’s religious authority. It remains a source of fear in Germany as well.
Die Zeit spoke with a German-Turkish imam who had worked for Ditib. He had invited a group of LGBTQ representatives to his mosque. A Ditib official reported this to Diyanet headquarters in Turkey, and shortly afterward, the imam was dismissed. He too prefers to remain anonymous.
German politicians are aware of the problem. In 2024, the traffic-light coalition government signed an agreement with Turkey. DITIB imams will no longer be dispatched from Turkey but will instead be trained in Germany. Then-Interior Minister Nancy Faeser hailed this as a “milestone in integration.”
In the future, 100 imams a year are to be trained in Germany. For now, most still come from Turkey. Although they currently complete a one-year language course and advanced training in Germany, funded by federal money, their academic studies are carried out in Turkey. Does the “School of Ankara” still have a future there?
A quiet, guarded neighborhood on the outskirts of a major Turkish city. Only a few cars, mostly high-end SUVs, pass the villas. Hamza Aydin lives with his wife in a house behind a heavy garden gate. He returned here in the summer of 2023, after his last visiting professorship abroad.
He no longer has any ties to his former life before the hate campaign. He keeps away from lecture halls and avoids crowds. It is too dangerous, he says, with too many radicalized people who see themselves as instruments of Allah’s will.
But the professor has not given up entirely. He continues to write books and runs a YouTube channel where he places the customs of different religions in their historical context. At times, he also addresses politics. He warns, for instance, about the new rulers in Syria, saying they are only disguising their Islamist leanings. Tens of thousands now follow him online. One user wrote: “I was disappointed with my religion and its rigid rules. Thanks to you, I have found my way back to faith.”
*Names changed by the editors to avoid endangering our interviewees
Teseo La Marca has just published the book The Misguided Islam Debate and Its Consequences (Westend Verlag).
