Any idea or ideology has basic principles that all its adherents accept in the first moments of its emergence. However, over time, these basic principles begin to change and subdivide into subgroups based on their own internal dynamics and the attitudes of their adherents. Although their starting points are the same, these changes and divisions that occur over time move away from each other as if their starting points were not the same, and they can even become enemies.
This is also true to a large extent when it comes to religions. While almost all religions in the world gathered their adherents around certain values and beliefs in the first moments of their emergence, they have lost these characteristics over time and have not been able to prevent their adherents from having different religious understandings from each other.
In the case of Islam, this situation does not differ much from others. Although Muslims were largely united at the time of its first revelation, over time, they did not delay in having a number of different religious understandings within the name of Islam. There are basically two reasons for this divergence, internal and external.
The internal reason is the structure of religious texts. The Qur'an, which is the main source, and the structure of its language allow for different interpretations, and these differences of interpretation, which sometimes seem to be contradictory to each other, have an epistemological value and play a great and positive role in enriching the religious life of Muslims.
The external reason is the way Muslims view religion and the world. Throughout the history of Islam, and even with the influence of their pre-Islamic traditions, Muslims have always viewed religious texts with different mindsets. In the background of these perspectives, there are many factors such as social, political, economic, cultural, historical, geographical, etc. When all these factors come together, the existence of different understandings of religion is inevitable. At this point, where we think that differentiations due to internal reasons are positive and even obligatory, it is not possible to say that external reasons always have positive results to the same extent.
Today, almost every society in the Islamic world has its own understanding of Islam and religion. It is not always the right attitude to explain these differences with innocent concepts such as "difference of interpretation, difference of culture". Moreover, the damage caused by these differences in recent times has begun to be voiced by almost everyone. When the discussions on the future of religion in the digital age are associated with this issue, the issue has gone beyond being an epistemological and sociological problem and has become of ontological importance for religions and Islam in particular.
This symposium, in which the reasons, implementation processes and results of the different perceptions of religion emerging among Muslims in today's Islamic world will be discussed, aims to put forward the views of experts on the subject and to contribute to the world of thought by determining the positive and negative aspects, if any.
Organizing Commitee