| Edip Yüksel | |
| Birth Date: | 20 December 1957 |
| Birth Place: | Güroymak, Turkey |
| Occupation: | Author, Activist, Professor Inventor |
| Movement: | Quranism |
| Relatives: |
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Edip Yüksel (born December 20, 1957) is an American-Kurdish activist and prominent figure in the Quranism movement.[1] Born in Güroymak, Yuksel is the author of more than twenty books on religion, politics, philosophy and law in Turkish. After settling in the United States, where he began his career as a lawyer, he became a colleague and friend of Rashad Khalifa.[1] However, his interpretation of the Qur'an has differed with Khalifa on a number of issues, and his work has represented a new trend within the Quranist movement.
Yüksel comes from a Kurdish family who lived in Turkey, and is brother of Metin Yüksel.[2] He is the author of more than twenty books on religion, politics, philosophy and law in Turkish. He has also written various articles and essays in English. He was a Turkish Islamist and a popular Islamic commentator until the mid-1980s when he rejected his previous religious beliefs and only used the Quran as the source of divine laws. He became a Quran-only Muslim, or known as Quranist. However, this movement is very controversial in the main Muslim circles, and thus Yüksel gained the rejection and hostility of many religious Islamic authorities in his home country. In 1989 Yüksel was forced to emigrate. He then settled in the United States of America, where he began his career as a lawyer.[3] In the US, he worked with Rashad Khalifa, who claimed to have discovered a Quran code, also known as Code 19, in the Quran and called on Muslims to return to the Quran alone and to abandon all hadiths.[4]
Yüksel is critical of Islamic creationists, such as Harun Yahya.[5]
Professor Aisha Musa, from Florida International University, says in her book Hadith as Scripture about Yüksel: