Who perceives a threat from the reality of the ummah?

There is a fact that the Islamophobic discourse and policies in force in Turkey are far cruder, more aggressive and more hate-filled than those in the Western world. This fact may be somewhat surprising, but it is a reality we must confront that a country whose people bear Muslim names, and whose society was for centuries the center of the Islamic world, can even surpass the Crusader-Zionist Western world in Islamophobic discourse.

Of course it is inevitable that this confrontation turns into an interrogation, even a trial. In Turkey, for years the headscarf ban was accepted as a normal practice. It was called a political symbol, a religious symbol, secularism, this and that, but this practice was carried out while looking the Muslim people straight in the eye.

While in every part of the world even looking askance at the headscarf means the same thing as hostility to Islam, in our country, in the name of a curious obsession with secularism, eminent politicians, scientists, journalists and educated elites defended and applied this practice as if it were a normal thing. At that time Muslims, whether out of politeness, or in order not to deepen the debate further, or in order not to face the despotic cults placed before them as the ideological reference of this ban, or whatever it was, never called it by its name. They did not say that the headscarf ban was directly enmity toward Islam, that anyone who even thought of banning the headscarf could not be a Muslim, and therefore had a serious problem with this land, this homeland. They did not say that only those in the position of occupiers of this country could think of and apply a headscarf ban.

Before it came to the headscarf, of course, a great many other values, symbols, emblems and concepts of Islam were vilified. One justification for the alphabet change had nothing to do with Islam. It was said to be to increase literacy further, so-called; it was said that the Arabic alphabet was difficult, and that it did not reflect the linguistic structure of Turkish as strongly as Latin. It would be fine if these justifications had stopped there, but right after that, insulting expressions toward Arabic were being instilled in the minds of tiny children, our children. Arabic script was now not merely difficult, it was primitive, the backward dark script of a backward society. When were these children going to learn that Arabic is one of the world's most powerful languages, that for a full 1400 years science, literature and philosophy were produced in this language under unparalleled civilizations?

One of the vilified concepts was of course the ummah. Once we had become a nation, the ummah was a harmful thing. The ummah, a value and a perception of identity that had kept the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks for centuries as a world power on three continents, turned into a harmful perception once we became a nation. Why? Was the ummah the reason we were squeezed from three continents into 781 thousand square kilometers? Who had ever seen any harm from the ummah as the highest expression of the perception of brotherhood among Turks, Kurds and Arabs?

Let us leave the question of benefit and harm aside. Viewed from that angle, the further we moved away from being an ummah, the more we shrank, the more we weakened, the more insignificant we became. This is very clear.

But there is also a dimension of the matter that concerns Islam. We forgot, too, that our being pulled from the ummah to the nation was the result of a defeat, and we built our entire national consciousness on cursing the ummah. No one told them to their faces that cursing the ummah, demeaning the concept of the ummah, in itself means cursing Islam, being hostile to Islam.

Muslims are one ummah. They are like the limbs of a body; when one part is wounded, this pain, this ache, is felt throughout the whole body. The Turks who are part of the ummah feel the pain of a Kurd in their very heart when a misfortune befalls him. The Kurds who are part of the ummah do not see themselves as separate from the Arabs, and the Arab does not see himself as separate from the Kurds and the Turks. Those who are not part of the ummah, of course, do not know this.

To those who suppose that being an ummah is a simple ideological choice, we remind: in the Surah al-Fatiha, which every Muslim recites many times every day, that is, at the beginning of the Holy Quran, Muslims address God with "You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help; guide us to the straight path." Even when they pray alone, they recite this supplication as "we." For a Muslim who, even in this most basic supplication, recites it in the "we" form meaning all Muslims, the "ummah" is not a fantastical, ideological or dispensable choice of identity. It is a necessary condition of his relationship with God. Every Muslim is a part of the Islamic ummah. Anyone who does not have this consciousness is not called a Muslim.

In recent days, in response to Erdoğan's Kızılcahamam speech in which he spoke of Turkish-Arab-Kurdish brotherhood, Özgür Özel made a strange outburst in the form of "we will not let you do ummah politics." It was of course an extremely unfortunate outburst. With his old habits, the misfortune of cursing the most basic value of Muslims in a Muslim neighborhood. Perhaps a habit inherited from the narrow-minded, bigoted nationalist despotism of the single-party period. But this language is no longer acceptable. Turkey is no longer a country in which such disrespect can be shown to the values, beliefs and concepts of Muslims. The concept of the ummah of Muslims can be uttered in this way in an Islamic country only from the position of an occupier.

The interesting part of the matter is that the concept of the ummah did not appear at all in the President's Kızılcahamam speech. Setting aside this hostile view of a basic Islamic concept, the fact that a mention of the brotherhood of peoples was immediately linked with this concept and turned into an accusation is a sign of how sensitively the Islamophobic radars work.

Otherwise, who is afraid of being an Ummah? Who is afraid of Muslims being one and together, of their uniting their strength, of their loving one another like brothers? What harm is there to anyone in such a unity, such an embrace?

Of course there are some who feel harm from this, who perceive a threat to themselves from it. What could those people have to do with Turkey, then?