Prayers and peace upon the Prophet

"Allah and His angels send blessings upon the Prophet; O believers, you too send blessings and greetings of peace upon him, in full submission."

Man, who was created by Allah from a drop of water and has been granted every kind of bounty again by Allah, then rises up, disregards his own creation and sees himself as self-sufficient... He feels himself independent of his Creator, self-sufficient, without need of his Creator, without any need to ask Him anything, to rely on Him, to thank Him...

Yet in this world it is Allah who taught man what he did not know. In order to be able to learn, Allah gave a brain, a heart and, beyond all of these, a mind to comprehend all this and the words with which to think about it. But man has turned around and regarded all this as his own spoils, imagined them to be possessions given to him for eternity and to remain with him forever. From the moment he knows himself, he does not even ask where all the beings he finds ready within himself have come to him from.

This is the general condition of humanity, being in loss over time; in ruin, because of not asking these questions and not pursuing them. Yet these are questions that, by the very nature of every human being's existence, make themselves asked. As science advances, as knowledge of human anatomy and of physics and chemistry grows, the questions about the source of this granted perfection make themselves asked all the more. That, as the level of science rises, a heedlessness that ignores these questions, a secularization, increases all the more shows still more clearly the ungrateful and ignoring nature of mankind. In such a state of heedlessness man is in terrible loss. The cost of this loss to people is that, in the vise of servitude to fellow creatures and servitude to whims and desires, they are exposed to every kind of oppression, pressure, exploitation, massacre, and to the corruption of human dignity and of generations. Man's regarding himself as self-sufficient is a total state of dark jahiliyya.

Our Lord, in His mercy, has bestowed a favor upon people by sending His prophets to bring them out of these darknesses. He chose the prophets "from among ourselves," as one who eats and drinks like us and understands our language, our troubles and our feelings. That he is one of us is also a great blessing in terms of establishing the strongest communication between us and the divine message. It is the most apt way of not feeling estranged from the divine word. Because the prophet comes to people, to this or that nation. Had he come to angels, he would have been like an angel. Had he come to the jinn, he would have been a jinn. Yet that the prophet who comes to people is human is a wisdom, a divine decree that can be watched with admiration.

The wisdom of our Prophet being, as the last prophet to come to humanity, a mercy to the worlds is that from the day he came until today he represents all the human values needed by all societies and civilizations that have come and gone, in forms so familiar that they could recognize them the moment they saw them. Everyone who sees him with his fitra recognizes him, finds something of himself in him, and says "this is one of us."

This exemplariness of the Prophet, commanded by the Qur'an, of course also requires us to put him in a place apart from other people. He is one of us, but he also possesses an authority, an exemplariness that is certainly very different from us. Allah, bestowing a favor on people, appointed him as a personality who could set an example to people in the best manner. He brought the Qur'an He sent to life in his person, and granted us his life and struggle as the most concrete and most accurate interpretation (ta'wil) of that book. Thus He made him a firm support against those who want to feel excessively free before the text, who try to subject the text to their own whim or to the whims and desires of others.

In the same way, for those who might find it hard to understand the text as an ordinary text, they have created a climate, a shade, in which they can easily find their way. It was with precisely these considerations that Sayyid Qutb named the tafsir he wrote based on it Fi Zilal al-Qur'an (In the Shade of the Qur'an).

Allah sent the Qur'an to us not as a completed book between two covers, but as a book lived and interpreted within the life of a prophet and his companions. Therefore, to sever the Prophet's sunna from the Qur'an is not to exalt the Qur'an, and brings nothing other than being deprived of the nature and the shade of the Qur'an.

In these days it is very important to reinforce an understanding of sira that surpasses both the approaches that make the Prophet ordinary as a human being and reduce him to an unqualified transmitter of the Qur'an, and the approaches that take him far beyond being "one of us" and make him superhuman. In this framework I had earlier pointed to many sira studies. Today we can add to these studies, as a great contribution, Ahmet Özel's latest work titled "Kutlu Hayatın İzinde" (In the Footsteps of the Blessed Life). The book, published this year by Timaş Publications, is a very valuable yield of Ahmet Hoca's in-depth work over many years. Ahmet Hoca, who also wrote the earlier book "Yönetici Peygamber Hz. Muhammed" (The Prophet Muhammad as Leader) and who has critical editions in many other works, wrote this book with precisely this balance in mind. In an interview previously published in our newspaper, he expressed his position on the sira in precisely these sentences:

"The classical-period sira literature has such a characteristic. When we look at the sira literature under Western influence, on the other hand, this time, under the influence of positivism and materialism, the Prophet is narrated stripped of all his miracles and karamat. In the fairest of the siras written with this understanding, the Prophet is presented as a 'successful leader' and a 'successful commander.' Ultimately this view reduces the Prophet, God forbid, to the task of a postman and arrives at the point of rejecting the science of hadith. So much so that even some theology professors, despite dozens of verses, can say that the Prophet has no authority to explain the Qur'an. Then, if the Almighty God has sent down a message, whom can the addressees ask about something they do not understand? They will ask the one who brought that message, and will he say 'I don't know'? Is this a matter of reason and sound judgment? Unfortunately, an understanding that rejects the science of sira and hadith has developed in the Islamic world. Various religious and political groups, enemies of Islam, are trying to portray the Prophet as an ordinary human being who has no relationship with Allah. But in their time the scholars of the day tried to sift out these views by setting forth certain criteria. Today, with the technical means at hand and the possibilities of evaluating the available material, many more criteria can be added to these."

To follow the Prophet, the only personality on earth worthy of being made a "leader" and taken as a role model, one must understand him and know him well. The shortest way of knowing him is to read the Qur'an, but in order to understand the Qur'an better one must also know him. Ahmet Özel's sira is a fine work to read in these very days when we commemorate the Prophet's birth.