Looking like a Muslim

Even if we live in the same world and pass through the same circle of events, we make our difference through our intentions and our gaze. It is a difference that outside observers often cannot notice. Looking like a Muslim is first of all an intention, an intention directed toward behaving like a Muslim. But in a Muslim this is an intention that cannot be fragmented. A Muslim is someone who cares to do everything he does as a Muslim. A Muslim cannot imagine caring to do some of his affairs as a Muslim while doing certain others like some other person. Perhaps he falls into heedlessness, neglects to reflect on the difference of acting as a Muslim, or violates the rule by committing a sin, but these neglects and violations are temporary, exceptional states. The main rule is that a Muslim cares whether everything he does is in accordance with Islam.

Whether it is debates about where Islamism has been evolving lately or debates about the course of secularization, neither can see or understand anything if they neglect this view. Today Muslims can test themselves by how much they care about the question of whether their deeds, choices, actions, relationships, friendships, and enmities accord with Islam, and by how much this question guides their lives.

It is a common typology that many people who have once adopted a conservative or Muslim identity live their lives in disarray, conduct their trade without ever seeking a standard of conformity to Islam, without paying any attention to the lawful and unlawful, to interest, to exorbitant profit, to respect for the sweat of one's brow, and without paying any attention to whether what they do harms the environment, people, and the country more than it benefits them. No one can object, of course, that people of this typology, because their names are Muslim and their inclinations conservative, may be seen as data for the fortunes of Islamism or of secularity. But it is also inevitable that they be seen as a serious problem in terms of Islam's own jargon of authenticity. Yet let us also say that within the same jargon this possibility is always possible and ordinary. Here it becomes inevitable that sociology and the religion's own logic, its own appraisal and judgment, proceed at a different level.

Let us note here that looking like a Muslim always carries a serious weight, far beyond an ideological current or wave, so that we do not deprive anyone of their due. In Türkiye there is a broad mass who observe the lawful and unlawful in their earnings and who, before doing anything, consider whether it is in accordance with Islam. It is the intentions, the gaze, and the activities of these people that give Islam real vitality.

A few years ago, for Beyan Publications, my dear friend and colleague Prof. Dr. Mahmut H. Akın and I prepared a series of 20 small books asking how a Muslim should look at different subjects and issues and seeking an answer to this question. The title of the series was set as "How Should a Muslim Look?" How should a Muslim look at subjects such as democracy, racism and nationalism, tradition and conservatism, Western civilization, evolution and Darwinism, fate and freedom, economy and interest, the Qur'an and historicity, the Qur'an and the Sunnah, philosophy, social media, sexuality and love, woman and feminism, deism and atheism, modernization and modernism?

The first issue this question brings to mind was how a Muslim could have a single absolute view on all these subjects that would bind everyone. That is, could Muslims not disagree on all these subjects? Is disagreement not permissible for Muslims on this matter? Of course it is permissible; even the views put forward under this title could be debated. Even so, we did not give up this title. Because the title itself pointed to the most important direction, the most important axis for Muslims. Whatever the task, whatever the subject, a Muslim has a Muslim-like gaze, a Muslim-like intention and action. What this gaze is may not always be sufficiently clear, but a Muslim must presume it and seek it. What he finds when he seeks with this intention may of course differ from what other Muslims find with the same intention and quest. But what does not change in each of them is that the Muslim cares to do everything he does for God and in accordance with His good pleasure.

In fact, this determination has been the approach that has determined the existence of all Muslims since the day they were addressed by revelation. The most important feature defining a Muslim is that he cares to do everything he does in God's name and in accordance with His good pleasure as declared in God's Book. To know where and how that good pleasure manifests itself, one must first resolve to understand the Book correctly. To understand correctly, one must look correctly. The question "How Should a Muslim Look?" contains, besides an inquiry and a quest, the sensitivity of a Muslim stance. Owing to the change the world has undergone in the last few centuries, and owing to the confusion about the concepts and tools that entered our lives with the effects of modernization and about the condition Muslims are in, this question has been asked more and more on every occasion.

In fact, when one reflects deeply on it, one sees that this question must be asked continually by a Muslim, always and under every condition, without distinguishing between yesterday and today. The Age of Happiness is not a utopia for Muslims. In every period it is a possible, attainable, and lasting model that can be made part of life with a sound outlook and with the Sunnah that is followed. At the basis of the generation of Companions, who passed through the Prophet's upbringing, sustaining the continuity of Islamization both individually and socially, there was always this question, "How Should a Muslim Look?", and the quest to answer it sincerely. Without doubt the first Muslim generation succeeded in being the most sincere example of a Muslim outlook, consciousness, and way of life, and by offering a human and moral alternative to those unlike themselves, made the greatest contribution to Islamization. For a Muslim this question is one that will never lose its validity in any time or place.

The Muslim life that takes shape around this question also has a historicity and different manifestations. People who cannot follow these differentiations from the inside may arrive by a shortcut at the conclusion that Muslim life has no constants at all. It is normal that they never again see the counterpart of their own historical photograph of Muslimness. Life flows on and nothing stays fixed as in a photograph. As for those who expect an update from Muslims, how open they are to seeing this update is something they themselves will know.

Of course Muslims too should have an issue of explaining themselves, but in the end it comes down to the question of who is open to hearing or seeing what from whom.