Have we now taken the knowledge and art of the West?

Even if it was not against the concept and the attitude of Westernization, the Islamist stance against "importing things from the West" was in fact based from the outset on a rather comfortable selectivism. The West is not the only different world, the only different civilization or form of society that has confronted Muslims. Through their countless conquests throughout history, Muslims have encountered many societies with many different religions and philosophies, and have dealt with all of them with a self-confidence drawn from the strength of the Islamic understanding of religion, and have seen no harm in taking from them whatever they could. For Islam is, in its essence, a religion with the capacity to transform other civilizations into itself.

Since the original state of things is permissibility, apart from certain basic principles, they saw no harm in appropriating different customs, practices and traditions so long as they did not conflict with Islam.

Seen from this angle, one aspect of the Ottoman relationship with the West amounted, for some Muslims, to as ordinary an Islamic interaction as could be, and what needed to be done was extremely simple. As with other cultures and civilizations, everything useful could be taken from it as well. But of course its religions and philosophies, any aspect incompatible with the basic principles of Islam, could not be taken.

Both the Ottoman elites and the circle around Sebilürreşad, the most important voice of the Islamist cause, were in this comfort. But precisely at this point we face an ambitious question: when you take the West's technique, do its culture, lifestyle and philosophy not come along with it?

This is one of those discussion topics that is always valid and that can be started from scratch and line everyone up in their own ranks. Is it possible to separate technology from its culture?

This debate had a significant counterpart across the whole Islamic world in the late nineteenth century, and in fact mainstream Islamic circles had given their answers to this debate more comfortably than later generations: of course technology and culture were things that could be separated from one another. This was not a situation so hard to understand or accept.

On this matter the great majority of the ulema regarded the import of technology as more than permissible, as a religious necessity. After all, one had to arm oneself with the enemy's weapon, and not deprive the ummah of the means that the time required. And after all, even Fatih Sultan Mehmet, whose conquest had been foretold by the Prophet, took a significant portion of the techniques he used in conquering Istanbul from his European, non-Muslim experts. All the other sultans, when the occasion arose, did not hesitate at such technical imports and did not worry that the technologies they imported might necessarily carry a culture along with them. That is, technology, as the most important carrier of modernization, even gained a religious motivation by this route.

For those who in later generations voiced critiques of Westernization or modernization in the name of Islam, this was perhaps an attitude to be regarded as the "original sin" that led to modernism. For this reason there have been many who criticized the Sebilürreşad circle, or the Islamists of the nineteenth century and those of the early twentieth century, particularly the Sebilürreşad circle.

The Islamist Sebilürreşad circle, led by Mehmet Akif Ersoy, had already expressed its solution on this matter in the same direction, as if committing the same "original sin," and with a rather simple formula: we should take the West's technique and its useful knowledge and leave its culture to them. His famous poem that begins "Take the West's science, take its art.." presented the best formula of this form of relationship.

Akif's only view on this matter is not what is expressed in this line. His verse work on the Generation of Asım tells this subject differently as well. Let us not go on at length here.

In short, for the Islamists of that period the problem of the West was in fact a problem that could be solved with a formula not at all as complicated as supposed. It was not at all hard to separate the West's science and technique from its culture, and to take one and leave the other.

Later this formula was heavily criticized by Islamist intellectuals after the seventies. At the basis of the criticisms lay the assumption, accepted as an indisputable proposition, that technique and culture could not be separated from one another, that technique was created by a culture and a way of life and had a philosophy beneath it, and that once technique was taken, culture and lifestyle would necessarily come as well.

These "typical-intellectual" critical statements, which look elegant at first glance and are full of grand words, are clearly based on extremely hasty inferences. These inferences are contrary to historical facts and also produce a blatantly cynical indifference toward the concerns of the Muslims of that day. This approach, which bears no responsibility for today and appears far from understanding the responsibilities borne by the people of that period, however much it may fill the eye with its radicalism, cannot produce from itself a fiqh and a politics that would soothe the heart of Muslim societies.

Meanwhile, one advantage of those who criticized the Sebilürreşad circle on the basis of this thesis was that it seemed supportable by events that actually took place in the later course of Turkish modernization. For in time, together with technique, Western culture had also ended up being taken. That is, Turkish modernization was not content with taking only Western techniques and institutions; it imported Western ideological values and everyday lifestyle and culture as they were.

In Turkey dress was changed, Islamic educational institutions were closed, Islam was entirely withdrawn from political and social life, relations between women and men moved far from the forms of traditional society, the understanding of privacy largely exceeded all the limits peculiar to both Muslim societies and traditional societies, and etiquette changed completely. The picture seems like a result that would vindicate those who claim that the import of Western science and technology necessarily entails the import of culture. Is it really so?

The truth of the matter is this:

1- Turkey's adoption of Western values or culture and etiquette was not a necessary consequence of its having imported Western science and technologies.

2- With the founding of the Republic, the ground or possibility for testing the Sebilürreşadists' theses was already gone. For the Republic was established by those who adopted modernization as a total project of Westernization liquidating the others, as a political will. That is, from then on there was no longer any political will left that could follow the option of leaving culture aside and importing science and technology. The modernization program of the cadres that founded the Republic, as against these Islamist or Ottoman official cadres, was not very selective among Western values; on the contrary, it carried out the wholesale importation of all Western values, institutions, even clothing.

So, in short, Western culture and etiquette did not enter the Islamic world through the door opened by science and technology, as is supposed. On the contrary, they flowed along a road that politics had opened wide and were imposed on the people. Moreover, in this importation the West's science and technology was not taken in a way that cared about closing the gap with the West as much as is claimed; on the contrary, the emphasis was rather on the importation of culture and etiquette.