Politics and history without veering left or right

When Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) began to convey the message of Tawhid in Mecca and Medina, the first reaction he met, particularly from the Jews, concerned his lineage rather than the content of his message. What business would this message have in the mouth of someone who was not Jewish? He was, after all, an ummi, that is, a gentile with no share of their books. Prophethood, in their view, was not a mission but a privilege, and belonged to Jewish elitism. Even if Muhammad was ultimately among the sons of Abraham, he was not among the descendants of Isaac, and this was a strong enough reason for elitism. Yet being a brother to the sons of Ishmael as well would have removed the very boundaries necessary for being considered elite. Because Islam requires not discriminating among prophets, and likewise not discriminating by language, race, color or sex in nearness to God. Thus, there being no difference between them and the sons of Ishmael would mean there being no difference between them and other people either. That this should be accepted as a development eliminating from the outset any possibility of elitism or superiority is in itself a state of trial.

After Joseph, the settlement of the Children of Israel in Egypt and their later enslavement, then their rescue by Moses and settlement in Palestine, the prophets who came one after another afterward... The new track that Jesus, coming from among the Children of Israel, introduced into history... Rome, Byzantium and then the rise of Islam... The tremendous passages in the Holy Qur'an on the disputes and dialogues with Christians and Jews. The later spread of Islam across Christian and Jewish lands, the conquest of Jerusalem as a shared heritage and the founding of Andalusian civilization. The Crusades, held one after another and extending over centuries... The wars of religion within Europe, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the renewed encounter with the Islamic world through colonial thrusts, Orientalism and the process of depriving the Islamic world of its caliph... The New World order in which the First World War and the founding of Israel would play a central role... Israel's Zionist policies gaining a legitimacy that reduces to nothing all the claimed humanist, secular, democratic values throughout the world, and so on. This brief tour of world history and politics is one that requires re-making sense of all the antagonisms of today's world. Where do the sons of Hegel stand within this tour? Where in this world is the fight between the working class and the bourgeois class? When you try to see the world in the company of the historical course of the sons of Abraham, who becomes the proletariat, who the aristocrat, who the bourgeois?

With the favor Israel has received from the world standing in plain view, and with Israel making the whole Middle East surge every day with currents of violence and burning it with racist and ethnocentric embers, who could think of heeding the call for the proletarians of the world to unite? Moreover, is not the real test even of those who champion the proletarians' cause about where they stand in this fight? Was not the major effect that ended the language of left politics in the Islamic world the silence, at best, of the European left toward Israel, and beyond that, the ties of lineage?

The people descended from the sons of Abraham who regard themselves ontologically superior to their other brothers reacted to a mission that came as a mercy to humanity coming not through themselves but through the brothers they looked down on. There is no objection to the mission itself, but toward the bearer of the mission there is a feeling of seeing the prestige the mission makes possible as stolen property. This archaic feeling of jealousy is also a feeling that does not vanish however much the world develops and however far humanity advances in science and art, and that manifests itself differently in every age.

Today, the performance that the AK Parti, as a conservative party in Turkey, has displayed in the social and political arena is in many respects a performance that socialists dreamed of but that even their dreams did not reach. The democratization of Turkey, the relative improvement of injustice in income distribution, widespread social services and policies, the development of union rights, and, on the Kurdish question, the complete abandonment of the Kemalist paradigm on behalf of the state, the recognition and restoration of the dignity of the Alevi identity contrary to the Kemalist construct, all came about at the hands of a conservative party in power. Moreover, it was again the same government that opened the way for the trial of September 12, especially, which leftists suffered great torture and victimization under and which therefore holds a special central place in the left's imagination as a longing for revenge, and that carried out that trial. While the rehabilitation of Nâzım Hikmet, the first teacher of the Turkish left, was likewise carried out by this government, a broader and more inclusive level of citizenship was also indicated. All of these are moves that should be appreciated by a left consistent with itself.

Yet it was seen that at precisely this moment the Turkish left gradually veered into debates over lifestyle and wardrobe and began to display fully bourgeois characteristics. The bourgeoisification or elitist reflex is probably in the genetics of the Turkish left. For it can be said that in Turkey the left has never been a working-class movement or a people's movement. Rather, it has always had a Messianic role that it claims, a role that places it, rather than as a descendant of Hegel, in a fitting place in the historical course of the sons of Abraham. Then it turns and looks and asks: does this democratization, this advancement of human rights, these welfare-state practices, this mobility of the poor into the upper class, this reckoning with September 12, come from conservatives who are expected to assume a "reactionary" (read it as ummi or gentile) role? This crushing reality, this impossible situation, can only be a bad dream...

In fact, if these conservatives must by all means assume a positive role in a historical period, they have no way other than to submit to the redeemer role that we are carrying out. Given this scene, why are they resisting this role?