Being a Muslim and leftism and the "opposition of the unattached"

What are we to say to those who, after being honored by this path of gnosis that God described as a blessing to people and completed with Islam, seek well-being on other paths that have somehow made themselves look pleasing?

There is a search, or an ordinary find, expressed through ways such as the Left or Socialist Islam, anti-capitalist Muslimhood..

Its ordinariness lies, first of all, in its being an option that has always stood on the side within a left-right axis understanding of politics. The compounds "Socialist Islam" used to be expressed much more openly at one time. In Turkey in the Republican period or in recent times there has always been an effort to establish a closeness, a synthesis, between Islam and socialism, or between Islam's discourse of social justice and socialism.

In recent times this discourse has also expressed an effort to open up a space for itself in politics against the AK Parti. The vast majority of those drawn to the movement or the discourse consisted of disgruntled people who had been unable to find a place for themselves within the AK Parti.

That is why it is not surprising that a common feature of all these names who experimented with Islamic-left discourses or with looking for a leftist attitude within Islam is that they consist of people with personal issues with AK Parti cadres. This fact alone requires us to descend a little further into the psychological roots of the Islamic-left claim.

The Islamic-left discourse seems like a discourse of revenge clung to, largely for personal reasons, by those who could not hold on within the main vein of Islamism.

Indeed, when the leading figures of this movement ran on AK Parti lists in the 2007 elections, the movement dissolved on its own. More recently, a different version emerged, particularly during the Gezi events, opposing the AK Parti, even mainstream Islamism, using Islamic discourses. But this time, whatever the things it criticized the AK Parti for, there was something far worse among those with whom alliances were formed during the Gezi incident. In Islam property is opposed most radically, and participation in the Gezi protests was justified on this basis. But the finance-capitalist support existing at both national and international levels in the Gezi movement was seen to have neither relevance nor politics.

Yet the intent and the politics of this alliance were also very clear. From start to finish the movement was a resistance or a blow by central capitalism against the rising, but in fact still not sufficiently central, peripheral capital.

The only discourse whose place was found strange in this equation was an anti-capitalist discourse under one name or another.

Against a leader who only a few weeks before Gezi had announced the success of bringing the interest rate down to the lowest level recorded in the history of the Republic, the last flag that could be waved was the anti-capitalist flag. When it was so clear that those who started, financed and launched the revolt to the whole world were openly the finance-capitalist lobbies of the world, the anti-capitalist Muslim movement must, to say the least, have lost its way in Taksim.

Independent of the Gezi context, if we were to take their claims seriously for a moment, can Islam be reduced to anti-capitalism?

Can a political cadastre that emerged after Hegel exhaust the expectations or stances of Muslims, who are expected to be carriers of an ancient struggle or stance, regarding politics, life and the human being?

Can the origin of the fight we witness among people in the world today be reduced to class, or to the right-left dualism that has been coded since Hegel?

Didn't we have a deeper, more ancient and more living story? Since Adam, the fight between the human being and Satan, the contradiction between Abel and Cain, and, somewhat nearer and with a much deeper effect on today, the fight among the sons of Abraham: could they have been ended by the fight between leftists and rightists?

What if the left-right fight is itself a new link in the fight among the very sons of Abraham?

Taking up the cause of an anti-capitalist or socialist version of Muslimhood without entering a proper analysis of capitalism, or while staying leagues away from awareness of the historical conditions in which capitalism emerged, undoubtedly means missing both the history and the context of the fight.

Today Europe's resistance to Turkey's joining the union, Israel's presence and effectiveness in the Middle East, Europe's and America's overlooking it in spite of everything, European socialism's approach to Israel, the possibility of the Holocaust and the grudges, complexes it created in the world afterwards and their projections to the present day.

The world's interest in the Middle East etc. The fight between Christians and Jews that has come down from the depths of history to the present day. In the total of the picture formed by the historical course of both religions' attitudes toward Muslims and their projections today, how simple, how insignificant the right-left axis or the conflict between classes remains.

How wretched a condition it puts a person in to run away from the middle of that great historical fight that belongs to oneself and dive into the right-left game.