Without veering left or right, without falling for Zionism…

In our last piece we had asked: 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?

What is the alternative to guidance if not misguidance? What we ask of God through the Fatiha we recite many times every day is that He keep us on the straight path without letting us fall into heedlessness and misguidance. A path on the Sirat al-Mustaqim without turning right or left is both our prayer and our word.

There is of course a sound, straight path granted to the human being in this world. That path will be walked. It will be walked without turning right or left. The path of those who fell into deviance, or the path of those who fell into heedlessness, will not be favored.

But, then, walking a road without turning right or left, living a life without zigzagging at all, continuing without deviating at all from a predetermined route, without ever thinking of stopping on that route again and changing it... whose expectation, whose longing, whose actual accomplishment is such an ideal of life?

Isn't ordinary life the best teacher actually showing us how much our perceptions and our expectations of life can change with age?

Isn't there a destiny from which even those who shut their eyes and plug their ears to the magnificent lessons this teacher places before us every day cannot escape?

Utopias are generally the zions that political movements aim to reach.

Those who set out toward these zions, if they can notice the deep irreconcilability and non-attainment between reality or history and zion, and notice the drama within life, are very likely to have taken a step on the road of wisdom.

Whereas those who try to realize utopias constructed contrary to history and life are like those who desire to return to their zions left behind in history.

Thanks to the material power and force they can gather, perhaps they achieve something, and reach places that look to them like zion.

But they arrive at the place they arrive at having lost even the insight to recognize how far it is the place they were trying to reach.

Utopia, whichever way you look at it, as a social design constructed for a period, has always remained behind life, and as a product of the human mind's capacity bound by time and space it is always a framework that will be too narrow for life and for the human being.

As a desire to return to a place the human being has come out of, all utopias are siblings of Zionism. Their direction is always backward, against time and history.

Whereas the Muslim's typical movement is the hijra, and in hijra being open to all the options that life, history and space will put before one, and being ready for the openings that will carry the human being to new horizons, comes with it.

It must not be forgotten that even the Shariah, which is supposed to be a fixed package of fiqh, is a path being walked, open to all the possibilities of life.

A road that is not walked is not called Shariah, and for a road that is walked, a text sitting fixed in one place inside a sealed envelope cannot be a suitable provision.

The desire to walk a road without turning right or left should not be understood simply as not giving a premium to rightism or leftism.

In fact the alternative to the Sirat al-Mustaqim too cannot be reduced to right and left.

The state of being the Sirat al-Mustaqim of course requires, in the first instance, in broad outline, holding fast to the sound path God has made known, to the formal sides of the firm handhold.

But this is the formal and outward side of the matter. There is also a truly subjective side to the matter. In this respect there are also entirely unforeseeable possibilities of straying from the path.

At times, the guarantee of remaining on the Sirat al-Mustaqim depends on winning the toughest struggle a person will wage against himself, but there is no moment that has been announced to the person and secured for this winning.

Perhaps knowing this truth may also be a sign of a new approach that will shed light on the secularization debates.

If, within the most devout attitudes and behaviors, a person does it for show, to get a place in the world, then all the indicators of devoutness are only hiding an intense worldliness.

By contrast, a person can do a job that looks entirely worldly while seeking "God's pleasure," with extremely devout feelings that he shows to no one, and of course not to the social scientist either.

This is the truth missed by those who characterize secularization as a feature of an age, and yet it is a truth that would require reviewing all secularization analyses afresh.