Did Western culture enter the Islamic world through the door technology opened?

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

This debate had an important resonance throughout the whole Islamic world at the end of the 19th century, and in fact the general run of Islamic circles had given their answers to it more comfortably than later generations: Of course technology and culture were things that could be separated. This was not so hard to understand or accept.

On this question the great majority of the ulema regarded the importation of technology as more than permissible, as a religious necessity. After all, one had to arm oneself with the enemy's weapons and not deprive the ummah of the means the age required. In other words, technology, as the most important carrier of modernization, gained even a religious motivation by this route.

For those in later generations who voiced criticisms of modernization in the name of Islam, this was perhaps an attitude to be regarded as a kind of "original sin" that led one astray into modernism.

The Islamist Sebilürreşad circle, headed by Mehmet Akif Ersoy, had already expressed its solution on this matter in the same direction, that is, as though committing the same "original sin," and with a rather simple formula: We should have taken the technique and the useful knowledge of the West and left its culture to them. The finest expression of this formula is these lines of Akif:

'Take the West's science, take its art;

And give your labors their utmost speed.

For it is no longer possible to live without these;

For art and science have no nationality; that is all.'

'Let your faces turn to the West's science alone, only.

Together with those children, toil night and day;

Acquire quickly the knowledge of three hundred years gone by.

The boundless spring that seeps in the land of science,

Drink of it yourselves, and bring those beneficial waters to the homeland.'

Later this formula was heavily criticized by Islamist intellectuals after the seventies. At the basis of the criticisms, the assumption that technique and culture cannot be separated from each other, that a culture creates technique, and that if technique is taken, culture will necessarily come too, was accepted as an indisputable proposition.

In these "typical-intellectual" critical expressions, which look elegant at first glance and are full of grand words, there are clearly highly hasty inferences and an obvious cynical indifference to historical realities and to the concerns the Muslims of that day had.

To explain the attitude of the ulema, seen as pro-modernization, simply by their acting on the side of power, that is, the state, as a class, ignores their responsibility to find practical solutions to the everyday problems and the problems of national survival that they faced for the Muslim society.

I think that, because the ulema of that day had their hands under the stone, they did not have the luxury of fantasizing like the intellectuals of the Republican period, who later bore practically no responsibility for Muslim society.

Akif and his friends alike felt to their very cells a serious problem of survival, on behalf of the state and on behalf of Muslim society, in the face of the rise of Western imperialism, and they were in search of a solution.

Fiqh already said that the basic rule regarding things is permissibility. This is not a principle invented in the modern period. Everything for which there is no evidence of its being forbidden is permissible. Especially if this permissible thing also provides practical benefit, there was no objection to "taking it even from China." Why should it not be taken from the West? Therefore the phrase "take the knowledge of the West" could not constitute a serious problem from the standpoint of a consciousness and ethic that bore the responsibility of a Muslim society.

One advantage of those who criticized the Sebilürreşad circle on the basis of this thesis was that it seemed to be supported by events that empirically took place in the later course of Turkish modernization. For over time, along with technique, Western culture too had in the end been taken. Today Turkish modernization has not been content with taking only Western techniques and institutions; it has imported Western ideological values and the everyday lifestyle and culture as they are.

Yet,

Turkey's adoption of Western values was not a necessary result of its having imported some Western technologies.

With the founding of the Republic, there was in any case no ground or possibility left for testing the theses of the Sebilürreşadists.

Because the Republic, as a political will, resulted in the liquidation of the others by those who adopted modernization as a total project of Westernization. From then on there was no political will left that could pursue the option of importing technology without culture. The modernization program of the cadres who founded the Republic did not make a very selective choice among Western values; on the contrary, it envisaged the total import of all Western values, institutions, even clothing.

So, in short, Western culture did not enter the Islamic world through the door opened by technology, as is imagined. On the contrary, it flowed along a road that politics had opened wide, and was imposed. Throughout history, in every kind of technological development, Muslims were either pioneers or never fell behind in acquiring those technologies by invoking religion. Countless examples could be given. But we must continue to discuss the subject without missing the real part of the matter.