"The path of wisdom in the fight against terror": the Malaysia International Security Dialogue

Last week, together with AK Parti Deputy Chairman Mr. Mehdi Eker, we were in Malaysia to attend the Putrajaya International Security Dialogue meeting organized by the Malaysian government.

Even as we try to understand what DAESH is, as a danger with an international organization and spread, it is no longer surprising to see that wherever there is an Islamic effort, model or struggle for vitality that is going reasonably well, it pops up there and, in particular, targets the overall interests of Muslims. Today, in the world, those who actually have the most right to complain about DAESH's activities, understanding and harm are Muslims. One would have to be excessively naive to believe that the Western powers who occupy the Muslim world and plunge it into unrest under the pretext of DAESH are in reality complaining about DAESH.

In the end, DAESH has turned into a narcotic that functions as anesthesia for all the surgeries that are desired to be performed on Muslim geographies on a global scale. While all the nerves and reflexes have been put to sleep on account of DAESH, the desired operations are performed on the Muslim geography. On top of that, the Muslim world is forced to account for the extremist ideas that DAESH exploits to the hilt.

DAESH has evidently been assigned important roles in the Far Eastern Islamic world as well, in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and even Myanmar. It has an important presence. A sufficient number of young people from these countries have joined the ranks of DAESH, and either carried out acts on behalf of the organization where they were or took part in acts in other geographies. In the end, they have reached a number about which statistical studies can be made and psychological and sociological inferences drawn.

Malaysia is an important country in the Far East that has its own weight for every kind of activity that can be undertaken in the name of Islam and has been able to develop its own model. By means of an international meeting, it thus put on the table, as a security matter, the measures to be taken against DAESH's drowning Islamic values and texts in excessive interpretations and thereby hurling people into a method of violence and terror.

A very great desire and wish for our President's participation in the meeting was communicated to the Turkish side, but because the date coincided with our esteemed President's trip to France, he could not attend this meeting. Together with Mr. Eker, we tried to convey his greetings, on his behalf, and Turkey's views on this subject. The close attention the Malaysian Prime Minister showed throughout the meeting to Mr. Eker, in particular as representing our President, was noteworthy.

From Turkey, Prof. Dr. Hüseyin Bağcı of METU also attended the meeting as an academic. In the meeting, whose general subject was "combating terror through wisdom and moderation", Bağcı conveyed his comparative observations and analyses between ethnic terror and religious terror on the examples of DAESH and the PKK.

As for me, I began my speech by asking, since we are going to adopt the path of wisdom in combating terrorism, first what wisdom means and what we can hope for by choosing the path of wisdom, differently from other paths of combating terror.

Wisdom (hikmah) is in fact a faculty; it is a deep approach that can see common sense, patience, discernment and insight, and an event not as a fragment but as part of the larger whole that constitutes it. The path of wisdom requires, rather than fighting and defeating the terrorist after he has emerged, knowing how he emerged, what conditions drove him down this path and who is behind him.

Truly, an important part of the views expressed at the meeting were just as those who nurture DAESH and put it before us would want us to think. They held the approach that if we treat it as a "self-developing interpretation" of Islam, perhaps an extreme, wrong, even deviant one, and explain to it what true Islam is, we can fight correctly. Of course, the emergence of such extreme interpretations from within Islam is a distortion of Islam, and Islam is free of these interpretations; that is true. But this does not explain the real sociological, psychological and political reasons behind the possibility of this extreme interpretation.

When we go down to the roots of DAESH terror or of the actual connections that have emerged between Islam and violence, we see that none of them rests solely on an interpretation of Islam. For that reason, the approach that puts Muslims into an inferiority complex and always pushes them into a defensive position is itself the same as the source that produces that terror.

That source is those who, using the 11 September attacks as a pretext, first occupied Afghanistan in the name of tracing the perpetrators, and, unable to hold back in that atmosphere, also occupied Iraq, killing and wounding millions of people there with inhuman practices and subjecting them to torture in dungeons.

It cannot be more normal that the crimes against humanity that accompanied that occupation produced rancor. Another source of rancor is the hypocritical, fraudulent Western support displayed toward the occupation of Jerusalem and the Palestinian lands by Zionist Israel.

While combating with wisdom the violence and terror we encounter in the Islamic world, we must first understand the sebeb-u illet-u hikmet of this phenomenon, its cause, its ailment and its wisdom. That cause and ailment can never be Islam itself, or even an extreme interpretation of Islam. Extreme interpretations of Islam have always existed, but they have never led to anything like what we see today.

One cause of violence in the Islamic world is the humiliation of Muslims, the occupation of their countries, and the massacre and deportation of millions of their children; but all these actions are already the real violence, and their perpetrators are non-Muslim occupiers.

Even so, this does not necessarily lead to terror either; but there is also a use of the rancor produced by this environment by the same occupiers.

There is the perpetuation of terror through alliances formed with other terror organizations against one terror organization. There is the fact that the hypocrisy displayed in this prevents the formation of a sincere common front against terror. In other words, the cause of terror is not Islam or Muslims, yet it is Muslims who are forced to account for it by pulling out the "moderate Islam" card, apologizing and lying down on the defensive. Is there not something strange in this?

Merve Kavakçı, who is well known throughout the whole Islamic world as well as here for her parliamentary membership process that could not be completed because she was prevented from taking the oath with her headscarf, has been appointed ambassador to Kuala Lumpur, and this has been perceived by Malaysians as a sign of the importance President Erdoğan attaches to Malaysia. With her warm and empathetic approach, Ms. Merve has already inspired great respect and admiration in everyone. We wish her success.