Arrows shot from the past to the present, from today to the future

We responded to the symposium of the Anatolia Platform on the Muslims' model of togetherness and their perspectives on the future, regarding it as an invitation to think about this subject, and we are continuing to think.

There is no religion without a vision of the future. At the very least, every religion has a vision of the end of the world. The vision of the end of the world in many religions also shows how they look at other people, and therefore what kind of model they have the potential to put forward today for living together with others.

It is possible to see many of the problems we are experiencing today with some countries, civilizations or members of religions as arrows shot from thousands of years ago to the present day. Israel's racist, aggressive, occupying policies today, and its approach of corrupting the whole world with its money, its pornography, its lying press and its weapons of mass destruction, are like a weapon set up thousands of years ago reaching its target.

The roots of a vision of the future, held with an arrogance that sees themselves as the masters of the world, according to which they will eventually return to this homeland even if they have been expelled from it, will rule the whole world, and all people will eventually become their servants and slaves, can be traced back thousands of years. Today the Jewish nation, taking the Zionist interpretation as its basis, is busy corrupting the whole world in order to bring precisely this arrow to its target. In this understanding and vision of the future, no one other than the Jews has any right to happiness, freedom or a life of dignity; therefore there is no need for any humanist concern that should be raised by the people who are today being killed with their own weapons of mass destruction, whose generations are being corrupted, who are losing their minds and being impoverished. In essence, they are not even "human beings" or "others" who would deserve to have God's commandments such as "do not kill! do not commit adultery! do not consume interest! do not lie!…" applied to them.

We can say the same of the Evangelical Christians who confront us these days with an aggression more Zionist than Israel, more royalist than the king, and with discourses that harm reason. What do they give humanity as the powers governing the US, which today effectively represents world sovereignty, and what will they have promised for the future? They do everything they do according to the prophecy, in the expressions of the Holy Bible known to direct all their politics, that the Children of Israel will eventually return to the lands promised to them.

When they take this prophecy as given, they construct their own mission as helping to bring this prophecy about. They force the conditions that suit this prophecy. They do not wait for God to accomplish this matter in His own time and under His own conditions; they try to hasten 'God' to carry out His plans. In the famous expression, "they are forcing God to the apocalypse".

Of course, the benefit they imagine from this apocalypse is that they will be the masters, under the leadership of Jesus, of a thousand-year kingdom to be established before this apocalypse. Just as there will be no place in this kingdom for Muslims or anyone from other religions, the real surprise is that no trace of the Jews will remain either.

In fact, therefore, there is no place for the Jews either in the Evangelicals' perspective on the future. That they serve them today creates a somewhat strange situation according to this perspective on the future, but that is the outlook. The Zionists are aware of this outlook, but in their own plans for the future the Evangelicals too are counted among the people allotted to serve them. Today they manage each other. This management undoubtedly brings them closer, makes them friends, integrates them, which is a separate reality.

The most important reason why no common sensibility can be developed in the intense wars being fought in the world today is the ways these religious understandings that dominate the world code people in this manner, and their visions of the future.

Socialism, which inherited a kind of Messianic understanding in secularizing Europe, and the European forms of fascism likewise did not refrain from trying to realize the same visions of the future, their utopias. In the future of socialism there is no place for any religion, any national identity and culture, or any social stratum. The Messiah pictured as the working class will in any case leave no trace of any of these.

Islam is the only religion that, in its own perspective on the future, reserves a place with all their rights for people other than its own members. The emphases in the Qur'an, repeated at every opportunity, that the world will never consist solely of Muslims and that social diversity will always exist, turn into a deeply rooted education and a mental and personal preparation.

Jews and Christians will always exist. Muslims are not made to imagine a future in which they and others will perish forever. Their law is defined, the limits of living together with them are drawn, as recognized, known, and with their rights acknowledged…

The struggle to be waged "until there is no more fitna and the religion is God's" is not a struggle to destroy other religions or their adherents, to dominate them, to subjugate them; on the contrary, it is the struggle for a situation in which freedom of religion and conscience is secured for the members of all religions and no one can make slaves and servants of others.

Muslims, of course, set out to wage this struggle some 1450 years ago. And there are also those who set out earlier or later to build a different kind of future. All of them will try to realize all their visions of the future. Some will try to make slaves and servants of all people, while Muslims will wage the struggle to protect human dignity and to liberate people. Is it possible that this will not lead to a conflict?

Conceiving the world of the future as an earthly paradise was the business of utopian ideologies that made it a condition to make the world pass through the vice of a hell in order to reach it. In the end, the selectivity applied over who would be entitled to that utopia constituted the first stage of that hell. Muslims make no such utopian claims. Whatever is to be done will be done today, and what is done today must benefit not only Muslims but all humanity.

Because Muslims know and believe well that God is the Lord not only of Muslims but of all the worlds.