When will we discuss this historicism?

I think some subjects have a periodicity with which they come onto the agenda. We go round and round and end up snagged on the same subjects. Yes, we only get snagged; and in this way, I suppose, each time we expose a problem of ours, that of being unable to turn our snagging into a productive debate. Rushing to have the last word and finish off and smother debates right away is what we do most often. This, of course, is the easy way out. And human beings generally have this weakness of favoring the easy way out.

We cannot fully face questions; it comes across as too laborious. We can fall for the first explanation that will set our minds at ease, that tells us "all right, this is the answer." In fact, the answer we are persuaded by is already the rote formula we were ready to be persuaded by. When we hear it again from another mouth, perhaps in slight disguise, with a slight difference of tone or a few words' difference, we are only refreshing our faith.

Yet the question, once asked there, stands suspended. When someone shows us the way to slip out the back door, we are eager, without hesitation, to flee that question. As long as the questions do not nag at our minds, do not gnaw at our brains, do not put at risk the consensuses we imagine.

The question of history or historicism is such a question. Every time this subject is opened, I will not lie, I become hopeful that perhaps this time a real debate will come about, that perhaps we will go to the very ends of where this question leads us, or if not, as far as we can get. There have been various occasions before, and each time, to the best of my ability, I tried in this column or in other outlets to show this question the attention it deserves. The question of history is truly very important. Today as in the past, it is among the most important causes of disputes among people.

Last March too, this debate seemed about to emerge in connection with our President's remarks on updating certain religious discourses. I tried humbly to join the debate with two articles titled "Ezmanın teğayyuru" ("The change of times") and "Kimlerin ezmanındayız? veya Tarihselciliğin Paradoksu" ("In whose times are we? or The Paradox of Historicism"). My aim, of course, was not to end or exhaust the debate.

Indeed I could not exhaust it, but the debate ended just as it began. It must have made some contribution. For the human being is a conversation, as Hölderlin said: "since we have been a conversation / and able to hear from one another."

Islamic thought in Turkey, too, can take shape only as a conversation. And this is the most important manifestation of our historicity. Who said what, and what answer did the other give to it? Had he not said that, would the other have given that answer? So the answer that emerges is a text formed by following the question asked.

And does that text immediately set other questions and other statements in motion as well? It does. Thoughts develop and take shape within such a dialogue, and over time reveal the quality of everyone who takes part. Even texts that do not reflect an air of dialogue are somehow written presupposing a certain intellectual environment, in a debate with those presupposed subjects. At the macro level, one can also see who is fleeing the debate, who is trying to say the last word quickly and close the subject, and that this contributes nothing to the general quality of thought.

The history debate is one that we, as the children of a defeated civilization, who are of course now trying to revive, cannot escape.

There can be some cunning in the ways this debate is put before us. Those who first put history before us as a modern concept imposed it as a universal route with Western civilization at its center. Looking from within that perception or philosophy of history, the only place we could find for ourselves was one where defeat was attributed to certain deficiencies or inadequacies in our own essence (our religion, our culture, our values). Therefore, looking from within that history, our religion was the cause of our backwardness, and what we had to do to catch up with history was clear.

A series of discourses in the field of theology were being provoked, as it were, precisely to produce the theology of this backwardness of ours. As Michel Foucault said, "incited to discourse". And this was an altogether different epistemic environment, one that took place within its own historical setting and produced its own measures of right and wrong.

Yet the history or historicism debate should have started from precisely there. Just as historicism, by focusing on the conditions of the Qur'an's relationship with human perception at the time of its revelation, makes it possible to say from there that the Qur'an carries no message to the present or, at best, carries it only in eroded form, it also made it possible to apply this to the historicist discourse itself. In that case it might have sufficed to ask by virtue of which superior subject qualities historicist thought deserves the virtually ahistorical position it tacitly claims.

That we live in a history and that our perception is restricted by the conditions of that history is the most important thing historicist thought teaches us. We are not far from understanding what kinds of dungeons historical conditions, language, culture and geography build for the human being and for human understanding. The question whether these dungeons bind Allah, who is bound by no history or dungeon, is a matter concerning how we know Allah Himself. If we cannot attribute to Allah an attribute that makes the impossible possible, we fall into the error of thinking that He is bound also by the history He Himself created.

Historicism ultimately teaches that no human being can remain outside history, but a believer is one who also knows that Allah is not bound by history. Allah is the creator of both history and time, but He sees fit, by His own will and decree, to address us mortal servants within the limits of a history. We cannot, of course, look from His absolute window. That is why, even if we believe that the Qur'an itself is not limited by history, our view of the Qur'an will always have to be limited by our own history.

I am aware that with these words I am pointing to a judgment that could end the debate. Yet this time the reason that drove me to write this article is precisely the discomfort I feel toward cutting the debate short, and especially toward trying to condemn the parties to the debate because they said this or that. I have been taking part, to the best of my ability, and trying to contribute to this debate since the nineties.

I think this debate is of vital importance both for contemporary Islamic thought and for the revival of our civilization.

Why, you ask? That is all the space we have for today; let us continue later, if you like.