Is the historicist outside history?

In the nineties, certain studies and theses, which were generally the subject of academic production in theological circles, were reflected in scholarly meetings, symposiums and conferences. Personally, at those meetings I realized how important this debate was for a contemporary Islamic thought and tried to do it justice. In those years a very lively, exciting discussion group had formed. Sides had formed too. Historicists or opponents of historicism, modernists and traditionalists, and so on.

In the article I published under the title "The Historicism Dispute in Turkish-Islamic Theology" in the book Change and Essence: Dialectical Relations Between Change and Contiunity in Turkish Intellectual Tradition (Değişim ve Öz: Türk Entelektüel Geleneğinde Değişim ve Süreklilik arasındaki diyalektik ilişki), edited by Şinasi Gündüz and Cafer S. Yaran in 2004, I characterized this debate as one of the most important debates in Turkish-Islamic thought and summarized it. The Turkish version of the article will be published in the forthcoming issue of the journal Tezkire.

I used to think that the most important thing that persuaded those inclined to historicist thought in the name of Islam was not so much coherent arguments arranged in a chain of logic as, in its most ordinary form, the fascinating discourse about the West's development.

For a person to be persuaded of an idea, to reach a conclusion through sequential arguments and evidence, is apparently not required even in the academic setting. What persuades one to rationalism may be an irrational motivation, what persuades one to follow the scientific path may be an entirely non-scientific experience, a feeling, a motive. There is also such a thing as "getting angry" at the priest and breaking the fast…

In my view, what persuades people to historicism, especially theological circles, is still a serious influence in which the Western perception of history or modernity is at the center. The institutions, standards, experiences and performances that the West has put forth today in many fields continue to dazzle. These, to a certain level of love, in fact cover over the dark face of the West. Those lovers cannot see the colonialist, racist, genocidal, inhuman role that those highly developed Western countries still continue to play in the Islamic world's backwardness, and they incline toward a literature of lament that places the blame for all this backwardness only on Muslims.

Have we not seen what kind of Western measure the will that Muslims today in Syria, in Egypt, in Yemen, in Iraq and everywhere in the Islamic world have shown on the way to changing their own fate and becoming the actor of their own history has run up against?

When thinking about the historicity of Muslims, of course we must think also from this angle and see the dark side of the West, which is the master of today's history. We must of course not overlook that the complexes this history has imposed on us exert a "historical effect" that also determines how we should look at our own book, culture and history. The first thing the historicist consciousness should teach is that no one is above history and cannot be. Yet the greatest handicap of the historicist discourse we generally witness is that it almost sees itself above history and aspires from that position to the privilege of being able to speak about how even Allah can remain under the influence of history… Is there such a position for the human being?

The historicism debate cannot, of course, enter our agenda independently of such historical effects. Nevertheless, the historicism debate is a debate that the Muslim subject must confront fully and in all its dimensions in order to realize its historical emergence. For the human being is a being afflicted by history. Of course, when historicism focuses on the human being's historicity, rather than and before focusing on the historical dimension of the Qur'an, it is an anthropology that tells the human being his limits. One must also trust that the more it makes the human being known, the closer it brings him to Allah.

Although this is my humble view from the time we first held this debate, I never felt a position of self-righteousness toward the parties who entered the debate and expressed their views. In essence, the historicism debate itself teaches the human being his limits, and therefore humility and his position in relation to others.

The parties could of course have had very different motivations. Some were only concerned with putting forward an original thesis in their academic work, while others were truly troubled by the troubles of Muslims and acted out of an intellectual's concern aimed at putting the situation right. This concern was present on every side of the debate. No one has a superiority that would require him to declare himself more sincere or inherently more right than the other.

That debate needs to be conducted properly. Because we badly need it even to know where we are and where we should begin. If we have set out without having this debate, which is generally always the case, meaning we will fix the load on the road, even then this debate is necessary in order to straighten the direction.

There is no point in seeing this debate as a threat to our religion and especially to our religious peace and raising a hue and cry. Those who hear this hue and cry also suppose that there is an undisputed unity of understanding and creed among all Muslims on every subject. For Allah's sake, a structure with thoroughly corrupt creeds like FETÖ emerged from this country. Did its dominant discourse not also imagine a perfect religious consensus and use this as a means of absolutizing the deviant creedal discourse of its own hocaefendis?

There is no sense in imagining a perfect environment of religious consensus and establishing an authoritarianism on top of it. No accounting has been made in this country of on which subject, over which concepts and ideas, who agrees with whom and how much.

Just look: even those who lambast historicism, in the same sentence badly confuse the different philosophers' different understandings of history with one another and speak with the unjust authority they have gleaned from there. Social-science jargon and religious jargon have become entirely mixed up. Is Popper's historicism the same thing as what Hegel, Marx, Dilthey, Gadamer or Heidegger understood by historicism?

When we gather them all in one basket and spend them, whose faith will we have saved?