Ignorance and racism that no knowledge can remove

However advanced the world may be, however much our historicity may give us experiences peculiar to ourselves, there is a universality that has seeped even into our strongest particularities.

By universality, do not think I am speaking of some humanist values. Generally a positive, ideal, romantic value is always attributed to the concept of universality. Yet the universal characteristics of the human being are not only reason, thought, logic and goodness. Man's jahiliyya too is a condition or characteristic that you may encounter wherever in the world and at whatever time in history you go.

Jahiliyya is man's arrogance, his ignorance of himself, his covetousness, his greed, and so on… It was thought that the modernity conceived by the Enlightenment would be the solution to all these traits. It was fancied that these evil characteristics belonging to man could be remedied by reason, by science, by well-thought-out, well-ordered institutional measures, that such traits would be forestalled, and if they could not be forestalled completely, that society would be "insured" against them. This was the Enlightenment delusion of man in loss.

You can look at current events on the one hand in their dimensions peculiar to our history, but on the other hand, if you wish, you can also see the universality in them. The story of Pharaoh is not a story that has remained in the past. "He has transgressed all bounds"; he imposed himself on his subjects as the absolute measure of truth. He saw his subjects not as human beings but as servants who could not possibly adopt any other belief, religion, view or path without his knowledge. He overstepped. There will need to be a Moses who, with fair words, in a warning, gentle tongue, will remind him, despite all his power, of the truth that he is nothing more than a helpless mortal, and, if he is not persuaded, will urge him to let go of the collars of the people he has enslaved. Although that story may belong to thousands of years ago, the human, dramatic dimensions it contains confront us every day with every kind of dictator.

Perhaps no other order in the past has presented itself as ornately as the Enlightenment and modernism. But we do not know that fully either. How, I wonder, did Pharaoh's magicians bewitch people's eyes? How did even most of those slaves come to be content with their lot, and probably accept even the slavery they lived as a fate they deserved? If Pharaoh had not promised them a paradise of this world or the next, would the life they lived have been one bearable by the whip alone?

Let us continue in reverse and come to what the Enlightenment and modern life promised. In which of humanity's most fundamental problematics has today's very advanced history gone further than any period of history? Let us set aside the "iron cages" inside the paradise they live in. Do we not see what kind of hell even this iron cage makes non-Western societies live through?

And racism, which operates over those deemed worthy of this paradise and hell and has spread to the whole world, is modernity's most important trait. Who is enlightened, who has remained in darkness? Who has advanced, who has fallen behind? Who has gone ahead of history, who has been late to history or been forced to be late? History, which history? Whose history?

Jahiliyya is not the name of a period that humanity has been able to surpass in its entirety; it is a set of traits that can haunt man at any moment. Its most important manifestation is racism.

Man's regarding himself as superior to others. His not knowing, not being able to know, or even if he knows not being able to accept, that, because he has been created by the same Allah as other human beings, he cannot as a human being be superior to others. It is the trait that tripped up Iblis, who had swallowed the whole of the world's knowledge and in fact knew this truth very well.

Jahiliyya is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. It is an attitude concerning being unable to accept despite knowing. It is a blind obstinate stance that you cannot persuade even if you pour out the knowledge of the whole world. Just as it can be individual, it can also take the form of an ideological formation shared socially. It can confront you in very elegant guises and discourses too.

Its remedy is never more science or more progress or a more advanced historicity. Its remedy, today as yesterday, is the treatment of the heart. And this treatment begins with the ignorant one's accepting it first. For one who does not accept his ignorance, it is not possible to find a way out of this state.

We said that racism is one of the most important manifestations of jahiliyya. Today, on the occasion of the Syrians, it confronts us in the attitudes of people from among ourselves. We see the same jahiliyya against Turks also in Germany, which is considered historically more advanced than we are. How bombastic, how righteous he thinks himself in expressing it… Everything he says with that bombast displays the wretchedness of ignorance.

What is it they say? If the Syrian elderly, women and children have fled the war and saved their lives, fine, but why are their young men among us? Why don't they all run to their country and fight? Why are our soldiers fighting in their place?

Setting aside the racist jahiliyya contained in these expressions, the eyes have gone blind even to the most obvious facts. You heedless ones, is Turkey entering the war only to protect Syria?

Truly, if only Turkey could intervene, without counting international balances and the like, to protect every innocent person who is being wrongfully killed. Rest assured, the expectation of all the oppressed is in this direction, and this is an expectation that brings glory and honor to Turkey.

But that is not the point. Turkey is in Syria at present first of all to protect its own borders, that is, its own people, from the threats of terror and occupation. That is, to protect its own people, among whom these racists unfortunately also number. Above all else Turkey is protecting itself against the forces that have coiled themselves there and hurl insolent threats at Turkey. And there too the greatest support to Turkey is given heroically by the Syrian youths fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Turkish military.

Besides, Turkey wants not to continue the war inside Syria, not to deepen it further, but to end it. It is not after arming more people and shedding more blood.

The head that is far from understanding this great virtue, which is a source of pride on Turkey's behalf, is unfortunately among us and can find the courage to speak in "our" name. This courage, of course, comes not from being in the right, only from ignorance.