What exactly were we to take from the West and what to leave? If only we believed in "ourselves"

The thesis of "keeping up with modernity while remaining ourselves" has, since the 19th century, faced the objection that "the price of keeping up with modernity is ceasing to be ourselves." Over time this objection has become so dominant that it has begun to regard those who defend "keeping up with modernity while remaining ourselves," indeed even those who consider it possible, as excessively naive, innocent and far from reality.

In fact, the fact on which this claim to realism leans has indeed been the distances laid out in terms of ceasing to be ourselves to the extent that we have kept up with modernity.

We are not where we first began this debate. We have a truly very different subjectivity from the people who started that debate. This is certain. Meanwhile we are at a point where modernity too, with all its institutions and way of thinking, holds sway.

Despite this, within the same modernity we have also formed a new position of "selfhood." Perhaps our only shortcoming is that we are still continuing to ask the same question without fully appreciating the nature of what we have at times lived through.

Who were those who first asked this question, who first formulated it, and who were those naive ones far from reality? It is easy, from today, to attribute this naivety to the proponents of this thesis, which began with the Namık Kemals and Ziya Pashas and found its most pithy expressions at the beginning of the nineteenth century with Mehmet Akif Ersoy and the Sebilürreşad circle. Yet there was a fundamental difference between their "selfhood" of that day and our "selfhood" of today. In the face of the Western threat that showed a tendency to spread with each passing day, they were in a position of taking precaution on behalf of the Ottoman State and society, which represented the politics of a living body. Within the framework of this precaution, they considered it possible to take the science and technique that made the West strong by abstracting them from its culture, religion and ideology, and thus to be able to resist the West's challenge.

The words of Mehmet Akif, famously expressed as "Take the West's science, take its art; / Give your efforts their utmost speed. / For it is no longer possible to live without these; / For art and science have no nationality; only..." would much later become almost an object of mockery for some Islamist intellectuals. For according to them it is not possible to separate science from culture, technique from ideology. Do you ask what the most important proof of this is? Here is what we have lived through so far: we took both the West's technique and its culture and ideology.

Undoubtedly there is much that these approaches overlook. First of all, they have greatly confused the order of cause and effect in what has befallen us. For the West's ideology and culture did not enter Turkey in particular, and the Islamic world in general, because the West's science and technique were taken, or through the door that they opened. On the contrary, Western culture and ideology entered entirely through political impositions. The Islamic world, with its open defeat against the West in the First World War, had entirely lost its right to self-determination anyway.

After that defeat, the modernist ideology was brought into the Islamic world, and especially Turkey, in its wildest, crudest form to be seated in the place of honor. In this period the Muslim political will that could have made a selectivity suited to its own interest had already been destroyed. What had existed in the Ottoman state, even at its worst, no longer existed after the First World War. From there on, the West's way of life did not penetrate Muslims as a spontaneous ideology of science and technique; it was forcibly imposed on Muslim peoples with a colonial mentality. This reality, which those who set out to condemn Akif's approach without seeing this difference ignore, clearly changes the point of view.

Second, as I wrote on an earlier occasion, because the ulema of that day had their hands under the stone, they did not have the luxury of indulging in fantasy like the intellectuals of the Republican period who later bore virtually no responsibility for Muslim society. Akif and his friends, in the face of the rise of Western imperialism, felt a serious problem of survival, on behalf of the state, on behalf of Muslim society, down to their very cells, and were in search of a solution. After all, fiqh said that the original status of things is permissibility. This is not a principle created in the modern period. Everything for which there is no evidence of its being forbidden is permissible. Especially if this permissible thing is also something that provides practical benefit, there was no objection to "taking it even from China." Why should it not be taken from the West? That is why the expression "take the West's science" could not constitute a serious problem in terms of a consciousness and morality bearing the responsibility of a Muslim society.

Third, the new "selfhoods" and new subject positions that have emerged within today's modernity are important positions, among which there are these very Muslim intellectuals themselves. Although they have studied and applied the West's science and technique to the fullest, this somehow does not hold them back from producing their "own" position.

Isn't it necessary to dwell on the reason for this too? So, modernity or Western science and technology is not by itself an entity that determines everything. It is not a road with no exit, a disaster with no deliverance from it, a difficulty containing no ease whatsoever.

Let us only believe in "ourselves."