Islamism: in terms of relying on a tradition and forming a tradition

The debates on Islamism can of course never end as long as Muslims exist. It is entirely natural for an agenda under this heading to be continually renewed and stirred. Especially when Islam is the most important subject and issue not only of Turkey but of the world.

As such, the political, cultural and social performances of those who take up the cause of Islam will continue to be a subject both of their own reflection and of the interest others take in them. Lately there are serious questions, problems and issues on this matter that need to be updated. Yetkin Düşünce has prepared a file that addresses Islamism in the context of the general question of "claims and what has been realized," precisely in a context where new subjects and questions have accumulated considerably. The file includes articles by Mustafa Tekin, Muhammet Çelik, Ahmet Keleş, İlhami Güler, Mustafa Öztürk, Ümit Aktaş, Esat Arslan, Muhammet Özdemir, M. Yaşar Soyalan, Zeynep Karataş, Atasoy Müftüoğlu and F. Zehra Kayhan, contributions from Mustafa Aydın, Yıldız Ramazanoğlu and Ferhat Kentel, and one interview each on the subject with me and Ömer Laçiner, contributions that will deepen the discussion of the various issues involved and self-reflection.

The first question and answer of the interview Fatih Yaman conducted with me was on Islamism's relationship with tradition. I would like to relay it exactly.

Where can we locate Islamism within the intellectual tradition that has existed since the Ottomans?

First of all, when we talk about Turkey, when we form a sentence that includes "tradition," we cannot help mentioning certain constraints, ruptures and interruptions that Turkey has experienced, which inevitably concerns us when thinking about Islamism as well. Of course, to this we must add the constraints relating to the concept of tradition's own factual correlate. First of all, in Turkey tradition took a deep blow with the Republic.

Despite everything, it is not a rupture, a break that resets everything and allows nothing to be inherited from the past, of course, but it is quite clear that it inflicted a trauma that made it impossible to transmit an important part of tradition. This rupture is one that determines, that must determine, what is said or can be said about Islamism. It indicates a transition from a condition in which Muslims existed as organs of a political body to an ontology in which they are shattered, turned at best into bodiless organs.

Everything said about Islamism without taking this rupture into account comes to nothing. On the other hand, are there really distinguishable intellectual traditions in Turkey? Although there may at times have been prominent thinkers, to what extent did they rely on a tradition, grow up within a tradition, become the product of a tradition, to what extent were they able to form a tradition?

Let us leave this question too, with all the answers it contains or implies, to the reader's imagination and judgment. But if we take Islamism up not as a tradition but as a will, a reflex and a sensibility that will recur at any moment wherever Muslims live, it has been a thought that has been a reference to a greater or lesser extent for all the thought developed in the Ottoman Empire, and that has granted its visa to all the thought imported.

Liberalism, Turkism, Ottomanism, and even to a degree socialism entered Ottoman intellectual culture and were able to move with the visa provided by the Islamist will and affirmation. When Ziya Gökalp wrote The Principles of Turkism, for instance, he had in his mind no conception of a world in which the caliphate was abolished and the Turkic world was separated from the mission of Islam. On the contrary, he had a conception that thought even Turkishness within the circle of Islam, intertwined with it. Even the Westernizers considered the justification of their thought within a framework in which the Islamic caliphate would be stronger and could compete with the West.

In the late Ottoman period the most important vein of Islamism is a ruling ideology. There are also those who opposed the existing government in the name of Islam. But this opposition is not a demand against the state, to overthrow the state and propose a more Islamic state in its place. Those who made the proposal "let us take the West's technology and leave the culture to them" carry, and represent, the reflexes of a political body in which the results of their proposals could be seen. In the end, it thinks in the name of a state, a political body, with which it identifies itself. Yet with the Republic the ontology of Islamism changed. The political body disappeared, and even individual bodies were subjected to the obligation of carrying the symbols of other political bodies. When he put on his head the hat that was the symbol of another political body, he now had to feel like the servant of another political will as well.

That is why the reactions Islamists gave to the practices of the Republican period produce an Islamism with a very different ontology. In this period Islamism positions itself not by identifying itself with the state but by separating from it, by opposing it. In this experience, where will you look for traditional continuity? Even the context of Akif's poems changes in an instant. Words spoken in another environment now either lose their meaning entirely or acquire an entirely different one. What remains, in the name of the Islamist text, is only his poems, and the people who gave up themselves, ready to face execution in order not to submit to the political body alternative to Islam, and those who went underground to protect what exists, withdrew into a corner or became rose-growers.

The Islamism that began to be expressed from the sixties produced for a long time a discourse, literature and politicality extremely disconnected from the forms in the Ottoman period. The references of this Islamism, adopted and learned mostly through translated texts, were the Islamisms of Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and India. But these Islamisms were not unrelated to the Ottomans. Islamism, which in Turkey experienced a definitive break in the traditional sense, found itself again through these countries. Can we see this as a complete break from tradition? We can, to this extent.