Has Islamism ever had a utopia?

Today, is there a reference text against which we can hold Islamism to account, and settle the account, for the distance between what it promised and what it has achieved?

Of course there are very important Islamist texts, and there are groups, communities and organizations that own these texts. The claims and demands put forward in these texts, the golden age they depict and the utopia they aim at are all there. Under what influences were these texts produced? That must be analyzed first, but without tying their entire source to those influences.

One of the most solid and most influential Islamist texts is, for instance, Sayyid Qutb's Milestones. Turkish Islamism has not produced manifesto-like texts of this kind. But there have been different interpretations of Milestones. It is a text that goes beyond Social Justice in Islam and requires reading it anew through a different paradigm. But because the model it puts forward is one that ignores politicality more than it should, it has perhaps also been a work that carries the effect of turning into its opposite.

Excessive radicalism turns into a door opening onto liberalism. For action programs that are hard, even impossible, to undertake inevitably bring a person to the point of radical submission to what already exists. Moreover, this comes with the contradiction of being as radical as possible in belief and as liberal as possible in practice. Yet the Social Justice in Islam that Qutb felt he had surpassed with Milestones is nonetheless more inclined toward politicality and, to tell the truth, has been a source of inspiration for all the Islamist political programs produced afterwards.

Today, the promises and programs that were attempted to be formulated here have somehow been influential in Muslims' political-economic attitudes and behaviors. The emphasis on justice, the demand for it, the claim to it has always been at the center of fragmented Muslim politicality. Since it has never been able to have, on its own, an organization at the level of the state in this regard, these promises are either being attempted to be met at the level of civil society, communities and groups, or policies in line with these promises are being attempted from the positions gained in the political field.

I have never been warm to putting forward a utopia in the name of Islamism. In fact, even Milestones, one of the manifesto-like texts that best express Islamism, does not construct a utopia. Indeed, it is a kind of anti-utopia. It does not, for example, promise today's person, who is going through material hardship, a world in which he will live more prosperously in the future. On the contrary, it claims to be a guide to the path of freedom that will be gained by making known his Creator and devoting servitude exclusively to Him, to a person who has lost himself in the swamp of servitude to fellow servants, who is ignorantly serving servants just like himself or even more helpless than himself, who has been severed from his bond with God, who has lost the awareness of why he is living in the world, who is deprived of knowledge about himself. It is a text that specifically explains that this path is arduous, that it involves every kind of hardship, and that there is no guarantee of reaching a happy ending in this world.

In that sense, don't the promises of Islamism set out on a very gnostic path? A path of suffering, without a utopia.

Of course they do. In my view, promises whose end reaches only narratives such as prosperity and equality make Islamism excessively worldly. A person's knowing himself, knowing his limits, also brings with it knowing other people. A Muslim who knows that this world is a world of trial already knows that a frozen ideal system is not possible in this world. He knows that even if a utopia, which is a product of minds, were somehow realized, it could not be lasting, and that in the end it would be afflicted by all of man's traits, his ambitions, his mortality. Because the Muslim servant knows himself, knows his Lord, knows man.

Islamism is of course not merely a politicality or a political ideology; there is also, much more importantly, as the basis of all relations, a dimension of religiosity. It is a consciousness that begins with, and is completed by, faith in God, in the realm of the unseen, and especially in the Hereafter. This consciousness also reveals the injustice contained in imposing things on others.

Islamism is a revolt against those who impose servitude to fellow servants. Let whoever wants to worship whatever worship it, but let him not impose his own god on others.

When Islamism turns into a politicality, imposing this religion on others, far from forcibly making people Muslim, claims to remove all the obstacles in the way of people believing as they wish and freely living the religion they wish.

This is the most striking claim of Milestones, which is presented almost as a reference text of violence and radicalism. It formulates even jihad not as spreading Islam but as an effort made on the path of liberating people.

If you ask how much the Islamists, having come to power, managed to determine the whole of politics, culture and the economy on their own, you would be saying that what you expect from Islamism is an iron curtain regime in the classical sense, which,

those who speak of the "failure of Islamism" generally proceed from this strange expectation.

Yet Islamism is, above all, an approach that deems it possible to coexist with others and that, as long as it does not destroy others, is also far from the arrogance of determining all spheres on its own.

NOTE: This subject is addressed in a broader form in our interview in the latest issue of Yetkin Düşünce journal.