Political Islam really has ended, for some

We can judge from the outset that those who attribute the end of political Islam to a failure are, before anything else, ignorant of the political. For politicality is not something that can be assessed by success. Even the defeat of some political movements does not end their politicality; it only gives an idea about their position on the political stage. For politicality is precisely something that can show itself where one can speak of those who win or lose in the course of a struggle.

Moreover, in the unjust world order that prevails in the world today, will the way to measure Islam's success pass through measuring how many institutions it has been able to establish that could rival this same unjust order, or precisely through its capacity to throw a spanner into this order?

The words of the 11th President Abdullah Gül declaring the end of political Islam give no impression other than surrender to the world order's criteria of success, as if fleeing from being caught between precisely this dilemma.

For God's sake, are Muslims responsible today for the failure of democracy or good governance to develop in Türkiye or in every part of the Islamic world? Is Türkiye exposed to countless coup attempts for years because it has not been able to successfully absorb Islam and democracy together? Or, on the contrary, because it has been able to achieve this synthesis very well and very successfully? Were the interventions to which Türkiye has been exposed since 2010, that is, from the moment, with the Arab Spring process, it was understood that Türkiye in this form had become dangerous to the system, carried out so that political Islam would evolve toward a more successful model? Or did perceptions of threat to the world system, posed by the independence Türkiye displayed when it ran democratic processes and reflected the will of its people in government, sow different feelings, calculations, and assessments in certain minds?

In what case would political Islam have been successful, and where do we look for political Islam today, in whose longing, in whose discourse, in whose actions?

When did Muslims' quests and demands for a better, more dignified, freer, and more prosperous world for themselves and all humanity end?

Have the Muslims who, as Muslims, are humiliated every day in every part of the world, subjected to oppression, whose homelands are occupied, whose wealth is plundered, and who moreover are feared and hated, remained silent and unresponsive to all this?

Every day, everywhere in the world, there are the Muslims' voices, discourses, and revolts, which have become loudly evident, against precisely these injustices. To say that political Islam has ended is possible only by turning deaf to these voices. Political Islam is not something that is always about the successful (or unsuccessful) management of institutions or companies produced in certain circles and handed the keys.

Political Islam is the resistance of the Palestinian whose land has been occupied. It is again the prayer and cry of the ummah whose sanctuary, honor, and sacred have been trampled in Jerusalem, in Mecca, in Medina. It is the longing for paradise of the children in Syria who every day have their houses demolished over their heads and are orphaned, left hungry and wretched, because there is bread to eat there. It is the martyrdom of the three thousand people who were massacred while quietly staging their protests in the square, against the coup carried out against the noble struggle the people of Egypt had entered in their quest for freedom, dignity, and bread; it is the sad but noble memories of those who witnessed that martyrdom, and their struggles that continue as if nothing had happened. It is the anguished cry of the poor Arakanese subjected to genocide by being burned or drowned in Myanmar. And it is the struggle for existence of Türkiye, which struggles against the manifold intrigues of the seven powers and a thousand and one faces of enemies, to be a hope for all the oppressed.

You will look for the political in these voices, these cries, these laments, and this struggle. Without being deaf to them, without being a stranger to all these voices, these cries, laments, and struggles, to squeeze political Islam into the essence of an experience lived in a certain period in Türkiye among certain people and to end it there, you see? This is precisely the handicap into which most analyses of political Islam frequently fall. There could be no better example than this. Everyone makes a solipsistic (egocentric, the sickness of imagining that when one closes one's eyes the world becomes invisible to others too) analysis of the process through his own personal experience. What has ended for himself he counts as ended throughout the world.

This is exactly the case for most of the people who keep a distance from political Islam or Islamism, who think that it has ended. In fact they themselves have drifted away, broken away, from the feelings, experiences, troubles, struggle, and friendships of that world. When one drifts away, friend and enemy inevitably become confused with one another.

Of course this is the solipsism into which those who were formerly Islamists have fallen. And then there is the solipsism of those who, as opponents of Islamism, are very fond of the possibility of its having ended, and of those who with great appetite produce and sell, or buy, every kind of news and analysis about this, those whose analyses and wishes have become mixed up. Both feed on the same ignorance about politicality.

Since we have tied the matter to success, it must also be well known that when political Islam in the world succeeds as a democratic, libertarian, and development-oriented movement, it does not win the appreciation of the democratic-modern world, but on the contrary becomes its target. They continue to perceive such a movement as a decolonization movement becoming independent of themselves. They do everything in their power to make such a movement fail. Indeed, European and American democracy could not even call the coup against Mohamed Morsi, the first President in Egyptian history to come to office by election, a coup.

So now, because Morsi was overthrown, are we going to count him a failure, and the world's most disgraceful dictator who replaced him, and the values he represents, a success?

Are we also not going to see the politicality represented by the strong objection and resistance that still exist against this outrage?