Success is from God

It is possible to evaluate some political movements through their unrealized utopias, unreached goals, promises that ended in fiasco or deviated seriously from their targets. The failure of the socialist movement, for example, can be shown by countless examples during its century of political experience. Another example is the fact that the illusion of absolute victory of liberalism, which came so close as to declare the end of history, gave way within a short time to a complete comedy that made it an object of mockery.

These states of these movements can of course be described as a failure, but still no one can speak of the end of liberal politicality or socialist politicality. Ha, there are those who speak of this too, but this talk is largely the talk of those who dislike socialists or liberals. And this talk can also give an idea about personal-individual experiences regarding such movements. That is all.

In certain periods there may be people who construct a utopia in the name of Islam. Perhaps ventures and attempts that take their fixed model from the Age of Bliss and project it toward the future. A significant part of these were attempts belonging to the "age of ideologies."

Indeed, countless criticisms were made, precisely among the Islamist circles themselves, that such utopian attempts were a kind of Islamic Zionism fervor. So much so that these criticisms have prevailed over the discourse of those who could reduce Islam, or in the specific term political Islam, to the promise of a utopia. Even in the intonation of those who say that being Muslim already sufficiently encompasses and contains the necessary politicality, that Islamist will, identity, and politicality is there anyway. In such cases the debate over whether Islamism really exists, whether it is necessary, whether it has died, whether it remains, can become equivalent to pounding water in a mortar.

Islam, by virtue of being a religion, of course keeps alive in all believers a certain faith that God's light will be completed and will prevail over unbelief. There is an inevitable politicality this produces, there is a sense of identity, right, and justice, and a certain belief about the alignment between the good and the bad. This belief cannot of course be reduced to utopian models produced in the name of Islam by certain people at certain times.

The most important flaw attributed to Western metaphysics is that everything is defined, objectified, and thus instrumentalized, with firm outlines, frozen. The Western-type metaphysicalization of the political is likewise the deep desire for identities to turn into clichés that have no permeability at all and are fixed for all times. The struggle continuing ad infinitum among all the human types fitted into certain clichés builds the metaphysical depths of Western politicality. Reality often has nothing to do with this typification. When a real Muslim confronts them with all his depth, his humanity, his knowledge, or his most basic human characteristics, he cracks that political metaphysics.

That typification is not enough to construct their Dajjals for provoking the path they set out on as "the fight against terrorism." That is why DAEŞ certainly represents Islam or Muslims better for them. Where the Muslim's savagery, his Dajjal-ness, is not enough, that typification is carefully and elaborately created under studio conditions, precisely in line with fantasy, and put into circulation. With all its caricature-like practices, deaf to reason, remote from human feelings, with its most cruel and brutal executions, its beheadings, it produces the typification that is needed, then turns around and reproduces it.

At its crudest, as Orientalism, which has become an instrument of current politicality, proceeds with such typifications, unfortunately it affects Muslim consciousness too. Many Muslims too determine their behavior under the hypnotic effect of that typification. Even while saying that Islam or the Muslim is not that but this, it is not that possible to stay away from this effect. In the end, against a metaphysically fixed definition of the Muslim, an attempt is made to substitute a Muslim cliché of another metaphysical fixity.

When the Muslim is seen as a typification that subsists through friend-enemy relations, where this friend-enemy is also fixed, the Muslim turns into a subject whose qualities, whose quality, do not change whatever he does. In the same way, non-Muslims too remain fixed until the Day of Judgment with all the characteristics attributed to them. Muslims think of an identity they have once acquired as an acquired right, as a privilege that can never be removed from them, and an identification takes place between what they do and Islam. The late Akif Emre's process that increasingly turns into Muslimism.

Yet being Muslim is not an acquired right and it is a choice whose price must be paid anew every day. It cannot be reduced, as a movement of goodness, to turning the qibla to the east or the west, it cannot be reduced to saying "I am a Muslim" or "I am an Islamist," and it cannot even be reduced to merely taking one's place in the ranks against the unbelievers.

Goodness is about continually doing actions of a certain quality with good intention, and the possibility of this is always bound to conditions of trial in which success or failure is at stake.

Islamists or Muslims may fail, but this failure has to do not with whether or not they reach their political goals, but with the sincerity they display toward their Lord, toward the Prophet, toward the believers, and toward people.

Otherwise, of course, success is always from God.