Against the global power of the coronavirus, and who is whose guardian?

The unknown enemy Coronavirus, with its tiny little existence that cannot be seen by the eye or heard by the ear and many of whose features are still unknown, has established in all its splendor an unprecedented rule in our lives.

It has done, and is doing, what no power has ever done until now. By occupying all the states of the world, which are in all kinds of disputes with one another, competing and warring, it has virtually united them on the basis of a common problem. It has suspended, until an unforeseeable future, all the institutions that have become indispensable to global life culture, those which, were one to stop for an hour, it was thought, would disrupt all of life; it has changed habits of living, made life, which was proceeding at full speed, brake suddenly. It killed before dying, it brought about the Day of Resurrection before its coming.

Believers periodically experience dying before dying through the hajj, through fasting, through prayer. Experiencing this is a religious duty. Answering, together with a community of believers, the call that invites to the experience that unifies, joins, and brings together, against the routine of life that separates, divides, sets in conflict, and alienates, makes us live that experience of death before death, it teaches us ourselves.

Of course, people answer to live that experience voluntarily.

This experience teaches that life is nothing but play and amusement. However, knowing that life is nothing but play and amusement does not suggest taking life unseriously, but on the contrary taking it more seriously, though in its real sense. Thus it brings one to the consciousness and will to pledge not to be captivated by the magic of a world in which we cannot command a single breath, and not to violate the rights of human beings created from the same essence, not to oppress people, not to submit to oppressors, not to serve a servant and not to make others serve. We understand that nothing we think we have gained in this world remains ours permanently, that nothing we think is ours belongs to us, but on the contrary that our whole being belongs to Him.

We understand, of course, with our human condition and our human differences of interpretation. Otherwise, this experience does not end with the same effect in everyone who takes part in this invitation.

Indeed, now too a virus compels us to live such an experience in another way. Is it not to be expected that an experience that in an instant zeroes out all the distances that all humanity has covered in the name of science, technology, and development would remind humanity, in the name of humanism, of a measure of humility? Whatever level of knowledge he may have reached, how little the human being's unknowns still remain beside his knowns…

In fact, those who deal with the philosophy of science, even those who deal with science itself, have generally come closer to this awareness in the world. These circles have long been aware of the meaninglessness of squabbling with religion that the self-sufficient, arrogant humanism of the 19th century engaged in.

The Coronavirus has, interestingly, united the whole world against a common enemy. The famous rule in sociology is being realized. A common enemy strengthens group solidarity and forms a new group consciousness.

Perhaps this virus entered our lives to play such a role. As if it came to tell us, as humanity, our own condition, to teach us ourselves, our human condition. Interestingly, it is as if this virus has been loaded with such a mind and aim. If we decode its biological genetics we may not be able to read this message, but in its spiritual genetics this effect is clearly read.

Of course, again it is read with our human condition, with our human differences of interpretation. There may also be those who do not refrain from reading so clear a situation again with their own incurable ailments and harms.

One not worth naming, choosing to remain blind and deaf to Türkiye's work that is exemplary to the whole world in the struggle with the Coronavirus within a scientific framework, said with his own sarcasm, "At best it is the saints of Tillo who will find the vaccine against the Coronavirus." Without even realizing that he had himself become worthy of sarcasm.

I do not know about saints in Tillo, because in my view all people are saints, awliya. They are either the awliya of God or the awliya of Satan. Muslims are each other's awliya, and the unbelievers are each other's. There is in any case no category outside awliya. Everyone somehow chooses whose wali they are, and makes it plain anyway.

But in Tillo there is also a positive-science tradition as serious as the Islamic scholarly tradition. 250 years ago in Tillo, İbrahim Hakkı, the student of İsmail Fakirullah, with his famous book "Marifetname" and his other works, produced advanced works that compiled all the positive sciences of his period, presented them in a very meaningful wholeness, and absorbed them within an Islamic paradigm.

This is something we cannot expect to be known by someone whose entire style and culture is opposition by being silly and picking fights. Just look: in the face of a plain situation that has paralyzed the whole world, with its science, its technique, its transportation, its communication, its capitalism, its finance, and driven it to reflection on a certain basis, what will the eye that can remain blind and deaf even then see, what will the ear hear, what will the mind grasp?

Is he not even aware that he himself is, truly, among the "saints"? A saint, yes, but whose saint?