To those who whistle while passing a cemetery

The talk about the end of Islamism is somewhat like the whistles blown to cope with one's fears while passing a graveyard. This is so especially for those with openly Islamophobic attitudes. It is something like an autosuggestion that there is nothing to be afraid of. A way of fighting one's phobia. There is nothing to fear, yet Islam and Muslims will continue to be an object of hatred.

However, in the confession-like discourses of those with a vague experience of Islamism, too, there is such a search for consolation, a desire for relief. Especially in those who want to attribute this end to a failure. After all, no one can question the historical responsibility within a movement whose bankruptcy has already been declared.

We have plunged straight into the subject. Let us go back a little to the background: on this subject, on which we wrote a series of articles in recent days, we had remained at the question of what kind of success those who attribute the end of political Islam to a failure expected of it, and we had said that this was the truly vital problem. For indeed, to Muslims who today, everywhere in the world, have their lands under occupation, who are subjected to coups in their countries and to every kind of oppression, who are both the nightmare of the world's arrogant powers and, because of this very fear, constantly their oppressed and victims, and to the stance they represent, by what criteria of fairness, and what kind of success or failure, could be attributed?

Of course, the discourses about the end or the continuation of Islamism have a great deal to do with individual perceptions and feelings. On this matter the basic rules of symbolic interactionism continue to operate in the most striking way. First of all, our perceptions of certain concepts, institutions, persons or ideas are determined by our experiences with them. Second, as our experiences with those concepts, ideas or objects change, our perceptions of them also continue to change.

It is inevitable that a phenomenon, concept or movement like Islamism exists through countless experiences and therefore produces very different perceptions of itself. This may also mean, to some extent, that Islamism has no objective existence independent of the sum of these perceptions and experiences.

Yet in today's world Islam and Islamism have a certain effective historical meaning, and individual experiences cannot be completely cut off from this meaning. People may interpret this effectiveness differently and feel it differently through their own individual experiences, but in a way that cannot remain distant or cut off from interaction with the role Islam performs in today's world...

Without seeing what Islam means in today's world, inferences made about Islamism also remain up in the air. Otherwise, every individual Muslim may be continuing to perform his worship and to live his Muslimness having given a satisfactory answer to the question of what Islam means for himself.

However, even in its most depoliticized form, it lives carrying a potential for conflict with the role that is attempted to be assigned to Muslimness within today's world order. Perhaps not every Muslim feels this conflict with the same tension, but in a global world that has shrunk this much, not being able to feel it can increasingly be regarded as a matter of exception. Moreover, while the very existence of those who cannot feel it is itself seen within today's world order as the potential of that familiar tension…

Essentially, within a world order founded for a century on wiping Islam off this world, in terms of the epistemological and hegemonic claims of this world order, Islam's survival today, and especially its survival as such a prominent and effective presence, is a scandal. For within the world order settled on a century ago, there would be no place for Islam, and there would be a place for the Muslim only to the extent that he could give up Islam's political claims and social manifestations (that is, none). Muslims' being deprived of a political body is not a choice of Muslims or the result of their spontaneous sociological development, degeneration or laziness; it has been the result of a severe colonial intervention carried out on them. Those who made that intervention have continued to follow the consequences of that intervention to the very end. For the will that made that intervention, all the manifestations of Islam today, and Muslims' continuing to carry the identity of Islam proudly in the world, are a failure with regard to its own operations. Of course, the matter also has other dimensions that we cannot dismiss by simply calling it a failure. The matter also stirs up psychological problems to some extent. Problems like the fear of ghosts or phantoms... The rumor of someone known to have been killed, indeed his very own dreams, going about in the open. The fear of Islam is also largely related to these psychological states.

The existence of Islam in one form or another, without needing to have any political success, is a failure, a scandal for a Western-centered hegemony project. Indeed, a successful Islamic political model is a still greater scandal. That is why the model of Islam that is relatively more tolerable in the name of Islam is the one represented in a Muslim person who is weak-willed, fatalistic and does not create disappointments in Orientalist fantasies.

In fact I made these analyses largely as a prelude to speaking about Salman Sayyid's book Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order, published in a successful Turkish by Vadi Yayınları, but we have reached the end of the space allotted to us today. Let the rest, God willing, be in the next article.