"Even if a verse came down from heaven"

"From the point of view of a Western-centered hegemonic project that is still valid today, the existence of Islam in one form or another, regardless of whether it has any political success at all, is a failure, a scandal."

Salman Sayyid makes this observation in his book "Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonization and World Order," published by Vadi Yayınları in a successful Turkish rendering by Mehmet Murat Şahin.

We already know Sayyid from his earlier book, also from Vadi Yayınları, "A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism."

When one asks whether manifesto-type texts have been written in the name of Islamism, Sayyid's are among the rare texts that come to mind in recent times. Perhaps not texts in the classical sense, of the kind that in the fifties, sixties and even seventies addressed only Muslims and tried to awaken them (for example Sayyid Qutb's Milestones, Mawdudi's Four Key Terms of the Qur'an, Nadwi's What Did the World Lose with the Decline of Muslims?, Muhammad Qutb's Jahiliyyah of the Twentieth Century, Rasim Özdenören's Essays on Thinking in a Muslim Way). Sayyid is an intellectual who grew up in a cultural and intellectual environment in which Western hegemony expresses itself in its best and strongest form. He did his doctorate with Ernesto Laclau, one of the famous Post-Marxists, and he is a figure who follows all the intellectual debates currently in circulation in the West at the most up-to-date and highest level, who looks at Islam from within that debating environment and who responds to it.

He is a strong critic of Orientalism, but he does not get stuck on this criticism; he tries to find, to express, even to represent what his own Muslim identity means in this world. In this respect, with all the texts he has produced, he tries to understand and interpret the struggles waged against Islam in the Western environment and to express a Muslim's political stance against them.

For him, of course, the caliphate has nothing to do with what DAEŞ, which he describes as "the warlords of the Euphrates," means by it, nor with the "certain political ambitions and contrived intrigues" in Jakarta, Abuja, Islamabad and Khartoum that have turned it into a bad caricature in the world. He recalls, or reminds us of, the caliphate in order to understand what kind of political and existential void the integrity of the Muslim body, which was perhaps assassinated a hundred years ago, creates today both for the hegemonic world order and for Muslims everywhere in the world.

In fact, Muslims today are not on the agenda only because they are waging their own struggles or because they are waging their own struggles. The Muslims or Islam, who are constantly on the agenda today in one way or another, are on the agenda because they keep alive the possibility that the West, which claims universality, is an ordinary, local culture of which there are plenty of examples in world history. In this respect, while Islam causes discomfort by keeping alive the possibility of the West's ordinariness, it also reminds us of the existence of other cultures condemned to extinction under Western hegemony. That is why Islamophobia does not affect only Muslims; as Trump made clear in various statements, it also ties Mexicans, Blacks and Chinese to one another with a metaphorical chain.

That is, Islam does not cause discomfort, as is supposed, with its violence or with terrorist acts that the great majority of Muslims also do not approve of somewhere; it also upsets a Western-centered perception of the world in a philosophical sense. Islamophobia, for its part, is not simply a negative representation of Islam or Muslims; it is an attempt to monitor and discipline Muslims by reference to a Western horizon, and to deny Muslim autonomy.

It is here that one must seek why Muslims have become the metaphor for everything that Eurocentrism wants to erase. Along with this, there are also the different representations of Islamism by Muslims everywhere in the world, and the idea attributed to Muslims on the basis of this dispersion, relativism and therefore a lack of a central truth…

Indeed, in the action of which of these is "true Islam" represented? Which experience will be taken, or should be taken, as reference? After all, so much dispersion can at most be a sign that there is no real experience or claim to validity.

Yet for Salman the answers to these questions are not at all difficult. Who are those who expect perfection from Muslims? Why and with what philosophy of man do they expect it? The expectation of perfection is also the enemy of a Muslim kind of political life. Political life, as the name implies, is a human form of action, and what gives it the quality of authenticity is not that verses descend to it from heaven, nor that its followers are as pure and clean as an angel or angels, for even if a verse were to descend from heaven, even if miracles were shown, this does not guarantee that people will see this authenticity and believe. Moreover, the measure of cleanliness, purity or angelhood of those who represent it cannot be set by its adversaries.

At this point, for Sayyid one of the most challenging aspects of Islamism is its relationship with Islam. He refers to the strong view, or observation, especially among some Muslims, that in places where Islamists have succeeded in obtaining power they have not been able to avoid its corrupting effect. According to him, the judgment implied by this observation is that Islamists should content themselves with being the permanent critics of power rather than its users.

Among us too, if you remember, Islamism was at one point given its funeral prayer on the claim that it had come to power.

Yet whether Muslims come to power or not is not what determines the lifespan of Islamism. Islamism has countless states: opposition, persecution, hijra, power, domestic politics, purgatory and so on, and Islamists never had a promise of never coming to power. In essence, every kind of political criticism always contains, at its core, a demand for power.

There is, of course, no point in sanctifying power, but the expression of a feeling of helplessness about reaching power as a radical and cynical hostility to power is a typical psychological condition, and from time to time Muslims, even Islamists, can become addicted to such a psychology.

We will continue to think with what Sayyid reminds us of.