We must remember: names and our reality

Naming is not simply the act of giving neutral signs or codes to certain objects; it is the beginning of building a world. In this respect namings are never neutral. They cannot be. In and of itself, language too, even in its barest form, is not impartial. While the pairs of concepts that exist at the most basic level of language are subject to a hierarchical arrangement, they also build their counterpart in the realm of reality. That is why the perception of the world and of reality is not the same for those who speak German, English, French or Arabic, Kurdish and those who speak Turkish. It is not, of course, the kind of difference that can be passed over by calling it cultural difference. Although it is a very basic component of culture, language is itself the dwelling of being, and every dwelling does not give its inhabitant the same comfort in every respect.

Proceeding from this basic reality that Salman Sayyid reminds us of in his book "Recalling the Caliphate," an important part of the great operation in the post-Caliphate world that sought to de-Islamize was the alienation of Muslims from their own language. Muslims were not even able to write the history and the naming of the very defeat they themselves had suffered.

Muslims, who were being buried in history by an assault on their political body, could not even recite a prayer for this funeral of theirs, because the victors had this process read out as they wished, in the language they wished. In the history they had read out with their own namings, they portrayed the Arabs as traitors to the Turks and the Turks as colonizers to the Arabs.

The past was not this, of course. But once within a Western-centered understanding of history, Muslims, with all their colors, were being made ahistorical.

At this very point Sayyid says, "people become ahistorical not because they have no past, but because they cannot narrate themselves into the future." Well, but who will narrate oneself into the future? For this too a political subject is needed. It is precisely this subject that Sayyid tries to name and tries to theorize: the Muslim.

That the West calls only what it has lived history, while characterizing what other peoples have lived as insignificant, mutually repeating events, is in fact the result not of "counting" other political subjects as nonexistent, but of a desire to "make" them nonexistent. Peoples without history are either nameless, that is, not a real people, or have been named by others. Great defeats can erase even a sufficiently strong and deep name, of course. After the destruction of Nineveh in 614 BC, after the great defeat they suffered, the Assyrians began to fall from memory as well. Even if the Assyrians continued to exist biologically, once their name was gone, they too disappeared.

Essentially, what took place as of 1918, in its final aim, amounts to nothing other than erasing the name of Islam. The last of the Crusades waged against Islam throughout history worked to reach its final aim, and the war ended only because it gave them a feeling of absolute victory. What was targeted was the elimination of Islam together with its name and its naming function. All the policies put into effect everywhere in the Islamic world after the war were aimed at realizing this goal. For the Western hegemony, which had fallen into the illusion of Enlightenment, the Islam problem had to a large extent been put on the way to a solution.

Precisely from this angle, the current circulation of the word Islam, Muslims' being on the world's agenda in one way or another, has turned into a scandal for the Western hegemony that had declared its absolute victory a century ago. Sayyid tries to show the nature of this scandal by descending to the very depths of the Western-centered conception of the world.

Islam, with all its variously woven richness, is a knot that ties together the many threads that make up the ummah. The name of Islam not only brings Muslims together and binds them to one another; its meaning also determines who Muslims were in the past and are today, and how Muslims should be.

Meanwhile, just as it is not correct to say that Islamism, which undertakes the expression of what is political by the nature of this matter, is a substitute for the name of Islam or Muslim, so too claiming that Islamism is a distortion of Islam is a futile pursuit that has to do only with being a stranger to the reading of this history.

Islamism is rather a cluster of political projects that try to position Islam at the center of any social order. It is the only voice, the only language, able to remove the centrality of the order formed by the namings of a Western-centered world, especially against it. Islamists have brought a Muslim subjectivity to the contemporary world in a successful and dazzling way. Viewed in terms of the division of the world between the West and the non-West, Muslims' carrying the name of Islam into this world has an effect that destabilizes the colonial order. In this sense Islam, with all the states and stances in which the name corresponds to the named, declares a real alternative defined by its own name.

In this regard, it is very meaningful and very fitting that Sayyid, in his undertaking in which he seeks the possibilities of constructing a Muslim subjectivity, begins with a chapter titled "Names." For our taking a place and a home in the world begins with names. After all, as is also stated in Surah Yusuf, "what people worship (those idols, though they have no real existence, are only) the names they themselves have named (and thereby endowed with an imagined existence)" (40).

Meanwhile, when Muslims have covered some distance in their struggle to take a place and a home in this world, are there not those who liken what they do to that of Kemalism? In Turkey, this kind of mindset is also a separate matter of complex against Islamism. Sayyid has a pair of words for this too:

"To claim that Islamists are the same because they use concepts, idioms and practices similar to Kemalism, which is the name of the operations of the Western-centered world in the Islamic world, is not only an empirical exaggeration but also a problem of insufficient conceptual theorization."

This insufficiency is also very closely related to missing the essence of the matter and failing to understand the importance of names. Why and how it comes about, one does not even need to think a little more; one only needs to "remember."