Language as the most dangerous property given to man, and the Tower of Babel liberalism could not restore

To begin an undertaking in which the possibilities of constructing a Muslim subjectivity are being sought with "names" is a very meaningful and fitting move. Heidegger had said that language is the house of being. Being is disclosed through language, understood by way of language, and there is no reality outside language. But this does not show that we can regard language as a tool at our disposal.

This characteristic of language also gives it, in the very line of Hölderlin's poetry to which Heidegger drew attention, the quality of being "the most dangerous of possessions given to man." For although language is something given to man, it is not closed to man's intervention, instrumentalization and use.

Beyond the given language, man also has the capacity to name. Through these namings he establishes in the world hierarchies that will make a servant a servant to himself or make himself a servant to a servant. Language at the same time begins to operate as a distortion of reality and builds a thick ideological wall around the being-house of man. It becomes a reality, or an illusion of reality, "built up by a word that comes out of people's mouths and grows" (Surah al-Kahf / 5).

Language thus performs its function, as the most dangerous possession given to man, in its most dangerous form. In accordance with its own dual nature it establishes, names, defines and conceptualizes the unjust hierarchies among people, and through all these processes it establishes the world with a verdict on who is superior, who is right, and who or what is valid. Language, as the most dangerous possession given to man, thus, the further it moves away from God's first naming, moves perceptions of reality away from their authentic form and distorts them.

The Muslims' struggle to take a place and a home in this world depends, to some extent, of course, on their being able to grasp that authentic language, on their being able to grasp a plainness that will show the world as it is. This is an operation of critical cleansing that returns the world distorted by language to its origin and makes it possible to see the truth as it is.

By this I do not mean what is implied by an often repeated expression of the type "we must speak our own language." You will appreciate that this sentence is by no means easy, and in some contexts is a little troublesome. After all, those who have a message for the world do not use a language that only they speak and only they understand; they find, and must find, a way to express their message especially in the language of those they address. The alternative is not possible in practice either. That is why to every people messengers were sent in that people's own language, indeed from among themselves, familiar with their languages, cultures, jokes, troubles, worries and joys.

This does not mean that you will accept all their troubles as troubles. Some of people's troubles may have become not their remedy but their very hell. Look at many of the troubles of today's people: these troubles have turned into opiates that numb them, into dangerous habits that drag them into catastrophe. But even to say this, one must understand them well. That is why from time to time we have to say that the expression "speaking in our own concepts" is exaggerated more than necessary. Because one who has a word to say must speak the language of the one addressed; there is no point or benefit in indulging in whims in the name of the message while waiting for the addressee to learn one's own language.

With all these sensitivities, building a Muslim subjectivity requires a powerful deconstructive, critical perspective on the language we speak or that is spoken against us. Salman Sayyid's book Recalling the Caliphate begins, in this search to build that subjectivity, with "names," and undertakes an analysis it calls "Critical Muslim Studies," with its inquiries under the headings of liberalism, secularism, relativism, democracy, futurology, diaspora, caliphate, order, hermeneutics and ethics.

For instance, under the first heading, it concerns the strategies of liberalism, by granting a status such as scientificity and universality to a highly particular and limited philosophy and way of life of the West in this world, to impose it on the whole world.

Liberalism, represented by the World Trade Center towers built like a kind of Tower of Babel in the name of achieving a universal unity of language that would remove all differences among people, had at the same time proclaimed the end of history. In these towers there is no place for politics, because everyone, before the (commonized) reason, having been made to keep in step with scientific truth and history, speaks the same language. Yet politics will be where there is differentiation.

In this context it is better understood what the "dialogue" efforts carried on for the sake of these universal ideals, while forgetting all the imperialist, colonialist past and present of the West, serve to cover up. Sayyid makes these criticisms through an interview given to CNN by Iran's former President Muhammad Khatami, in which he used Alexis de Tocqueville against American politics. He treats separately its meaning for Muslims and its meaning for Americans, who were not very pleased with these comparisons. He puts forth a very valuable and interesting effort of political hermeneutics.

Our human existence, formed by the toppling of the towers of Babel and the differentiation of people's languages that followed, is at the same time the basis of our differences and therefore of politics. A desire aimed at destroying these differences is a desire that, especially in Western history, has never been concealed, but it also gives away the essence of totalitarian attempts aimed at destroying human differences.

The red cards that are attempted to be raised in the West against Islam or other cultures, whether in the name of scientificity, great civilization, history (gheist), or universality, show with what kind of despotism liberalism, under the name of freedom, is afflicted. On the other hand, Islam's unmanageable presence against these red cards has an effect, not only at the level of violence encountered here and there but also at the philosophical level, that frustrates Western-centrism.

It is precisely for this reason that the discourse of the "clash of civilizations" represents the effort to cope with the upsetting effects of the dissolution of this Westernist discourse.