Ignorance (Jahiliyyah)

The days of the coronavirus should give each of us a chance to reflect deeply on the meaning of our lives, on an accounting of what we have done in this life and what we could have done but did not, and on what the help we withheld from others has in fact failed to gain us and has instead cost us. We have reached a point where all the goods and possessions we have accumulated have suddenly lost all their meaning, or rather have found their true meaning.

Remember, only a few months ago, what were we saying about the Syrians and migrants who came knocking at our door? "Are we obliged to look after these people? Why are we carrying their burden while our own children go hungry? Because of the Syrians we can no longer walk the streets in Aksaray," and so on. How the meaning of those questions, those debates, that indifference has changed in the days of Corona. Once the comfort and property and goods that we counted as our own and made into a veil over our eyes were taken away, how the truth appeared clear as day.

There have been many who found Sayyid Qutb's approach, which described modern man's indifference toward God and toward people as "jahiliyya," too radical and criticized it. Because of this conceptualization he was accused of takfirism and of an uncompromising exclusivism toward people with other ideas and views. Yet Qutb, looking precisely through the window of that truth, was pointing to an indifference, a negligence, a heedlessness, a straying into which people can at times abandon themselves en masse.

By speaking of a state of jahiliyya into which Muslims themselves can fall, what he meant was in fact not takfir, but a warning to Muslims themselves not to rely on having attached themselves to Islam. In this way he explained that turning being Muslim into an acquired right, and even reducing it to an ethnic affiliation, does not accord with the spirit of Islam. That is, even if your name is Muslim, this does not guarantee that you are saved. Being Muslim is a responsibility whose price must be paid every day, every moment, with vigilance.

What matters is to live in a constant state of vigilance, because in life we are in a continual trial, and a human being has a self, psychological states, ambitions, greeds, pride, and complexes that are always ready to tempt him and drag him into heedlessness and straying.

In fact, what Sayyid Qutb did, Yunus Emre was also doing in his own language. "Knowledge is to know knowledge, knowledge is to know oneself; if you do not know yourself, what kind of reading is this? Do not say 'I have read, I have known,' do not say 'I have performed much worship'; if you do not know the Truth, it is a vain boast for nothing." To the extent that a person does not know himself, he floats at different levels of jahiliyya. When a person does not know himself, he has not known his Lord either.

Essentially, all great philosophers describe those who remain strangers to the truth they have discovered in their own way as either forgetful, or heedless, or ignorant. The line that began with Nietzsche and Heidegger and that accuses the whole Western tradition of "being sunk in a logocentric metaphysics" is today the thickest line of hermeneutic, poststructuralist and postmodern philosophies in the West. Heidegger says that all Western philosophy after Socrates is in complete heedlessness and error because it has forgotten Being and has not given it its due, and he does not stop at saying it; he does not want to hear a single word from the people attached to this philosophy. Yet no one accuses him, or Gadamer, Derrida, Rorty, Guattari, Deleuze, Caputo and others who carried his philosophy to still more radical extremes, of either takfirism or bigotry.

This is a separate matter, of course, and it would bear a great deal of discussion. Let us come to today, to the jahiliyya that, in the days of Corona, we have realized we had fallen into throughout our lives.

Let us admit that today nearly all of us, because of this calamity that has befallen us, notice our own indifference toward our lives much better, and have come closer to accepting into what kind of "jahiliyya" this indifference had sunk us.

Of course, as Qutb did not mean either, not every kind of jahiliyya is unbelief. But jahiliyya is man's living in this world, without taking the hereafter into account, with passions, ambitions and enmities as if he were never going to die.

Jahiliyya is, when those in need knock at your door in this world and ask a share of what you own, to treat them with contempt and scorn, because you really think that what you own belongs to you and you see other people's troubles as other than your own.

Jahiliyya is becoming a slave and servant to others in order to pile more on top of goods and property that you could not finish spending in your whole life.

Jahiliyya is bowing and bending for a few pennies of benefit before people who are no different from you, servants created like you.

Jahiliyya is your putting on airs of superiority over people who, like you, are servants created by God, and trying to make them your servants and exploit them.

Jahiliyya is to forget, not to know, or to act as if one does not know, that the world's resources will suffice for all the people God created.

Jahiliyya is to forget that the earth God has bestowed, and His blessings and means, are broad enough, and to suppose oneself compelled and condemned in the dungeon where one is confined, consenting to humiliation, getting used to humiliation.

So, to renew Muhammad Qutb's expression, the jahiliyya of the 20th and 21st centuries is: to boast of the science and technology one has produced, to imagine that with this technology one can nearly defy God, yet to be heedless of the possibility that the world one has built with one's own hands, that technologies, can lead to one's own catastrophe. It is, while producing, by spending the world's money, a weapons technology and industry that could kill one's enemies thousands of times over, to disregard what a tiny little virus can do in the world that one has built and that one calls, with great arrogance, "global."

Jahiliyya is precisely a state of having forgotten what Almighty God showed to Pharaoh by the hand of Moses, to Nimrod by the hand of Abraham, and to all humanity by the hands of Jesus and Muhammad.