The ebb and flow of worldliness and religiosity

Worldliness, that is, secularization, is not an exceptional development in the history of the world. It is hardly surprising that those who are so fond of their own secularity also extol it as a higher stage in the progress of humanity. Our noble Book says that the paths they follow have been made to appear pleasing to all people. There is a series of mechanisms that make a human being's own catastrophe look to him like paradise, pleasing and beautiful. Modern philosophy called these ideology, culture, episteme. Marx, without noticing the distortion reflected in his own mind, named this ideological delusion "the distorted reflection of reality in consciousness."

Just as a human being will eventually die, it is possible for a truth that no one can even avoid seeing to be forgotten, neglected by society, and for life to be lived as though one were going to plant a stake in this world and stay. Consider that there are so many differences that separate all human beings: cultural, ethnic, geographic, gender, history, class, status, or differences of every kind of social stratum. But there is one common feature that unites everyone, in which all these differences vanish: death. Alphonso Lingis called this "The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common" (Ayrıntı Yayınları).

Although "everyone dies alone," as Heidegger put it, everyone dies, and this is the most common thing about all of us. In contrast, forgetting death, acting as if there were no death, oppressing the other people with whom one shares this very thing, observing no right toward them, living in one's conduct toward them as if one would never be called to account after death: this is the most widespread and concrete manifestation of the secularity of humankind.

Secularization is the human being's neglecting, ignoring, even forgetting, feigning ignorance of this plain truth. If this is not jahiliyya, what is? And does a person boast of his own ignorance? Well, he does boast.

Secularism as an ideology of modernism is precisely the name of a human being boasting of his own tragedy, his own wretchedness, and of course it is not new, as it imagines itself to be.

Even if secularization has a philosophy, it is a human condition. It is the forgetting of being, the forgetting of death as the most fundamental reality of life, the human being's forgetting of his responsibilities toward others, that is, his heedlessness, and as such it is as old as humanity. Perhaps those who exalt this heedlessness and offer philosophical or sociological praise of it rise to the level of misguidance, but the essence of the matter is forgetting.

Of course Muslims cannot be exempt from the possibility or danger of this heedlessness. But when assessments are made that lead to pessimistic analyses in the finding that Muslims have become worldly, as if depicting an irreversible, one-way process, that ominous claim of secularization is given even more support.

The truth is that in the individual's world too, religion, religiosity, and concern for the hereafter have their ebbs and flows, just as worldly heedlessness does. Indeed, we have pointed to very valuable studies showing that the claim of a secular age, or the sociological secularization thesis, is not factually correct. The studies of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, which show, using the example of Europe, that even in the periods said to be the most secular the world has lived, the opposite, a growing religiosity, had developed, are of this kind.

The book "The Nature of Religion" by David Hume, one of the famous thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, puts forward a model that works on a cyclical basis and is far more explanatory against the thesis that secularization is an evolutionary development against religiosity, or monotheism against polytheism. This framework, which runs contrary to the prevailing approach in the Enlightenment era when secular values climbed to their peak, rescues from an evolutionary approach both the movements within religion itself from monotheism to polytheism and back, and the line of development between the secular and the religious across history.

As against the evolutionary positivist approach that was the dominant paradigm in the field of the history of religions, Hume, much earlier, describes transitions both among religions and within each religion from polytheism (superstition) to monotheism (scripturalism) and from there back again to polytheism. This movement allows us to discern a kind of pendulum-like change among the tendencies in the history of religions.

The developments or discourses recorded in our age as a departure from religiosity are actions and discourses that have existed from the first human being together with a religious discourse, in a state of conflict and debate with it. From time to time one has prevailed over the other and gained a relative superiority. But in no period of the world has one entirely destroyed the other. Because both the desire for secularity and the desire for religiosity are two fundamental tendencies existing within the human being.

These two tendencies sometimes swing back and forth between themselves within a society like a pendulum. Visible movements of becoming more religious or moving away from religion are seen in society. But these occur within a society as historical waves. It is not possible to identify an evolutionary movement in favor of one of them here.

Sometimes a movement of worldliness-versus-otherworldliness develops within a religion itself, in favor of one and to the detriment of the other. In that case religion, without being internalized, is simply instrumentalized in line with entirely worldly tendencies and aims. That is, instead of heeding religion's call to salvation and changing himself, the human being bends and twists religion in line with his worldly interests, distorts it, and makes religion subject to himself.

At other times a movement toward becoming religious or toward worldliness can be observed within an individual. A person is not always in the same state of mind, the same attitude. A person who is immersed in the world one day may turn to a religious state the next day, or an hour later, under the influence of an event he has lived through, news he has received, something he has seen, a message he has read. This turning may take the form of repentance or an experience of rebirth. The exact opposite can also occur. A person may emerge from the feeling of living under complete divine watch, with the sense that one day he will give an account of everything he has done, and incline toward the world.