The question of the Perception of the Age

Since the nineteenth century, a great many Muslims have said a great deal about both the diagnosis and identification of the inertia to which the Islamic world has been subjected in the modern world and the way out of that inertia. Among what has been said there have been views that were highly horizon-opening and very much on target concerning the diagnosis and the path to a cure. But probably none has been bolder, or has touched Muslim hearts more, indeed shaken and awakened them, than the famous lines of Mehmet Akif Ersoy: "Taking our inspiration directly from the Qur'an, we must have Islam speak to the comprehension of the age."

Before these lines Akif says, "Can this religion's needs still be met by works seven hundred years old? Never," and after them he also says, "This cannot be done with empty claims; it requires knowledge. I see no man of that capacity; you show me one?" In this he was in fact saying that knowing the path of diagnosis and cure is one thing, while carrying it out is another, that in the end it requires a will, an initiative and a competence, and thus that a bare diagnosis never suffices either.

Of course, for years these words of Akif have become one of the important slogans of Turkish Islamic thought, and, beyond a slogan, they have of course made some people think seriously and have motivated them.

Many circles, however, have stumbled on the expression "the comprehension of the age." What might Akif have meant by "having Islam speak to the comprehension of the age"? There is a circle that asks this question with a suspicion, with an intellectual prying, which almost brings matters to the point of accusing Akif of taking the well-known comprehension of the age as a base and trying to fit Islam to it.

The truth is that, whatever anyone says, the matter of comprehension is in fact an important subject that contemporary Islamic thought must confront thoroughly. Do different centuries have different comprehensions? Must the difference between these comprehensions also produce a differentiation in the discourse of Islam?

These lines of Akif, not only because of their literary value but also because of all the positions that the person and struggle of Akif represent for contemporary Islamism, can be an important starting point for debates on the nature of the encounter between human comprehension and revelation. Those who criticize Mehmet Akif for giving more credit than necessary to the comprehension of the age, indeed for being a reformist because of this, arrive at this conclusion, probably also knowing his approaches to Abduh and Afghani. Yet Akif is not a person who would follow every view of the persons in question blindly; moreover, even where he refers to them he does not hold back from criticizing them, but that is a separate matter and needs to be dealt with separately.

As for the matter of the comprehension of the age, there is this assumption implicit in the criticisms on this subject: The comprehension of our age is distant from the age in which the Qur'an was revealed both in time and in religious understanding, and the only way of making a comprehension speak the Qur'an is to conform to that comprehension.

Yet the question of why "making comprehension say something" is thought necessarily to mean "conforming to the comprehension" is not even asked. Moreover, did the Qur'an do something different in the period when it was revealed? Did it not, in that period too, for example, have Islam speak first to the comprehension of the people of Mecca, then of Medina, and later of the wider worlds? In the end there is a human comprehension that is addressed by the Qur'an. There is no form of communication or process of understanding that makes it possible for people to renounce their comprehension at first instance when they are addressed by the Qur'an. Every generation, every century, and up to a point every individual, has its own mortal comprehension, and the Qur'an in the end addresses this mortal comprehension. In the end it is stated in the Qur'an that a messenger who speaks the truth "in the tongue of his people" was sent to every people. This does not mean that the truth or the word of truth is changed; it means that, within that language and comprehension, the equivalent of that word is expressed in the most suitable language.

When this share of change is not known, the human interpretations of the word of truth of one period are sanctified for other times and put in its place. To see this plain fact, one of course need not accept the claim of the historicists that much of the content of the Qur'an is entirely bound to the historical period in which it was revealed and says nothing to us for the present. But the fact that the Qur'an was revealed by God, the possessor of absolute knowledge, who is not bound by time, history and social contexts, does not mean that all those who are addressed by it have an absolute comprehension.

The truth of the matter is that even among the first-period Muslims it is not possible to assume complete equality among the different individual comprehensions addressed by the Qur'an. Of course, there was a difference in effect in the minds and hearts addressed by the Qur'an then too, and across the many historical differences in between there has been far more. For that reason, emphasizing the historical conditions of the comprehensions that are addressed by the Qur'an and that will in the end speak Islam is something different from the historicist approach, and its importance can never be ignored.

Interestingly, in fact, those who criticize the mission of "having Islam speak to the comprehension of the age" end up, probably without realizing it, assuming a kind of "super-comprehension," ahistorical, asocial, always ready to be addressed by the Qur'an, functioning like a tabula rasa (a blank slate that records what it perceives as it is). In this case they themselves would need to make no effort at all to have these comprehensions accept Islam. It is bound to be the case that this indifference toward getting Islam accepted by comprehensions meets up with an unavoidable apoliticism and inactivity in the name of Islam. It is, in a sense, an unjust position of absoluteness assumed by human beings in the name of Islam, which is an absolute source of knowledge.

Yet what Akif speaks of is not fitting Islam to that comprehension as it finds it, but making it speak Islam. A comprehension that speaks Islam will not speak without becoming Muslim, that is, it will change. And in the end the comprehension that will speak Islam is the comprehension of this age. Otherwise, what business could we have with other ages?