A time will come when we listen to Said Halim Pasha

We said that the Muslim subject of Said Halim Pasha, his Prince, has very serious differences from the subject design of the socialists. First of all, the understanding of history is very different. However much Muslims are subjects, they are not exempt from the laws of social change. Certain weaknesses, crises and attacks to which they have been exposed for centuries ultimately make them subject to a history in which God is the absolute subject.

There must certainly be an assessment of how we came to this state, and it is possible to make it in an extremely realistic, objective and sensible way. Indeed, however bad the present situation may be, there is certainly a way out of it. For with every hardship there is ease, and this is a tremendous horizon and source of motivation in which the Muslim subject unifies his own agency with the existence of the Absolute Will.

But the responsibility of this agency is ultimately only as great as the possibilities and limits granted to it. One must stay away from the arrogance of making designs of history, utopian and historicist, and turning what is impossible today into a responsibility. For Islam has no Zion; on the contrary, Islam is a religion of hijra. In order to change, the human being must first change himself. The risk is great that the change we stubbornly demand from where we stand will ultimately absolutize our own historical situation, or a utopian design that has emerged from our own situation, and turn it into a Zion. Muslims are not after a Zionism that would reverse the flow of history. The stubborn side of Zionism, which works against the peace of all humanity, in any case produces no good for humanity; on the contrary, it has no result other than taking revenge on all humanity and making all people serve itself.

In itself, history cannot be turned back. Obstinacy displayed against the flow of history is in fact a crime committed against the peace of all humanity, and its result brings political and social disasters for all people. This of course does not mean that the human being must surrender to the flow of history as it is.

In essence, rather than regarding himself as responsible for the flow of history, the Muslim subject must identify the duty that falls to him within the given history, acquire the knowledge of the present state (ilm al-hal), grasp the responsibility appropriate to it and fulfill it. The rest is left to God, the true owner of history, the only being who encompasses the whole of history.

Utopias are also contemporary versions of Zionism. In fact, this could be a very meaningful starting point precisely for thinking about Said Halim Pasha and, through him, about some of the characteristics of the Islamist Prince.

Said Halim Pasha's realism in question perhaps stemmed from the responsibility of governance he undertook, or perhaps this realism added a distinct merit to him in the responsibility of governance he took on. But most important is that the performance he displayed, even if for a short period, by shouldering the responsibility of power as an Islamist can constitute a distinct reference value for Islamist thought and politics.

There is no happy fulfillment in this Islamist political practice. That is, there is no aspect of it that, by realizing all of one's ideals, perhaps one's utopia, in a practice of power, creates a model for an ideal Islamic governance. But with this practice the Pasha has perhaps opened a meaningful field for asking whether there is a necessity for Islamist politics to create such a model.

Fulfillment (mürüvvet) is precisely the happy ending that, from the narrative of a movement that has reached its goal, gives us the prospect of a divan (kerevet) to sit upon. Yet life goes on with all its problems, its struggles, the endless quarrels of friend and foe. Neither does anyone reach his goal nor does anyone mount his divan.

In such a life, the conflict between the good and the evil opens new stages for every generation, indeed for every moment of every generation, for the right roles to be played.

In the stages that confronted Said Halim Pasha as an Islamist prince, there is the grand vizierate responsibility of a great state that is collapsing. The state he governs is, by identity and quality, an Islamic state. As an Islamic state, it is of course politically responsible too for the backwardness of its peoples and of the Islamic world, and for the crises it diagnoses, and must seek remedies for their recovery. On top of this there is the great earthquake that world balances were experiencing, the world war, and the weight of having been forced to enter this war.

As an Islamist prince, the Pasha has neither time to lose in nostalgia, nor the luxury of consoling and spoiling his psychology with it, nor the madness of sowing barren utopias of raw dreams into the future. What he can produce as an Islamist with his hand under the stone can only be the knowledge of the present state, and this leads him to the most realistic, most sociological assessments possible.

With this characteristic, the Pasha constitutes, by his stance, an answer to approaches that deem it obligatory to see Islamism only as an ideology peculiar to opposition.

Islamism can have a thousand and one states. To put it in the language of Yunus or Nesimi: sometimes it becomes power and looks to the way of ruling people with justice; sometimes, while in power, it opposes the more hidden, deeper powers; for a moment it opposes itself; for a moment, with its stance, it challenges the oppressors and draws their wrath, becomes oppressed; for a moment it comes and challenges the world and claims to give order to the world; sometimes, seeing that the entire world is nothing but idle play and amusement, it withdraws into itself, dies before dying, and is seized by the deepest states of asceticism through fasting, itikaf and seclusion. These states, which can be seen in the person of Said Halim Pasha as a typical Islamist, can constitute a good example for rethinking Islamism in the context of exactly these debates.

The two-day Said Halim Pasha Symposium of the Zeytinburnu Municipality, with all its participants, was a good occasion for thinking about all these subjects, a veritable feast of ideas. I heartily congratulate Mayor Ömer Arısoy, who has made a serious difference in this regard even at a time when municipalities have rather neglected cultural activities, and Asım Öz, the valued man of thought and action who practically carried the symposium.