The civilianization of the desires to nationalize Islam

Until the days of February 28, throughout the entire Republican period, while the emphasis on Turkish Islam was carried out entirely as a project of the secularist state policy, the Islamist reaction coming from society in return relied on a more universal claim, feeling and horizon of Islam. A "religion that will serve our purposes," in place of a religion that we would listen to, be open to, and that could change and correct us, was rather a part of the state's desire for power. This search of the state for "nationalizing religion" reached its limits, but this time it opened the way for the "self-admiration" and the exaltation of a "religious interpretation peculiar to us" that developed, based on Turkey's relative successes, among precisely those segments that had reacted against these interventions of the state.

The fact that, with the relative withdrawal of the state's policy on this subject, the discourse of Turkish Islam has been taken over by civil elements is a subject that needs to be dwelt upon. We can say that a success achieved politically, and the relative improvement of political and economic conditions in the country, also had an effect in this. The AK Party's coming to power in 2002 under the leadership of its charismatic leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, its settling the account of February 28 and leaving it behind, and its achieving important gains in the name of religious freedoms and then in the name of the country's development is a great blessing, but instead of fulfilling the thanks due for this blessing, a strong feeling also developed of being seized by the arrogance of it.

Without doubt, compared with other Islamic countries, there is no Islamic country as advanced as Turkey in terms of Islamic freedoms, the better representation of Islam, and the better safeguarding of human rights and dignity. Today Turkey has in effect become the center of the whole Islamic world in this regard.

Of course this does not mean that the rulers of the Islamic countries in question also accept this centrality. Indeed, to the extent that Turkey takes up the cause of the issues of Islam, it even meets with hostility from these countries. But we can observe that a serious distance has also formed between the peoples and the rulers of these countries, and that Muslim peoples have turned their faces toward Turkey. The fact that 5 million people who have had to flee because of oppression in their own countries have adopted Turkey as a refuge bears witness to this in practice. Moreover, the practice put forward in Turkey in the AK Party period and under Erdoğan's leadership during the Arab Spring process served an inspiring function as a model. After the Arab Revolutions overthrew their dictators one by one, in their quest for the new order they would build, they very often mentioned something called the "Turkey Model." The model was of course the political interpretation of Islam put forward by the AK Party. On this subject, though Arab revolutionaries possessed a far richer intellectual accumulation, they could express a search for a model without displaying any complex.

In return, it seems that a success achieved through politics by way of the AK Party made some people dizzy after a while and began to feed a peculiar sense of superiority. It is a strange situation, a matter of claiming at the most improbable place a success that does not directly belong to oneself, and suffering indigestion from it.

The reason we say "that does not belong to them" is that those who voice these discourses have in fact kept their distance from politics from the start. This is the picture of the fact that those who belittled politics with an approach that regarded politics as the devil's work, in the periods when the state in Turkey was determined to destroy religion entirely, did not hold back from claiming the gains realized through politics like spoils, ahead of everyone. When one looks at the political records and genealogies of those who set themselves apart from the ummah in general by saying "Anatolian 'Irfan'" and "Hanafi-Maturidi interpretation," this picture appears in high resolution.

Yet what gave them the psychological courage for this superiority is the gains that politics provided for Turkey. Otherwise, what situation could have allowed those who thought in the name of Islam during the February 28 period or before it to put on airs of superiority over any Arab country? In that period, what difference could Turkish Islam have had that would have enabled it to put on airs of superiority over the interpretation of Islam in Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Algeria or any other Islamic country?

Once the subject is tied to success in this way, the failure of Islamic political practices in other countries is of course tacitly put forward as well. What Islamic thoughts and feelings motivated the peoples who rose up during the Arab Spring process? Whatever they were, since they failed at the end of the day, their understanding of religion must have been wrong too!

The haste in this inference, it is clear, badly ignores both the political-sociological conditions of Turkey and the political-sociological conditions of the Arab world. It ignores the solidarity shown against the Arab Spring by the Arab autocratic regimes and the so-called advanced democratic regimes of the world, and the unprecedentedly ruthless interventions and conspiracies aimed at suppressing the will of the Arab peoples through this solidarity. Is it not worth examining what kind of satisfaction is provided by the sense of superiority displayed by drawing from this the conclusion that the Arab peoples' interpretations of Islam are inferior?

Tying a claim of truth to a success that has been granted for one reason or another is an ordinary form of reasoning, and in fact, through the arrogance it causes, it removes one just as far from the truth. History is full of examples in which those who were in the right were subjected to oppression and had to pay very heavy prices (that is, were apparently unsuccessful).

A community's being subjected to oppression, its meeting with resistance, even oppression, and being defeated in realizing its ideals in the world does not of course show that they are wrong. Throughout history even the number of prophets who saw success or fulfillment in the world is very small. Success is being unable to give up the claim of truth at the price of being defeated. Wars are lost not when one is defeated, but when one comes to resemble the enemy.

In this regard, Islamic thought and stance are represented not by those who, with the worldly successes they have attained and the civilizations they have founded, soon adopt the comfort and compromise of a settled way of life that opens toward dissipation and corruption, but by those who, on their way to the gallows, can cry out to their oppressors that they will outlive their executioners.