Views of Islamophobia from my homeland in the new year

What we need most urgently, as a nation, in the new year is to secure the integrity and health of our social body. The habits we have inherited from the past to the present, or which, while inheriting them, we have contributed even further to building up and consolidating instead of changing and correcting, unfortunately do not look promising in this respect. We had said that turning even the smallest matter into an occasion for cursing one another and spewing rancor and hatred continues to be a part of our political discourse and culture.

Positioning ourselves against one another provides an easier comfort than hearing and understanding something from one another. Perhaps this is the nature of politics, even of sociality. Wherever there are human beings, there is discord, there is dispute, conflict, rivalry, envy and the inability to tolerate one another's good fortune, and this suppresses the more fundamental human trait that we call intimacy.

The quality of man's being a "caliph" on earth implies being in "discord" with one another more than it implies being the image of the Creator. Perhaps the real meaning implicit in the noble verse is this, and God knows best.

Western humanism conceived of man as a super-being, but in its own political practice it never encountered, on earth, this man whom it had raised to the heavens. On the contrary, it deemed every kind of inhuman treatment fit for the man it did encounter on earth, under the very influence of these humanist philosophies. Because humanist thought, going round and round, fed man's self-admiration, self-sufficiency and disdain for need. And the practice of this self-sufficiency and disdain served to legitimize the violence that those who are aware of their humanism exercise against those who are not. For that reason, modernity, as a project of the humanist Enlightenment, whether completed or not, became the source of the most oppressive, exclusionary, racist, totalitarian, fascistic and genocidal political practices recorded in history. The deaths in a single world war rivaled the number of people who died in all the wars of the whole of human history. We do not even go into what happened when the realization of modernity as a project advanced a little further and the Second World War was entered.

Although Muslims have existed in the last century as a very numerous population, they bear no responsibility for what takes place on the world stage. A century ago, with the defeat and burial in history of the Ottoman State, Muslims lost their position as an effective agent in the world. Despite their numerous population, growing larger every day, they are barred from taking a role in world politics.

Despite this, the lands in which they live never found peace and continued to be the arena of wars among the dominant states. Looking at the current picture today, the great majority of the conflict zones in the world are Muslim lands, and responsibility for this is placed on Muslims. Yet in none of these regions do Muslims hold governing responsibility in their capacity as Muslims.

On the contrary, in the great majority of these countries, a far heavier form of the Islamophobia that we suffer from in Western countries is displayed. Rulers who fear Islam and hate Muslims are today the most important problem of the Islamic world. Because this fear turns around and leads to violence and repression, and produces justifications of legitimacy for dictatorial governments. Today, the great majority of Islamic countries find their legitimacy before their Western masters in the Islamophobic discourses that they set in motion in their own countries.

In fact, a much simpler expression of this machinery is this: the secular or secularist ruling elites of the country work plainly like branches of the occupying powers. There can be no other name for trying to sell the religion, faith and culture of one's own people to the West as a danger. This is where, in many countries of the Islamic world today, the ruling elite is positioned between its people and Western hegemony.

None of the justifications put forward against the headscarf and religious education on February 28 and before could have had the slightest legitimacy among its people, its nation, within an independent country. All of these justifications drew the power they needed solely and exclusively from the colonial powers whose voluntary representatives they were. They continue to expect strength from their alliances with the same powers. To whom, to which office, to what authority do you think they report religious education for small children as a deviation from the path, as a "danger"?

That they can still put forward all these discourses with a more nationalist, even independence-minded, chatter only gives away the origin of the current nationalist discourse, and nothing else.

Is it not related to the siege from which we have still not fully recovered that in every analysis in which we speak of the importance of the integrity of the body of the nation we arrive at this point? Given that this siege first clouds the mind, and while inventing a new religion called Anatolian Islam, a new reference and an excessive range of tolerance, it fires its most intolerant and most merciless salvos against religious education, the most basic means of self-reproduction for a religion?

Is this really confusion, or is it a discourse that muddles heads while knowing exactly what it is doing? We need to look into it.