"Pioneers of the Islamic Movement"

Ramadan is the month of the Qur’an, a time of fasting, of giving (infaq), of spiritual retreat (i‘tikaf), a time of striving to know and comprehend the other in his otherness, a time of contemplation and of turning back upon oneself to discover oneself…

With this approach, let us hope to live a full and fulfilling Ramadan.

When we speak of reading in Ramadan, above all else one must read the Qur’an abundantly. The Qur’an is the one and only book that will guide us in these discoveries and lead us to right guidance. But within its guidance, we must also set out on discoveries directed toward ourselves.

If I were to prepare a reading list for Ramadan, these days I would put at the very top of the list Hayreddin Karaman Hoca’s book “İslami Hareket Öncüleri,” the 5th volume of which has recently come to light, while also pointing to the drawback that could arise from describing the book as one that is remembered and read only in Ramadans. The book has a distinctive definition of and approach to Islamism, one with which I agree to the very end. It is therefore a book that must absolutely be taken into account first of all in every academic study on Islamism.

We know that the academic and intellectual literature on Islamism has reduced it to an ideological or political movement that emerged with the 19th century in opposition to Western imperialism or modernity, and, in the case of Turkey, to a newfangled style of politics alongside Westernism, Turkism and Ottomanism.

It must be said at once that this reduction is incapable of explaining or understanding either the nature of Islamism or its coming back to life, again and again, in other grounds and in other guises after dying. When Islamism is reduced to “a reactive movement” and to certain historical conditions, then once the conditions that gave birth to it disappear, its words, tied to those conditions, are deemed to have become invalid as well, and it is regarded as having completed its role on the stage as a single line in a dialogue belonging to one time and one occasion.

Of course, to count it so is very comforting, very pleasing for some. After all, the psychological relief that arises in certain people when Islamism, as an objection, is removed from the scene, and the fact that the stance and claims of Islamist discourse begin to hover over them like a ghost, are one and the same thing.

It is quite clear that the death of Islamism serves, for some, a rehabilitating function, like the whistling one does when passing a graveyard. To those who announce a death in their eagerness for relief, what could it mean to say that Islamism has not in fact died, that it cannot die so long as Muslims exist, that it is a dimension that completes the Muslim’s existence, other than putting a stop to this effort at rehabilitation?

Truly, for those who try to understand the situation beyond these psychological problems, Karaman Hoca’s approach of course carries Islamism beyond being something specific to the 19th century and a movement of reaction to the West. In doing so, the book does not merely offer those who research Islamism a first-hand self-description. It also offers Muslims who today travel the same road a strong historical consciousness. It tries to create an awareness of the place of their own movements, actions and understandings within a continuity in history.

When our Prophet addressed the Quraysh and challenged the idols that also constituted their history, he ascribed himself to Adam, Noah, Idris, Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Salih, Hud, Joseph, Moses and Jesus, and called all of them “my ancestors.” Yet there was no lineage or tribal bond between these names and the Prophet, but the cause of tawhid that all of them represented linked them all to one another in another genealogy. The pioneers of the cause of Islam after the Prophet likewise have a genealogy that will never be severed. Treating Islamism as a few reactive attempts at interpretation that crawled out of a tree hollow, out of the bosom of modernity, can of course comfort some people, but all that does is make possible and habitual their experience of encountering Islamisms in every period as though seeing a ghost. On the other hand, Islamism today also needs to know its own genealogy, and Karaman Hoca is trying to set out this genealogy in the soundest manner.

The spirit of the genealogy comes from this description that Karaman Hoca expresses in the preface to the first volume: “Renewing what has grown old (tajdid) and correcting what has become corrupted (islah) has existed in Islamic culture and Islamic life since the earliest period of Islam. The order that grew old and corrupted in the period we mention is the order applied in the periods of sultanate and despotism, which, even if its source is divine, is human in terms of its interpretation and application. While other ideologies opposed taking Islam as the fundamental source of order, the scholars and thinkers called Islamists maintained that salvation lies in Islam, but that interpretations and practices that are human and have by now grown old, or have been wrong from the outset, even if they have been based on Islam, must be changed (renewed and reformed). That being so, the Islamists are nothing but the new name that the mujaddids and muslihs we know took in a certain period, and what they do is tajdid, is islah.”

The idea of tajdid is not a new idea, but it is a measure aimed at always remaining new, at saying new things, at saying ancient truths in a new language and with a new spirit. When severed from its context, even the strongest truths are bound to meet with indifference and become entirely ineffective. Truths that have become traditionalized and cut off from their spirit, leaving only their residue behind, can no longer continue their first effects in people’s conscience and awareness.

For new circumstances one must say new things, or one must readjust truths suited to the most ordinary human conditions that are supposed to be new. To know truly what has been left in yesterday and what must be said now, besides being in a strong bond with the Book of Guidance, one must possess a sound consciousness of Tawhid and a sense of reality.

With this consciousness, Karaman Hoca’s genealogy study of 100 persons, which he identified for the Islamic movement or for the history of tajdid and islah of Islam, has for now reached 5 volumes.

In these five volumes he has determined the place of 32 persons with his own distinctive approach. While joining in the wish “may Allah grant its completion,” let us look a little more closely at the book.