The truthful friend

Yeni Şafak · Yasin Aktay - The truthful friend (Siddiq)

The Prophet, the teacher of friendship, was never, ever a politician who told people something he himself did not believe. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky has a long analysis of how leading figures who change the world in line with their own ideals and goals behave toward people. While marching toward the goals they have set, they need people's support. That is why they try to persuade people. Behind this effort at persuasion, it is impossible for there to be a relationship of friendship between the leader and those he addresses. Because those who follow the leader are in fact merely an instrument of that political leader's goals.

That is why politicians do not hesitate in the least to waste the lives of many people on this journey. Discourses of heroism, veterancy or martyrdom serve in this sense only to motivate the subjects who can walk the path being walked.

They have no real counterpart. Dostoevsky includes the Prophet Muhammad in this analysis too. But how obvious it is that he did not know him and had never listened to him. Had he listened, perhaps he would have seen the difference between other leaders and the Prophet, and what he said about leaders could have served to underline this difference.

Indeed, in the call of the leaders of many political movements there is a trace of this kind of instrumentalization of the human being. There is no possibility of their being friends with those attached to them; they are merely instruments to be used. Friendship is precisely an obvious way of measuring how instrumental this relationship is: the Prophet(s) would be friends with those who followed them, would give them the key to friendship, and would make people partners in the truth that made them happy, ensuring that they too became happy in the same way.

What Moses sought was not a community that would make him a holder of power, but the attainment of freedom by his own people, their living in a free atmosphere in a manner befitting human dignity, their not serving one another as servants, and their reaching eternal felicity in the hereafter. Moses believed this, and shared what he believed.

When the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was in Mecca, he watched with great anguish how people's worship of nonsensical idols, and the relations of oppression, exploitation and servitude of one human being to another that they formed around belief in those idols, corrupted society and drove people out of their humanity. While people went on living in great heedlessness these conditions that estranged them from their natural disposition, he, as one who noticed and saw it, could not remain indifferent to what they were living. He could not find a friend among those people in that state; indeed he was in a state in which there was precisely no friend. Even in such a state, there was beside him a lifelong friend who felt his anguish, understood him, saw what he saw, shared his troubles, cared for him, and was with him virtually "like one soul divided between two bodies" ("Keruhin vahidin beyne cismeyni kusimet"): his wife Khadija (may God be pleased with her), and there was also Abu Bakr, who was his friend in every name and every definition.

Abu Bakr was the Prophet's friend even before the Prophet taught others the measures and the art of friendship, of being a companion (ashab). He already knew what it meant to be a friend and what friendship requires. We cannot know how much of what he knew he had learned from his friend, but it is certain that he later added much more to this knowledge.

He was such a friend that when his companion told him he had received revelation from God, he believed him without the slightest hesitation and set out with him, without blinking, on a long and thorny road.

The relationship of Muhammad (pbuh) with Abu Bakr is, without doubt, a relationship of friendship that all knowledge or philosophies of friendship will take as a reference. It is an experience whose possibility has been proven against the pessimism or gloom of "there is no friend." There it stands like a light, a principle of hope, warning Muhammad and those who believed in him against every kind of tragic impasse.

That relationship of friendship did not remain between the two; from it, compassion, mercy, wisdom, and an openness of hearing, listening, learning and seeing from one another issued to all of humanity. As virtues are shared they grow stronger, and strengthened virtues do not diminish friendships but consolidate them further.

When he says "There is an army behind that mountain heading toward you," perhaps some will really run to look whether there is an army or not, some will find it absurd and reject it, but the friend will rush to take his precautions at once, without needing to look here or there.

Muhammad (pbuh), to whom revelation came and who, on the basis of this revelation, demanded a change of all their established social, economic and cultural orders, had by now fallen in the Meccan perception to the level of a madman. In this state he was left alone, mocked, held in contempt and scorn, humiliated, and excluded, but he could not be excluded by a single friend. On top of all this he had also claimed the most impossible thing, coming with a claim that fit neither within science, nor reason, nor the horizon of any ordinary experience. One night he was raised from his bed to the Masjid al-Aqsa and from there taken up to the heavens, and many doors of knowledge were opened to him there. This was not acceptable. It was something impossible.

But is not friendship, is not faith, precisely an attitude put forth at the very moment one thinks something is impossible? The answer met by those who hoped to turn his mind against him by saying "Your friend is saying these absurdities" is one that makes a friend at the same time "siddiq" (truthful): "If he says these things, he speaks the truth." And the argument is over; whoever wishes believes, and whoever wishes does not.

Another typical event that makes the Siddiq friend live up to his name occurred in his display of belief in a report given in Surah al-Rum. When the polytheists found absurd, and even took as an opportunity, Surah al-Rum, which reported that the Romans, who had just been defeated by the Persians, would be victorious within 9 years at the latest, he made a wager with them that this event would take place. To believe enough to place such a bet in favor of the Romans is in itself an attitude that shows all the difficulty of belief. Because under the conditions of that day the Romans' victory over the Sasanians was considered impossible. Yet he had trusted his friend, and knew that this trust would not be in vain.

And what of the magnificent care the Siddiq friend showed, on the road of hijra he set out on with his companion, so that the vermin that might come out in the cave where they stopped would not harm his friend, and the way, when nothing was left to plug the last hole in which he knew a snake lived, he put his foot there without letting his friend notice?

If there is friendship, there is something more than a friend, and that is all...