The cause, politics and path of friends

Yeni Şafak · YASİN AKTAY - The cause, the politics and the path of friends

Where comradeship takes the place of friendship, friendship too is inevitably subjected to intense pressure. How will the "comrade-friend," who is obliged to set his friends right on the path of politics, pay his debt to the virtues suspended for the sake of the goal, to the virtues that are the very reason for friendship?

However much we may separate friendship from comradeship, every politics of friendship includes a comradeship. A human life is not one whose only aim is friendship, one that begins and ends with friends. There is a journey of life lived together with friends. Making enemies is a requirement of making friends. For friendship is in itself an alliance of the virtuous against the evils that exist in the world. But in the politics of friendship the target of this alliance is not the wicked but the wickednesses. The wicked would not do it if they knew; so the aim is to inform people, to show friendship in all its positivity.

This is not a legend that takes place in a void, but points to a life that takes place within a history, within a society and among people. A path, a process and a struggle. That is why the path is itself the world in which friendship emerges and is tested. To trivialize this path and bring the imagined goal to the fore, to postpone all the rights of the path to that goal, makes error unavoidable for friends. If every path is permissible for reaching the goal, the right of the path is trampled, and falling into disputes with one's fellow travelers becomes unavoidable.

"I did not come for the cause, my business is love / The friend's house is hearts, I came to build hearts," says Yunus Emre. Kenan Göçer, in his Philosophy of Friendship, drawing on this saying of Yunus, concludes that one who loves cannot have a cause, and urges us to think through the opposition between comradeship and friendship on that basis: To love is to lose the claim, that is, the cause. The love Yunus points to as the real business is focused on the present tense, while the cause fixes its eyes on the future tense. Friends focus on principle, comrades on the goal. In love the parties are ends for one another, whereas comrades can be sacrificed for the cause to reach its goal. For the cause that places the goal beyond, everything becomes instrumentalized. For friends there is nowhere to arrive at beyond the friends. For comrades the path comes first. For friends, the friend comes both first and last.

When the goal comes to the fore, the path is neglected, and friends turn into comrades who become instruments for reaching the goal. We must remember and understand that the path is itself the destination. It is customary for all political movements to postpone their ideal virtuous conduct to destinations, goals, revolutions and utopias to be reached one day. Until that goal, that destination is reached, certain ethical behaviors that ought to be realized are suspended. Because the place where they are truly to be applied is not here but there, at the destination, at the time when the goal is realized.

Ethical behaviors that are constantly postponed on account of this or that extraordinary circumstance also corrupt the relationship of friends with one another. When political comrades accept this corrupted relationship with one another for the sake of this goal, they have moved away from giving friendship its due and have killed one another. Friends who ally in falsehood destroy both friendship and themselves.

Yet the Islamic stance and life is not a life whose future can be postponed, but a stance and a life that can be put forth in its most ideal form right today. There is no extraordinary situation that would require postponing any rule of ethics. The things you cannot do today because you lack the power are in any case things you are not obliged to do. The evil you see, you change with your hand; if you cannot, with your tongue; and if you cannot even do that, by hating it in your heart, and you determine your side in favor of your friends. In doing so you do not fear the blame of those who blame, you do not shrink from neighborhood pressure, and you stand with the truth without anxiety about being left alone, being shamed or being isolated.

Let us note aside that the words expressing all the forms of understanding and living Islam are related to the path. Mezhep, which expresses juristic or doctrinal processes, means the way traveled. Let us also record beside it the question of whether these are paths opened by traveling on and on, or the traveling of a path that already exists. Tarikat is itself a path, as though a path laid out and defined beforehand even if it were not traveled. Shariah means a broad road, an avenue, a main road which wider segments must pass through.

If there is mezhep, tariq, shariah, a path, there are also fellow travelers. But for the path of religion, as a perfect politics of friendship in all these senses, to turn into a body of principles suspended for the sake of goals is a complete degeneration. It is well known that a great portion of the Jews, who were commanded not to kill, not to steal, not to consume interest, not to lie, and to be good to their neighbor, are famous today and in the past for doing all of these. In fact when asked, they too say they obey all these commands, but only when ideal circumstances arise in which they obey them. And the ideal circumstance is the closed communal relations among the Jews. Since the rest of people have no share of the Book and are not friends, there is no ethical responsibility toward them either. Every kind of lie can be told to them, they can be killed, interest can be taken from them and their property can be seized.

As we have said before on another occasion, this trait of the Jews narrated in the Qur'an is not narrated solely in order to vilify them. On the contrary, because the possibility of Muslims themselves falling into the same error is foreseen, it is narrated as a warning. That is, here too the subject is not the Jews in themselves, but an evil that can always emerge in similar groups, styles of politics and movements. How open the path is to being walked by many people, and how ready it is to embrace people as friends, is very important here.

A journey that grants its travelers the privilege of being chosen is itself corrupting. A journey that advises its travelers to suspend all virtues toward others among themselves is bound to lead astray. Everyone who absolutely bars others from this path is outside this path.