Without freedom there is no morality

The demonstrations that began after the death of a woman named Mahsa Amini, whom the Morality Police in Iran took to a center in order to "guide" her, quickly spread to all the cities of Iran. Because the internet was cut off as the protests widened, for some time no clear information has been available on the scale and developments of these protests. The expectation that these protests will lead to a regime change naturally exists in many quarters. Especially to the extent that they are perceived as an uprising against the headscarf, they whet serious Islamophobic expectations and appetites, both in Türkiye and in many parts of the world, and stir up their rhetoric.

We cannot know how and how far developments will satisfy these appetites, but it is certain that this event has produced a confusion of feelings and minds in which perceptions of Islam, morality, freedom, revolution and Iran are jumbled together.

First of all, it had long been established as a fact that, ever since Shiism became the state religion in Iran, the practice of power put forth in the name of religion has weakened rather than strengthened religion in society.

We have seen once again that a regime cannot become Islamic by calling the state "Islam," or even by placing mullahs at the head of all institutions. We say "once again" because earlier, too, the constitutions of the great majority of existing Arab countries stated that Islam is the state religion and that the source of legislation is the Sharia, and they still do. Yet there too, neither the state's religion being Islam nor these constitutional provisions makes the state or society conform to the principles and aims of Islam.

The Arab monarchies are regimes that are, in foreign policy, utterly dependent on outside powers and secular, and, in domestic policy, so despotic, corrupt, and removed from transparency, consultation, justice and respect for human rights as to be incompatible with any interpretation of Islam, regimes with no regard for merit and competence in appointments and no trace of human dignity. And all these practices can be legitimized before the masses merely by the nominal fact that the state's name is Islam, by a provision or two in the constitution, and of course by the widespread visibility of an abundance of formal religious garb, dress and worship.

This is a distortion that of course thoroughly deserves debates about what is Islamic in politics. This situation, which is completely contrary to the spirit of Islam, which is libertarian, just and centered on human rights and dignity, is at the same time the sorry state of affairs of the Islamic world.

In Iran, the change of 1979 had come with a claim of revolution, expressing precisely this distortion in the Islamic world. Although at first there were strong and hopeful emphases on values such as freedom, independence and justice against the utterly suppressed religious visibility and formalism, it soon developed toward a line that legitimized with a more intense Islamic discourse the despotism experienced in other Arab monarchies and dictatorships, and darkened toward totalitarianism.

There were many figures who said that the revolution had slid onto a line exactly opposite to the slogans it raised in its early days. Ayatollah Montazeri, who had been declared Khomeini's successor, had, while Khomeini was still alive, made very serious warnings to the effect that the revolution had deviated from its line and that nothing but slogans had been produced in the time that had passed. But these warnings got him removed from the position of successor as well.

The practice that Iran has put forth in the name of Islam is undoubtedly an experience from which very instructive and important lessons can be drawn for contemporary Islamic movements. Indeed, this experience, in which great hopes were invested at first, became within a very short time the subject of serious criticism by Muslim intellectuals as well.

The Iranian model, which in a short time re-established its ties with the Persian state mentality through the ideology of the mullahs and as a nation-state, is of course not the destiny of a style of Islamic politics. All the mainstream Islamic movements that I know of began, in a very short time, to put serious theoretical and organic distance between themselves and this style of politics.

However, the anti-Islam circles in the West have always very much liked to see Iran, with its bad, oppressive, formalistic practices, in the position of representing Islam. This is something that fed their anti-Islam prejudices. Just as they were very fond of ISIS for exactly this reason.

Although the Iranian Revolution bears the name of Islam, and although it positioned itself against the US and Israel as chief enemies, all of the US's Middle East policies served only to strengthen the Iranian regime. Moreover, not only has Iran had no effective struggle against Israel and the US, its official enemies, but with its expansion policies carried out in every part of the Islamic world it has caused only the shedding of Muslim blood.

While in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon Iran's sectarian policies have cost the lives of millions of Muslims, in Azerbaijan it has forgotten even its sectarian line and has not held back from following a perhaps anti-Türkiye policy.

No one can say that the imposition of the headscarf in Iran has had an effect that strengthened either the philosophy or the religious meaning of the headscarf, or its standing in practice. On the contrary, imposing the headscarf on people by force has seriously cooled people toward both the headscarf and Islam. The gradual weakening of Islam in daily life is a reaction by the people in Iran against a regime, which they identify with corruption and oppression, identifying itself with Islam. Today, in 43 years, despite all its Islamic claims and appearances, Iran has produced a society in which deism, atheism and secularism rival those of European countries.

Just as forcing people to wear the headscarf has no Islamic side whatsoever, it is a fact everyone sees that in practice in Iran it has led to the development of a serious reaction against the headscarf. There is no difference between the headscarf ban that the Kemalists imposed for years in Türkiye and forcing people to wear the headscarf. Indeed, Türkiye never chose to move from one tyranny to another.

No rule of Islam can be forcibly imposed on people in today's society. Moral and religious acts depend, first of all, on the condition of freedom. One who has no freedom has no morality either.

There is no virtue in what someone does because he has to do it. Yet an Islamic politics is, first of all, a virtuous politics, a politics carried out for virtues. And the basic condition of virtue is freedom.