Where can we find the sincerity we have lost?

Sincerity. It is at once a very familiar feeling and, like friendship, a virtue whose absence we complain about a great deal. Everyone surely has experiences with sincerity, their own particular definitions or perceptions of it. But somehow, when this concept is mentioned, many people may sigh over it as a value that has been lost in our age.

It is precisely this sigh that reminds us, and makes us feel, what kind of virtue sincerity is at its depths. In a world where everything has been commercialized, bound to measure and protocol, where rationalization and bureaucratic rules are thought to be sufficiently redemptive, where interests are placed above everything and almost sanctified, sincerity can only be recalled with a nostalgic sigh. That is why this sigh is thought of as a lost value, a memory of an innocence belonging to years gone by.

It is something too much for a world that we have witnessed becoming thoroughly soiled as we grew up. In a world we have built by taking our revenge, for not finding it in others, by negating it even more, sincerity is not merely too much; when we see it, it can even have a disturbing effect on us. Yet that discomfort is our reaction to a call inviting us to return to ourselves.

Like friendship, sincerity is among those feelings that do not demand much definition, but are felt and lived. When one sets out to define it, it is bound to rules, deviates from its natural fluidity, and turns into a formality rather than a feeling. Sincerity, heartfelt candor, is a person feeling and behaving toward the other as it comes from within, without any calculation. Being genuine, one's inside and outside being one, closeness, even friendship.

In fact, sincerity does not always require friendship. A person may be sincere, or display sincere behavior, both toward friends and toward those who are not friends. But there can be no friend who is not sincere. The essence of friendship is sincerity.

As long as the sincerity shown toward non-friends does not amount to a betrayal of friends, it does not contradict friendship either. After all, there is no way to be everyone's friend. For friendship, especially friendship based on virtues, whether it wants to or not, also makes enemies of those who are against those virtues. In that case, sincerity toward the enemy would be a betrayal of the friend.

The best virtue that can be shown toward the enemy is therefore often not sincerity, but at most honesty. Even so, the conduct shown even toward the enemy sets itself apart from others to the extent that it contains within itself a sincerity toward its own values and its own word. In the attitude of the Prophet and his companions toward their enemies this sincerity was so dominant that, at the end of the day, all of them let themselves be carried away by the attractive flow of this sincerity, and all of them joined a new circle of friendship in which sincerity prevailed.

In a sense, the proclamation of Islam is an invitation to re-establish the sincerity that has been exhausted and spent among people. It is the setting in motion of an energy that has become material and reified, and the restoration of its fluidity. Thus, in an absolute sense, not even a fixed and unchanging enemy remains. The feeling toward the enemy who stands before you is in essence not hatred, but, with sincerity, a feeling of compassion and tenderness. The enmity of people who came into being from the same essence most probably stems from their not knowing. The bodies they carry have turned into corpses devoid of the meaning of spirit. Yet the spirit of those who have turned dead while living responds in a believer's way, reviving to the warmth of sincerity. Like Umar, who first resisted stubbornly because he did not know, and then, through the warmth of that sincerity, turned into one of the chosen companions; like all the people of the Quraysh.

Kenan Göçer, who wrote Friendship Philosophy, says so, attributing it to Wilhelm Schmid: "Matter, or reification, is the cooling of energy. We can define cooled energy as matter. In that case, in a social context, friendship is the state of human relations not cooling, or the fluidity of the spirit. This fluidity of the spirit can be called sincerity. And every social structure that lies outside friendship is the cooled state of human relations. Naturally, fluidity does not accumulate; it begins to be counted and accumulated only as it cools and becomes matter."

In fact, in this respect sincerity is an energy that is as conductive and as motive as it is fluid. That the essence of religion is sincerity is the best indication of this. The religious feeling and religious conduct require everything that sincerity evokes. There can be no piety with a half-hearted faith. The most obvious characteristic of behavior done without believing, merely out of social necessities or for show before others, is a lack of sincerity, and its counterpart in terms of religion is hypocrisy.

Moreover, the weakening of religion also means the weakening of sincerity. If sincerity is not felt in a religious person, there is a problem in that religiosity. Another dimension can be added to theories of secularization from here as well. Sincerity cannot be the subject of statistics, it cannot be tied to statistical figures, but neither can you measure religiosity without feeling sincerity and without taking it into account. The statistical figures that establish secularization only give the measure of the religious rituals and behaviors in which people take part with certain periodicity and in certain numbers; they cannot measure the sincerity and genuineness in these behaviors. The proportion of people who pray and fast merely because it is a social and political trend cannot be determined by statistical research.

Secularization, that is, worldliness, is a person's having no interest, knowledge or belief regarding the hereafter, or, if there is such belief, its not producing in him any fluidity toward the hereafter. It is all of one's interest getting stuck, frozen, materialized in this world. This materialization alienates a person from the other world and renders his friends meaningless and unnecessary. The horizon, the depth and the fluidity of relations with people are lost, and sincerity disappears. When sincerity goes, what remains is a soulless, heartless, merciless world. Marx had said so, and he was right, but he could not see, could not show, the way out.

Sincerity is perhaps the only way for a person to overcome, before anything else, his alienation from himself. With friends, in a friendly manner, with heartfelt candor toward oneself, toward one's Lord, toward people…