The originality of the world we live in and the historical recurrence of secularization

People are inclined to think that the times we live in differ importantly from the times before us. Sometimes this difference is felt under a sense of exile or nostalgia at moving away from a golden age, and sometimes with a sense of superiority arising from having produced an originality, a creation, never before seen. Both attitudes reflect the human desire to see or show one's own experience as very different from that of others. And this has not been an attitude peculiar only to modern man, as is supposed. Throughout history people have had such a tendency, so that in the Noble Qur'an, in expressions that often begin with "those before you too...", it is told that earlier peoples too saw themselves as the most original people who had ever come and gone, and of course as people possessing the greatest powers, and became arrogant.

Modernism too rests on a conception of the world in which contemporary man constructs himself with great pride and a sense of superiority, and in which a different relationship with nature, man and God, with time and space, is imagined. When the components of this conception of the world are examined, it is seen that it is not something of a kind never seen in any period of history. Especially from the standpoint of religions' conceptions of the world and of man, it can readily be accepted that the kinds of people, mentalities, and attitudes toward nature and God encountered in every period of history merely recur in the context of modernity.

The idea that man sees himself as very original and different is also, from the standpoint of religious memory, a human attitude that recurs in every period of history. Even so, it cannot be ignored that each time this recurrence has a difference stemming from the originality of its actors and setting. Every sheep is hung by its own leg, and every individual human has his own originality, responsibility and individuality.

As Martin Heidegger asked in response to a criticism directed at him, "Of course there is nothing new that has not been said under the dome of the heavens, and others have said before what I say as well, but is it not new that I say it now and here?" Going a little further, we can say that it is not new for everyone or every generation to regard itself as new and original, but the way modern man regards himself as new in this modern age is entirely new.

In every period of history and in every part of the world, wherever there is human society, religion has also existed as a pattern of behavior, that is, as a sociological institution. With the existence of religion, different attitudes toward religion, for example cases in which the understanding preached by religion is rejected and another way is sought as an alternative, have always existed in parallel. Yet to count among religious traditions the hostility to religion and the overcoming of religion, and to count them peculiar to modernity, is part of modernity's claim of originality.

A secular attitude toward religion is something that has always existed in traditional societies too. The inner discourse of religion itself is in any case always in debate and conflict with secular attitudes, that is, with worldliness. Yet one of the most important dimensions characterizing the modern period has been, as Max Weber best expressed it, "the disenchantment of the world."

The disenchantment of the world, that is, seeking the cause of what happens in the world again in the world, giving up finding a cause for these occurrences outside the world, in the heavens or in the realm of the spirit... Although even this attitude characterizes modernity, it is an attitude that has always existed in every period of history wherever there is religion, alongside religion.

The "enchanted world," in Max Weber a dimension characterizing traditional society, has interestingly been a world that has no counterpart for Muslims, who make sense of the world entirely from a tawhidic perspective. For Muslims the world has never been an enchanted world, as it has been for Christians. Although there have been some among Muslims who, under hermetic or different cultural influences, were drawn to this conception of an enchanted world, such a conception never reached a level that would characterize Muslims.

Although God is the absolute cause of everything that happens, God's sunnah in His creation has always left a door open to a kind of causal thinking. For although it is God who creates every first and last, inner and outer, He has created around a sunnah. Recognizing no absolute cause other than God also prevents attributing magic to the world in every here and there matter, and makes attributing magic identical with paganism. That is why even adapting Weberian analyses of secularization or modernization to the world of Muslims has been an inappropriate effort from the start.

In truth, the adaptation of these analyses to the Western world is not without problems either. While the findings and observations on secularization should show that the influence of religion in the world is gradually declining, it is also seen that the influence of religion makes itself felt in very different ways both in politics and in daily life.

As we mentioned before, the works of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have even said that the real Christianization in European history took place in the modern period, that is, in the period when secularization is judged to have become dominant. According to them, the presence of a religious appearance everywhere in the Middle Ages, in which religion is said to have been more effective and determining, is very misleading, since the religion in force in this period is extremely scattered and a kind of paganism very far from Christianity.

Christianity was something that broad masses began to adopt with bookish approaches only with urbanization. Perhaps from this angle it can be compared with the situation in which, with Türkiye's urbanization, both the form and the content of religiosity took on an entirely different state.