Determining direction at the postmodern crossroads

To be able to measure secularization and religiosity sociologically, we need concrete indicators. Yet, as we have said before, sincere religiosity is something that cannot be the subject of statistics, cannot be tied to statistical figures; but you also cannot measure religiosity without feeling and taking into account its sincerity. The statistical figures that detect secularization likewise only give the measure of the religious rituals and behaviors in which people take part at certain intervals and in certain numbers; they cannot measure the sincerity and authenticity in these behaviors. The proportion of people who pray and fast merely because it is a social and political trend may be detected in statistical research as "religiosification" or "conservatization," but within these figures there are in fact also loads of manifestations arising from the instrumentalization and worldliness of religion.

That is why the visibility of religion and its effectiveness and authentic experience may not always support one another. Many cases can be shown in which, as religion becomes excessively visible, its real effect and its authentic experiences decrease. In some Arab countries, while Islam is excessively visible, its effect on life is quite small.

While Meccan idolatry presented a scene in which religion was extremely visible in every part of life, the effect of religion on social life was caught in the filter of this visuality and blocked. While Islam established a principle in which religion dominates the whole of life, it expressed itself, here and there, also by objecting to this being understood as formalism and reduced to it:

"Righteousness is not that you turn your faces toward the east or the west. But the righteous are those who believe in God and the Last Day, the angels, the Book and the prophets, and who give wealth, out of love for it (willingly, gladly), to relatives, orphans, the needy, the wayfarer and those who ask, who establish prayer and give zakat, who fulfill their promises when they promise, and who are patient in hardship and adversity; those are the truthful, and those are the God-fearing" (Baqara, 177). Here, against the situation in which forms are fetishized, without of course giving up the forms, the lost spirit is returned to them "lovingly, willingly, desirously."

So much so that at first glance one may even think that Islam invites a kind of secularization in contrast to other religions. But this subject requires a deeper approach. Here I am trying to point out both the invalidity of the claim of originality of those approaches that see this theme, in particular in terms of the relationship of modernization with religion, as original, and the void into which they fall by trying to explain Islamic culture and societies with the same conceptual frameworks as Western societies.

There is a common approach that identifies modernization with secularization. The prevalence of this identification sufficiently explains why the resistance or revolts in the Islamic world against Westernization, which came onto the agenda as another name and manifestation of colonialism, have always been Islam-referenced. One should never see secularization in the Islamic world as distant and separate from political developments. Although the secularization of daily life has at times turned into a social tendency, these tendencies are neither irreversible, and the influence of politics is much greater than the influence of technology. The proposal "leave its culture, take its science," put forward by Muslim intellectuals and some of the ulama between the West's technique and its culture in the last period of the Ottoman state, is by no means an empty and invalid proposal.

Although the later domination of Western culture in the Islamic world has been attributed to the inseparability of the technology taken from culture, what is overlooked is that that "laicist" culture, that Western, hedonistic way of life, entered not through the door opened by technology but through the road imposed by politics. It is seen that Erol Güngör, in his book on "Cultural Change," also questions this relationship in a very fundamental way.

Leaving aside the reality of religion, Islam and Türkiye, which is attempted to be understood in the light of all the analyses of modernity, there is a dominant discourse that we have arrived at a postmodern world. In short, it can also be said that we are at a historical crossroads.

Crossroads generally offer different options. Perhaps the most attractive side of postmodern discourse is that, in contrast to the compulsory and one-directional thinking contained in modernism, it has prepared both the mind and the will for the possibility that roads can be diversified. Postmodernity, unlike modernity, leaves open a field in which one can go and pass through different roads and routes. Roads may differ, and so may claims of truth and historical perceptions and directions... Everyone has the possibility of intervening in history.

Not many say it, but in the light of this thought we can comfortably say that we can celebrate the return of the subject, with its will, its human difference and its existence.

Not many say it, because postmodernity is rather identified with a nihilism into which the relativist understanding of truth drops the subject, leading it to great pessimism and lack of will. One effect of this nihilism is relativism and fatalism, and its ultimate effect on politics is cynicism and political alienation.

Yet relativism is a truth that postmodernity has merely discovered, and this truth also has an effect that teaches man his humanity, his mortality, his limits, that is, in fact, his place. Thanks to this, we have come closer today to understanding that the sense of certainty to which the humanism of modernism, which deifies man and makes him the sole measure of all truths, has accustomed us, is itself a disease.

That is why the postmodern condition, contrary to the common perception, also has a positive feature that reminds man that he is at a crossroads, that he has the right and the possibility of choosing, and that this choice may lead to many things and may change many things.

Undoubtedly, in the literature that has formed so far about postmodernism, it is said that the relationship between religion and society in this historical period presents a new and original experience. All the predictions of modernism said that religion, and especially communal sociality, would eventually disappear in favor of the free and autonomous individual. Yet one of the great myths of the modernization movements, which has begun to dissolve as time advances, is the conception of the "free or autonomous individual."

How do postmodern discourses, having first demolished this conception of the "free and autonomous individual," make room for its return to the stage afterwards?

When we pursue this problem, we will see that we will only have traveled again the road that those before us traveled.