A tour of the horizon with Mokhtar al-Shinqiti: the problem of thought, renewal and the constitution in the Islamic World

Can we say that the state and level of thought in the Islamic world are very different from the state and level of politics? This is a more complicated question than it appears. Starting from the gravity of the current political situation, whoever wishes can console himself by holding thought responsible for it, and whoever wishes can produce from it an additional discourse of anguish on behalf of Muslims. Islamic thought is of course not a thought that can take shape in the air, in a vacuum, independently of political and historical circumstances. But for at least a century Muslims have had no political representation. There is no political actor that thinks and acts on behalf of Muslims and aspires to a role on the world political stage on their behalf. This is the most important result that the First World War brought to world history, and neither the world nor Muslims have yet been able to fully confront this result.

When the efforts put forward today in the name of Islamic thought ignore this reality and embark on immense civilization designs, a strange, somewhat tragicomic scene emerges. In what period of history and under what social conditions will this civilization come about? There is not much sense in further idealizing the ideal examples put forward in one period of history and proposing them as a goal for today, even for the future.

Which human community, with what kind of intention, what kind of covenant and what kind of quality, will proceed toward these goals, passing through which concrete channels, and reach them? Nobody will award Muslims a turnkey tender for building a civilization. Against those who resist that path, who object and try to obstruct it, one will advance by politics, sometimes by war, by clashing and debating, but far more importantly, on the way to that path, that quality will be shown along the way. The road is the destination itself. A destination reached with those who lose themselves on the road, who forget their friends and companions, who withhold from them the most humane quality of conduct, becomes a raw fantasy.

Islamic thought, before being a thought, is a practice; it is a righteous deed in harmony with thought.

Recently I was listening, with these preliminary considerations of mine, to the conference that one of the very valuable Muslim thinkers who has drawn attention with brilliant work in the field of Islamic thought, the Mauritanian Prof. Mukhtar al-Shinqiti, gave in Ankara at the Islamic Thought Institute, chaired by Prof. Mehmet Görmez, under the title "Tajdid and Synthesizing Islamic Thinkers in the Modern Period."

Al-Shinqiti is aware of the lack of political representation to which the Islamic world was subjected at the end of the First World War. He is also sufficiently aware of its bearing on the possible productions of Islamic thought and on the relevance of the thought produced. In the world we live in, Muslims, whose number approaches two billion, exist as a reality, but they have no political existence. This situation makes Muslims civil, oppositional or minority movements in almost the whole of the world we live in. Although they have no political representation, the efforts Muslims put forward in the name of thought take place as a haphazard dialogue with the modern world, one that is often devoid of relevance.

Now, under the effect of the noise that social media and other media also produce, a completely different picture appears. Whose perceptions, whose realities meet where and how, with whose words and thought? Does this situation also produce opportunities in the name of thought? It cannot of course be entirely negative. After all, with every hardship there is ease, and all realities come together with their opportunities.

Proceeding from the fact that throughout history Muslims have had such encounters with others, al-Shinqiti underlined the Muslim sunnah that Muslims followed in these encounters. In Islam the default in things is permissibility (ibaha). As long as it does not contradict Islam's basic principles, Islam, reaching different societies and cultures, did not ask them to abandon their cultural characteristics. On the contrary, it made all their characteristics that do not contradict the essence of the religion they held a part of Islamic civilization. Thus the expansion quality of Islamic civilization operated throughout history as a practice.

Every human community reached did not, by joining Islam, melt its own culture, history and characteristics into Islamic civilization; rather, by wiping the rust off them, Islam included them in the sum of Islamic civilization. The worry that Islamic civilization might be distorted by this inclusion did, over time, inevitably emerge. Sometimes, the uncritical adoption, without any questioning, of cultural features held before becoming Muslim that were genuinely contrary to religion led to a deviation in Islamic civilization. Tajdid (renewal) has been experienced again and again throughout history precisely to point out these excesses, and to remind and keep alive the excitement of faith and Islam for Muslims who had lost their excitement because things had become routine.

The point here is that Muslims be able to take from others without losing themselves and without forgetting their own constants. The performance Muslims have shown throughout history in keeping this balance has been seen in no other civilization.

When Muslims took things from China, India, Africa and ancient Greece, they observed and lived by these principles. Indeed, although they never hesitated to take demonstrative (burhani) reason from ancient Greece, the admiration and awe that what they took in this field produced in some Islamic philosophers led them to the delusion that they could also take what the Greek philosophers said on theology or the creation of the world, which are in fact entirely conjectural fields. This too is a well-known form of deviation.

They failed to see the reality that knowing well in one field does not make you an authority in every field. Moreover, it is in the nature of authority that authority displayed in one field increasingly turns into a demand for authority in every field. Some figures today who, whose authority was handed to them by chance in the field of history or physics, claim it in the field of politics and religion too, indeed in every field, are typical examples of this that can recur at any time.

The encounter we are experiencing today is very different from the encounters we experienced in the past. As we said at the beginning, Muslims in the world lack political representation mechanisms. For none of the states that govern Muslims are Islam or Muslims, as thought or religion, a priority issue.

Al-Shinqiti nonetheless set out from the finding that the most important problem for the Muslim world today is the problem of "constitution and authoritarianism," and has produced the most comprehensive and best work done so far in the field. In light of what we have described above, the first question that comes to mind is of course how this constitutional politics and conduct will be made acceptable to authoritarian societies. But let us just ask it today, of course.