The cultural origins of despotism and the way to overcome it: continuing to think with al-Shinqiti

It is inevitable that every encounter of Muslims with other societies affects them. For when we speak of Muslims, even of the most ideal Muslims, we are not speaking of robots who can live through all developments within society, engage in every kind of exchange with people, and remain themselves without being under any influence. Muslims too are human, and this interaction is inevitable. The one who influences is also influenced. In fact, while this rule holds even in the field of physics, expecting someone to go on with life in the social world without being under any influence both attributes a metaphysical constancy to the Muslim and misses the reality of life.

Of course, in saying this we are not speaking of Muslims dissolving and disappearing into the societies they encounter, or of examples of adapting to those societies' non-Islamic realities without making any claim or call. That too is certainly an interaction, but one that ends in an unacceptable degeneration or assimilation. The Muslim way of interaction is to keep one's eyes and ears open to receiving, knowing that there are things to be learned even from those to whom one delivers one's message, without giving up one's own claims and constants.

At his conference at the Islamic Thought Institute in Ankara, with the Mauritanian Muslim thinker Mukhtar al-Shinqiti, whose Horizon Tour we have been continuing, we tried to dwell on the margins within which Muslims, remaining bound to their own constants and never giving up their cause, may also take something from the societies they encounter. This also points to the skill of Islamic thought in dyeing the whole human heritage in its own color. It is not for nothing that the Qur'an speaks of being dyed with God's dye. Dye by its nature does not change the structure; it changes the appearance and in fact the function of a particular structural practice.

Al-Shinqiti says that at the core of all civilizations there are also goods, but that the Islamic essence can be brought to light once the dust or rust that has accumulated on them over time is wiped away. That is why Islam's adoption of another culture in each cultural encounter does not take place as assimilation or degeneration; on the contrary, it takes place as istiab, an inclusion, an expansion, which Marshall Hodgson, in his work The Venture of Islam, describes as "by far a distinctive originality of Islamic civilization." That is why the Christians and Jews within Islamic civilization also produced their cultural practices by incorporating them into Islamic civilization.

The endless debates since the 19th century about how to separate and take the West's technique from its culture are in fact considered a serious regression from the standpoint of the expansion practice of Islamic civilization. For in the past, Muslims who carried Islam's message to every corner of the world had behaved much more at ease in this matter. The situation of those who, even today, advocate not taking even technique and science, on the grounds that when we take the technique the culture will come automatically, is far more interesting. Speaking entirely from the midst of the very science and technique they mention, and talking about this resistance, they are not even aware of how far they bring Muslim jurisprudence down to a level of absurdity occurring in a vacuum.

They may today put forward, as proof of their claims, that Western culture has entered our lives together with Western science and technology. Yet what they forget is that Western culture, especially the culture that is absolutely unacceptable from an Islamic point of view, entered not through the door opened by science and technology, but through the door opened by politics.

In this country the Western alphabet, dress, culture, historical consciousness and way of life were, moreover, under the name of "revolution," made to be accepted by society not through science and technology, but entirely in a top-down manner. The helpless intellectual barriers that those who missed the chance to resist that politics try to erect against science and technology have no meaning or relevance whatsoever. What is needed is the return of a mind of ijtihad that can read the situation in a more realistic way and better appreciate the margins of expansion in terms of Islam's constants.

However, according to al-Shinqiti, the real great problem of the Islamic world is of course a problem more deeply rooted than the one that began in the last century: the problem of istibdad (despotism) that has afflicted the ummah since the times when the Caliphate turned into a sultanate. With arguments he presents on the authority of Malik bin Nabi, M. Abid al-Jabiri and al-Kawakibi, al-Shinqiti explains that even today the most important problem of the Islamic world is the problem of istibdad.

Since the "great fitna" that began with the Umayyads, even creed has not been able to escape, here and there, being instrumentalized in the hands of politics. While istibdad reduces the shared mind of Muslims to a single mind within the mind of the political authority, it inevitably exhausts the mind and renders it unproductive. In situations where no possibility and no environment is left for evaluating different minds, the labeling of every free and different idea as deviation or treason makes thought sterile.

While this mechanism works this way in politics, religious communities and formations, instead of objecting to this istibdad of political power and producing alternatives, imitate it and reproduce the same istibdad within themselves. It is a real tragedy that the adherents of a religion whose rule and instruction is consultation with the people of expertise have made, by this means, an istibdad that blocks the way of free reason into a culture.

The way to overcome this tragedy is for a kind of constitutional shura to be operated, from the top down or from the bottom up, in order to struggle against istibdad.

The Arab Spring, before and after, has shown that the actors who are candidates for overcoming this istibdad in the Islamic world are still the Islamists. Although the cultural roots of the istibdad that has afflicted Muslims can be traced back to the first fitna, the istibdad that has afflicted Muslims in the post-colonial period has no direct connection with this culture. On the contrary, this istibdad is one that the Westerners, who claim to be the so-called pioneers of democracy, have deemed fit for Muslim societies.

Westerners never wanted democracy for Muslims. While they produce plenty of literature on the incompatibility of Islam and democracy, they have seen the possibility of a real democracy as a nightmare and tried to strangle it in cooperation with the despots in the Islamic world. The attitude of Western countries, and even of their intellectuals, in the counter-revolution processes of the Arab Spring shows this sufficiently.

The same circles' questioning of democracy in Türkiye is only one example of this contradiction. Otherwise, is what they complain about that Islamists are not democrats, or is it coping with the difficulty of a possible victory for their own agents in a democratized Türkiye?

Al-Shinqiti's book "The Constitutional Crisis in Islamic Civilization," published by Mana Publications, is a powerful text that can set productive debates in motion. Of course, for it to fulfill its function, it must find its interlocutors, its readers.