A catechism for politics: you lose not when you are defeated by the enemy but when you become like them

The enmities and rivalries of those who have a concern to tell all human beings and a heart lofty enough to wish the good of all human beings are based not on innate, given characteristics, such as race, tribal ties, gender, or nationality, but entirely on virtues.

Even if he is their own relative, kin, or fellow descendant, they do not stand by someone who has committed injustice and do not count him as one of their own, for example. By contrast, they share friendship, around a politics of virtue, with those who are not of their own descent or kin. The greatest virtue of Islamist or conservative politics in Turkey is precisely that it adopted this principle. So long as it stood on this principle, it made unparalleled contributions to the establishment of social justice or justice in the judiciary in Turkey. But where politics is tested by power, the difficulty of persevering in these principles has always made itself felt.

To the extent that you close off the possibility of the virtue you hold being adopted by your enemies as well, you distance yourself from Islamic politics. Virtues are not an arena of competition but an arena of sharing. The arena of virtues is one that expands as it is shared, and as it expands can make room for everyone. Islamic politics is a style of politics that calls people to the good and invites turning enemies into friends. A view put forth today in the name of conservative politics that condemns its rivals to a certain position and fixes them there may perhaps behave in accordance with the nature of politics within the framework drawn by Carl Schmitt, but it is far from Islamic politics.

As is known, the famous German political philosopher Schmitt, after extending politics to nearly the whole of life, explained that the essence of politics is the friend-enemy relation. According to him, even in the temporary stability experienced in politics there are parties who have put their enmities to sleep, and the feeling they hold toward the other side is an inimical feeling, and this never changes. From this perspective the transformation of enmity into friendship, and of enemies into friends, may even be considered impossible.

We have said before that after Schmitt it has become almost customary to characterize all political action as an insurmountable "friend-enemy" relation whose limits are naturally set. Everyone's enemy is clear, and the ultimate feeling toward the enemy is his elimination. There is no good to be shared with the enemy and no meaning in showing him any favor. Friends, in turn, are defined as persons who come together against the enemy and thus need the enemy. Everything rests on a political philosophy oriented toward warriors, warriors whose basic virtue is readiness to kill.

For Schmitt, while the political concept rests on the distinction between friend and enemy, there is no society of friends oriented toward affirming the Other. On the contrary, having an enemy is almost the essential thing, and even the friend is affirmed only to the extent that he is functional for the existence of an enemy: friends are persons who come together against a common enemy and produce a common defense against the other.

"Without an enemy I would go mad, my world would lose all its stability and coherence. Had we put up with the loss of our enemies, had we not been able to determine concretely who the enemy is, the result would be not peace but chaos, and a dangerous chaos, the emasculation of the entire political order and the depoliticization of the nation," says Schimtt.

If one pays attention to Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, just as brotherhood is based on blood ties, enmity too is that which is not of our blood, which was not born in the same homeland as us, and which can never be one of us, and our enmity toward it can never be entirely removed.

Yet the enemy of the Muslim is not certain people who never change, but only their actions and their jahiliyya, and ultimately every enemy is also the addressee of an invitation to friendship. For friendship for Muslims is not based on blood ties, that is, not a bond of brotherhood, but a voluntary and free choice based on virtues.

Muslims do not harbor jealousy toward the truth they possess. That others too possess this truth can precisely remove enmity, and this is what is desired and aimed at. There is no eternal and everlasting enemy. Enmity and friendship are not things given to a person at birth, but are established through choices made in favor of virtues.

That is why even toward his enemy the Muslim's basic feeling is not hatred but pity and compassion. For even enemies were created by God and they too are addressees of His call to friendship. This is a perspective hard to accept for racists or for asabiyyas based on given characteristics. A person cannot change his race. That is why friendships based on blood-brotherhood have no chance of spreading and of saying anything to others. And since friendship among kin (kar(ın)deşler) will never be lived without disappointments, the conclusion "there are no friends" is easily reached.

In Islam, however, those who are our enemies today are enemies not because of the characteristics, identities, or tribal or clan memberships given to them at birth, but only because of their attitude toward the truth, their oppression, their injustices, and their transgressions.

Behind this, again, there lies the view, in the Muslim expression of Socratic wisdom, "had they known, they would not have done it." That is, the cause of enmity between us stems from our not knowing one another, in fact perhaps from our not knowing ourselves, and from our having become alienated from the virtues to which we will be subject and to which we will listen in this world.

We must remove that jahiliyya that distances us from one another. For us, what is the enemy is not people but jahiliyya as an attitude, an action, a heedlessness.

Jahiliyya, in turn, cannot be a quality eternally attached to any human being. Moreover, it can recur from time to time even in people whose jahiliyya has been removed.

In that case, an authentic life and politics is a life and politics lived with complete vigilance.