Our world and our condition at the end of a year

On this last day of the year 2022, we can see that great changes are approaching on the horizon of the general landscape of the world. In everyone in the world there is a search, an effort to escape from crises, a determination to free oneself from the conditions and actors that caused the crisis, and a great tension produced by all of this.

The world order established after the First and Second World Wars, with its rules and limits laid down, developed at the end of the Cold War, in a manner that could never again be stitched back together, toward a chaotic state of disorder and lawlessness in which whoever is able, whoever can set up the game, does as he pleases. The matter goes beyond the arbitrariness and the sharing out among the 5 that govern the world. The structure of 5 that governs the world is itself in an insatiable, unceasing rivalry among themselves, but it is very hard to follow the logic of their rivalry and conflicts and their consistent moves in the game of powers. The moves made can be small and irrational out of proportion to their strength.

Perhaps this has to do with the governing capabilities of the countries. A leadership or administration out of proportion to the size of the country can hold great powers back from using their advantages against their rivals. And a very strange game emerges. Even if a power like the USA may record short-term successes in the policy it pursues today in the Middle East, against China, and against Russia over the Ukraine question, promising the world a long-term order, or even sustaining its own hegemony in the same manner, is out of the question.

To promise an order, one must be a seller of certain virtues, even if insincerely. At the end of the Cold War, the claim of bringing democracy and freedom first to a world that had spent years under the Iron Curtain, and later to the Middle East, was, for better or worse, a claim. Though it was quite clear that it was using it for its own imperialist aims, it also provided it a moral advantage in the world. It used this advantage to the hilt against the Serbs in the Balkans, in its intervention in Iraq and then its occupation, and in Afghanistan.

Today the USA makes no claim of carrying any value to the rest of the world, even for imperialist purposes.

The interesting thing is that, besides the power it relies on being unable to provide protection to its own allies, its being a source of trouble for them has begun to become a typical condition. It cannot provide the EU with protection against the danger of Russian expansion, yet American pressure on Europe cannot be shaken off. The situation of Ukraine, which defied Russia trusting in the USA, is plain. Although Russia may in the end have been made to back down, its own country could not avoid being ruined as the arena of America's proxy war.

Its story in Syria is an example in which we can watch how the USA, the superpower of our world, is heading toward bankruptcy both in values and in power. Coming with the humane justification of putting an end to Assad's massacres, entering into an alliance with the PYD-PKK terrorist organization against the DAESH terrorist organization it had itself produced, and squatting on three or five barrels of oil inside Syria, which has its own troubles... This is the politics and economy to which the mighty USA has stooped. Can an order for the world come out of this power, which can irresponsibly enter an adventure that would constitute a threat to its biggest ally in NATO?

The EU is in no different a situation here. We have seen it devour, one by one as its turn came, all the values it had adopted as its founding philosophy and had undertaken to champion. The EU project was an unnamed closed Christian union, and now even that Christian union cannot get along within itself. It has nothing to say or promise to the world, let alone to the Islamic world. When the possibility of democratization of the Islamic world emerged, it stood not beside this process but against it. With all its members, at every opportunity, it showed that it prefers to deal in the Middle East not with democratic governments but with autocratic, dictatorial ones. All that is left it as a banner is its degenerate values, hedonism, and gender values that destroy the family. Today the peoples of the Middle East who have demands in the realm of democratization, human rights and values expect nothing from the USA or Europe other than that they not cast a shadow upon them.

Today Russia, which stands opposite the USA and Europe as in the Cold War years, likewise makes no claim to represent any human value, and we see that its shows of power lead more to human destruction. In Soviet times it had the claim of delivering the places it spread to from capitalist exploitation and of building a better, more egalitarian, more just order. Today Russia has no such claim at all. All it knows is its own simple interests. For this purpose, what they did in Syria rivals in crime and brutality what the USA did in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the areas where the USA has gone bankrupt, Russia represents no positive value. China, too, which appears as a rival to the USA, has nothing it can promise humanity wherever it comes to the fore in the race for power. With what it has done in East Turkestan, and in fact with the treatment it has deemed fit for its own people in its own country, it shows what it might dare in possible situations.

This is the state of our world at the beginning of the new year.

Only Muslims have the potential to offer the world a strong vision and set of virtues for a new and just order. But Muslims are still restricted within the existing order. For this potential to be revealed, they must first wage a struggle to overcome these restrictions.

Today the Islamic world, suffering especially from human rights violations, despotism and treatment unbefitting of human dignity, is seething inwardly in search of a better world. The Arab Spring, which began 12 years ago and was forcibly suppressed and is still being suppressed, was a stage that gave all the signs of this search. It is possible and highly probable that the Islamic world, with its peoples and honest rulers, will bring this search to a certain stage in the new period and light a new ray of hope for the world.

There is now a very capable, rich Muslim intellectual accumulation that appraises these possibilities and knows how to shed light on itself. The present conditions of the Islamic world allow this accumulation to gather in Istanbul. Let us look from here for a while.