The Islamic world will cut its own umbilical cord

In the first days of 2023, let us as Muslims continue to reflect on our world and our condition.

We say that only Muslims have the potential to offer a strong vision and set of virtues for a world that is more just, more livable, and befitting of human honor and dignity. We are not saying this, on behalf of Muslims, in order to fuel yet further a rhetoric of bombast with which we are, sadly, all too familiar.

Of course, this potential can be realized above all by Muslims freeing themselves from the chains of colonialism and occupation to which they have been subjected for two hundred years and by embracing Islam. Otherwise, Muslims cannot have any right or claim regarding today merely because their ancestors founded great civilizations. The past has remained in the past. Boasting of the past cannot carry any value or virtue into the present. Such boasting has no meaning other than exalting the religion of the forefathers, whereas Islam has commanded not boasting of ancestors but hastening toward righteous, sincere and upright deeds.

A human being has nothing but his own labor, and no one bears another's sin or another's reward.

What share falls to us today, for example, from our ancestors having been perfect human beings, having performed great heroic deeds, having founded great civilizations? If we lack the quality and the virtues that drove them to those heroic deeds and those great works, what meaning is there in attributing ourselves to them other than clinging to them like parasites and squandering their symbolic legacy?

We see that, especially in the post-Caliphate conditions, no help or support has come from the West for exiting the backwardness caused by the colonial and despotic regimes to which the Muslim world has been subjected. During the Arab Spring, peoples supposed that on the road to their own democratization they could find support from Western countries in good faith, but in the end a great disappointment was fated for them.

In essence, the cause of despotism and backwardness in the Islamic world is the Western world. It is impossible for this cause itself to be a way out for Muslims, either in terms of values or in terms of international balances of power. The Western world, which for years adopted a condescending stance toward the Muslim world on democracy and human rights, took no other attitude than to smother every possibility of democratization in the Islamic world whenever one appeared.

Today the reborn Islamic world sees very well that it must cut its own umbilical cord itself. And let no one doubt that the true rebirth of the Islamic world will bring good to the whole world. At this point it is fitting to recall once more the famous question of Abu'l-Hasan Alien-Nedvi, one of the great intellectuals of Indian Muslims, who knew very well what the Ottoman caliphate meant: "What Did the World Lose with the Decline of the Muslims?" No lament is being sung here on behalf of Muslims; on the contrary, it is emphasized that the whole world deserves a lament because of the decline of the Muslims.

Indeed, the decline of the Muslims coincided historically with the rise of savage capitalism, insatiable colonialism, genocides unseen in history, and massacres of human beings, nature and the environment. With the return of Muslims to the stage of history today, a new possibility will have emerged for the establishment of an order that is truly more just and more befitting of human rights and dignity.

Of course, in this matter the Islamic world must first pull itself together. We have said that serious quests exist in this direction. But let us note at once that these quests have not yet become a quest of those sections that govern the Islamic world. A significant part of the elites governing the Islamic world has no concern for such a thing as the Islamic world. We could even say that they work as the most important obstacles to the regathering of this world. Moreover, the ruling elites of the Islamic world, who harbor no concern other than protecting their own power, see this very idea of "pulling together" as the greatest threat to themselves. That is why the dungeons of these countries are full of thinkers, scholars, intellectuals and politicians who advocate this idea.

The intellectual efforts devoted to a regathering in the Islamic world and to offering the blessing of Islam to the world cannot even be adequately expressed in any of the cities that have historically been the centers of the Islamic world. In Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Mecca, Medina, even Tehran, neither the general concerns of Muslims nor any thinking about Islam's message or answer suited to today's world can be discussed or expressed.

Without doubt, God's earth is wide, and the message of Islam that cannot be expressed in one place, as in history, will always find a place where it is voiced. Today, in exactly this sense, Istanbul has become a center in which Islamic thought, in all its dimensions, finds a place to be nourished and to be expressed. It has become the first or second address of all the important thinkers of the Islamic world. And this despite the fact that Turkey does not follow an exclusive and well-worked policy to attract this thought in particular. It is a spontaneously developing situation.

On the one hand, the constrictions that continue and recur in every period in most countries of the Islamic world; on the other, in Turkey, an environment of openness to the world, democracy and freedoms that has been put forth in parallel, even as the Muslim identity is remembered more. This duality, and we say this far from any intention of flattery or exaltation, inevitably prepares Turkey for a pioneering role in the Islamic world.

How aware Turkey, with its ruling elite and its people, is of this, and how well it comprehends the responsibility of this role, is of course a separate matter. Will those who are somewhat aware of this situation produce for Turkey merely a condescension of championship, or will they feel a serious sense of responsibility and ethics?

It is obvious that we have serious problems and unpreparedness in this regard; we will continue to dwell on it.