Intellectual birth pangs for the rebirth of the Islamic World

The Islamic world is sufficiently concerned not only for Muslims but for the whole world to see a more just and more livable order established. The divine sunnah is in constant circulation on earth so as to make the oppressed and those left weak prevail over the oppressors. Anyone who wishes may of course read this as a sociological rule as well. But the matter does not operate merely as a Hegelian master-slave dialectic in the world. Often (in class struggles or in ethnic-nationalist conflicts) one sees that the slave, once raised to the position of master, offers the world nothing but the very tyranny of the master he once envied.

Yet the demand for justice of the Muslims, who have been the subalterns of the present world order for at least two centuries, is not only for themselves but for all human beings. The aim is not merely to replace the oppressor but to secure an order in which the position of power will establish and distribute justice for all people. Muslims did this in the past. They were able to do so not because of characteristics stemming from particular ethnic, racial or geographical conditions of life, but only because they were bound to the Book that contains the Balance.

Whatever the peoples honored by Islam had been beforehand, Islam gave them important merits. No one honored Islam, neither Arab nor Persian nor Turk nor Kurd nor Indian nor anyone else. All of them were honored by Islam through being Muslims, and precisely because they knew this to be so, and to the extent that they knew it, they were exalted, since they did not fall into the ignorance of imposing an obligation of gratitude upon the Messenger of God and his religion, as the Bedouins mentioned in the Qur'an did. Thanks to this they made historic contributions to humanity's accumulation of civilization.

For centuries, and time and again, everywhere, they put forward to the world a unique model of cultural openness and civilization, but also of cultural and religious coexistence and religious freedom. That this model was not an exceptional model applied once, but was repeated in the same way everywhere, from Jerusalem to Cairo, from Damascus to Antioch, from Baghdad to Istanbul, from Skopje to Sarajevo, from Hyderabad to Lahore and Samarkand, sufficiently shows that it has firm religious references.

It may be said that the Muslim generations who applied these models and today's Muslim generations live in very different conditions. And indeed that is the case. Compared with the generations that applied those models successfully, Muslims today live, first of all and exceptionally, in post-Caliphate conditions.

This is of course not a figure of speech. Post-Caliphate conditions for Muslims correspond to situations such as headlessness, lack of focus, lack of political representation, ambiguous and arbitrary affiliations, colonialism, self-colonization, and, at best, a mode of nourishment from Islam as a wild, unrefined growth. Even calling such a formation a "world," that is, the "Islamic World," is debatable (On this occasion, let us mention, with all our appreciation and with the hope that it will help these debates be conducted better, the work titled "The Idea of the Muslim World," recently translated into Turkish, by our esteemed thinker and international academic Cemil Aydın). Yet at the same time there are people, approaching 2 billion in population, who to one degree or another are nourished by the same Book, turn to the same qibla, perform the same acts of worship in the same form and content, and who, in their most minimal state, live all the conditions, troubles, difficulties and of course also the advantages of a "world."

Nor is this world a closed one; it is intertwined with other worlds, neighboring them, facing them, and therefore in constant interaction.

That such a world today lacks a leadership is a post-Caliphate situation. But its being in constant search of a leadership is another face of the same situation. For scattered organs want a head.

For Muslims to become able to say something to the world today, they must first pull themselves together internally. And for this pulling together, the quests being pursued must turn into a reasonable political program. It needs to be nourished and supported by serious intellectuals. Cemil Aydın's work, meticulous and backed by historical analyses, is an important contribution in this regard. Prof. Salman Sayyid's works such as Recalling the Caliphate and Fear of Fundamentalism, which we mentioned earlier, Wadah Khanfar with his Sharq Forum, Prof. Sami al-Arian with his CIGA at Sabahattin Zaim University, Prof. Muhtar el-Şankıti with his important works, and the maqasid studies of Prof. Mehmet Görmez at the Institute of Islamic Thought stand out as addresses of an important intellectual accumulation and production.

Of course not all the work consists of this. The Kuala Lumpur Summit, which convened in Istanbul on the 6th in recent days, is also an important platform to be noted in this direction. Especially at the latest meeting, Abdürrezzak Meqri, the current chairman of the political party of the Movement of Society for Peace (Silm) in Algeria, who also chairs the Summit, wrote a 266-page report-book specially for this Summit, titled "Civilizational Mobilization and the Challenges of Transition." This book is in itself one of the books that will serve as a reference for the debates to be held in this field. God willing, we will take up that book here in time. It needs to be translated into Turkish as soon as possible and offered to the Turkish reader. The Islamic World Strategic Thought Platform, chaired by Muhammed el-Raşid, who for many years served as editor-in-chief of Al-Mujtama magazine in Kuwait, likewise suffering from the same concerns, holds its regular meetings in Istanbul. We can gather all these efforts under the heading "intellectual birth pangs for the rebirth of the Islamic World." But the fact that the center of all these efforts is Istanbul also deserves separate emphasis.

Right at this point, two interesting articles by Dr. Kemal el-Kasir, one of the esteemed thinkers and writers of the Maghreb, were published in Al-Quds Al-Arabi in November and December. The articles were titled "The Collapse of Closed Cultural Paradigms: What Kind of Role for Turkey?" and "What Does the Islamic World Need from Turkey?" In both, after developing the idea that the Islamic World must first achieve a pulling together within itself in order to make its historic contribution to today's world and to the accumulation of civilization, he discusses who possesses the conditions necessary to do this.

El-Kasir points to Turkey and Istanbul as the address that, generally suffering from the same concerns and without harboring any nationalist or ethnicist worry, will build a new civilization on behalf of Muslims or make a pioneering contribution to the existing accumulation of civilization on behalf of Muslims.

But, repeating the question we asked at the end of our previous article: Are the Turks in general aware of this historic role of theirs, are they sufficiently prepared for this pioneering role? Let us see.