A contribution to the tolerance and forbearance debates

You have probably been following for some time the debate on hoşgörü and tolerance that began with a piece by Hayrettin Karaman. Since it is a debate I had personally entered on a few earlier occasions, I watched with curiosity and interest how it would proceed. It was interesting that not only as formulated by Karaman, but the views and attitudes put forward on the occasion of this debate fell into place without surprising anyone at all.

First of all, we may begin by wondering what kind of promise of hoşgörü is made by the attitude displayed toward Karaman's proposal of the concept of tahammül (forbearance) in place of the concept of hoşgörü. Yet there is nothing to wonder about in this either. The discourse of hoşgörü is generally a hypocritical discourse that refutes itself in a short time. Those who talk about hoşgörü most invariably have an object of hatred toward which they turn harshly, and toward that object they behave so violently as to cancel their own discourse of hoşgörü.

This is also the problematic of liberal society (to what extent this society has actually partaken of liberal principles and teachings is a separate matter, of course): when building a discourse on hoşgörü, it keeps its ideal margins much narrower than is supposed. It puts before us a model in which all the limits are drawn in advance and nothing is open to any debate. What is to be done on every subject is settled, and there is no need for any debate on them. A structure that has made its own limits so absolute, anti-political, hostile to life, is really hard to find in history. Even so, it does not refrain from securing unfair competitive advantages for its own discourse under the self-appointed titles of "libertarian" and, when the occasion arises, "tolerant."

Yet even the treatment that religions, or people who have truths of their own, receive in this social structure is an example of the failed examination undergone by this discourse of hoşgörü. Let alone hoşgörü, a culture is forming that cannot tolerate even the truth claims of religions or other political groups. Religions have, by their nature, particular designs of the human being. They hold a sharp assessment of "right" and "wrong" regarding human behavior. Religions say that adultery, theft, lying and mistreating neighbors are forbidden. They do not say this into a void, of course; they say it to people, especially to the people who believe in them, and they also apply their sanctions over their own believers.

In order to keep its believers away from certain behaviors, religion has to define those behaviors as "bad." All religions have worked this way for thousands of years; they have no other chance of existing. But today an unprecedented pressure, in the name of so-called freedoms, is being exerted on religions' playing this most natural of their roles. They are being forced to find a way to function without regarding any behavior as bad.

A religion that commands performing prayer also dwells on the badness of not praying. Just as it dwells on the sin of not fasting as much as it commands fasting. And how will religion keep believers away from adultery without regarding adultery as bad and showing it so? And what kind of language will a religion that forbids drinking alcohol find to keep believers away from it? They are probably expected to find a way similar to that of the govends in the film Beynelmilel, who, when forced by intense demand to play the folk songs banned on 12 September, played them quietly and silently, with cloth wrapped around the drumsticks. This pressure creates an extremely odd sight, of course.

Karaman's proposal to substitute tahammül for hoşgörü is in fact very fitting to the nature of the matter. Although Western languages have no direct equivalent of the concept of hoşgörü, the concept that comes closest to it is "tolerance." And tolerance corresponds to our müsamaha, or katlanma (enduring), or precisely, as Karaman proposes, tahammül. Therefore the tolerance that liberal societies envisage for such situations is in fact also what Karaman proposes.

The concept of hoşgörü itself is like a joke our beautiful Turkish plays on us. The word contains so much affirmation, a looking with sympathy, that it cannot be used for situations in which tolerance is shown. If you find the thing you tolerate "hoş" (pleasing), you have not endured it but already embraced it. By definition there can be no genuine way of also finding pleasing something you regard as bad in essence. You cannot do it without lapsing into fraudulence. Therefore Karaman, who invites human behavior to be rescued from this fraudulence, deserves above all a word of thanks.

The graded attitudes of "actual intervention," "verbal objection," or at least "inward rejection" toward things regarded in religion as forbidden or disliked require, as much as the probable power of the evil, a knowledge of states regarding the believer's authority, position and duty in the face of this evil.

In "societies based on a contract," a Muslim of course has no right of actual intervention in the limits of people's freedom, but he is not without the right to put a distance between himself and that behavior either. Knowing and coding a bad behavior as "bad" does not in every case mean intervening against the person who does that act or restricting his freedom to display that behavior. The matter concerns, at the least, how the person who lives his religion will regard that behavior. This is so even in an "Islamic society," in Karaman's phrase. There is nothing Islamic about taking away people's right to commit sin by means of the state, though of course without forgetting that the kind of the forbidden matters here. For killing is a form of sin, and so is theft, and so are using heroin or trading in it...

Religion's side of laying down moral rulings, forming communities and influencing society is received with astonishment as if it had just been discovered! The real oddity is here. Religion, Islam above all, is already this. The questioning of whether Karaman could have said these things earlier is also, in my view, a result of the same odd astonishment. The professor spoke of the long-known and never-changing nature of religion. Treating this as something new is also a simple indicator of how hegemonic the current discourse has become.

This too is, in fact, a simple discourse of power. An exceedingly jealous discourse of power that accepts the influence of no other center over individuals' bodies besides itself. A discourse that raises itself on the shoulders of a value, such as freedom, that it has not earned.

The problem is that this discourse of power has been internalized to such an extent even by Muslims.