Questions about the system

The debate on secularism that the Prime Minister started during his tour of the Arab Spring countries soon triggered other debates as well. Now that it has been opened, it has launched a fruitful debate in which we can clarify many issues concerning Islamism, the system, secularity, and the Islamic or non-Islamic character of politics or any other activity.

I entered the secularism debate at one point and wrote three columns in a row, but the well-known limits of a newspaper column (the 3,500-character limits, which I admittedly never manage to observe fully) do not allow the debate to be deepened much. Still, the debate must not be left half-finished.

First of all, I must say that I had one or two objections to the point at which Mustafa Akyol entered the debate, but frankly the pieces that targeted Akyol's person rather than what he said stood in the way of my entering that subject earlier. Whatever Akyol said, he fully deserved to be discussed, both because of his references and because of the content of what he said. The questions he raises and the criticisms he directs at Islamism are questions that must be met with a cool head. He is not entirely unjustified, and when one rises in anger and cuts off the questions, those questions are not thereby answered; one merely suppresses the possibility of a fruitful debate that could benefit everyone. Not to mention that it spoils the enjoyment of the debate...

Without naming him, Hayrettin Karaman hoca, I think, made a very meaningful contribution to the debate from the point where Akyol had carried it. The Hoca especially noticed the generalizing and reductionist approaches that permeate judgments about Islamists. This was precisely the first point that needed to be seen. Recently it has become a strange habit to resort to examples that turn the second into a whipping boy in comparisons of the historical experience of the Nur community and Milli Görüş, or more precisely the Islamist communities, in their approaches to certain issues.

Akyol cited the Risale-i Nur circles' positive attitude toward the EU from the very beginning and attributed to the former the wisdom, and to the latter the absolute wrongness, of this stance; this is of course a retrospective reading that looks from today and from only one side.

Otherwise, neither the fact that one side has not changed at all since then is a sign of its being right, nor is the fact that the Islamist community has today come to a point of advocating EU accession a sign of its having been wrong back then.

The debates between the Nur circles and the Islamist segments on that day were also not as simple as Akyol describes. Surely there were also much more real debates in between, which gave the matter its actual color.

Moreover, being able to change one's position on an issue shows that political reason is at work; having everyone come over to one's own line once, even though one has not changed position on anything, is nothing in itself to be proud of. This is the story of the stopped clock: against the rightness you enjoy for a moment, time flows on and you may again find yourself outside of history.

Hold on a moment now, where is the EU going? When Turkey develops enough to meet the conditions of EU membership, does the EU remain as it was? When Turkey reaches those conditions, does it want to join the EU?

If political reason and will are at work, changing one's position and policy in the face of changing conditions is not something to be criticized; on the contrary, it is something positive. After all, the change of times and the change of rulings cannot be denied.

Meanwhile, a stereotyping of an Islamist type is taking place under the heading of "the Islamists' passion for the system." According to a more realistic definition, can the arguments and debates of Islamism on one issue, which Akyol himself cannot be said to stand outside of, be simplified this much?

There are the debates that İsmet Özel conducted on the system as far back as the late seventies and early eighties. Wherever Özel stands today, he made a real contribution to the literature on Islamism's views on the system in those days. Özel's contribution even led to a kind of cynicism that could not point to a way out of the given situation and went as far as the annulment of the political level. Yet those who have read them know well that the approaches to the system of the other undisputed teachers of Islamism in Turkey, Sezai Karakoç, Ali Shariati and especially Sayyid Qutb, although open to stereotyping from outside, are grounded from beginning to end in a powerful moral responsibility and philosophy of action.

When you plunge into those debates, you can open onto endless horizons regarding the diversity of Islamism's views and stances on the system. What is a system? What is an Islamic system? What is a human system?

Before all these questions, perhaps we should begin with another question: Are the systems we assume exist out there somewhere also, to some extent, tricks of our own minds? When we say Islamic system, are we imagining a subject that does not appear at all in the Book of God? Is there such a subject? To what extent is this subject responsible for what happens? When what we call the system does good things, to whom is the reward recorded, and when it does bad things, who is given the punishment before God?

In my view, these are questions that cannot be answered even from the point at which Karaman hoca took up the system debates? This is a debate that goes beyond where Akyol started it. Let us see whether we will be able to continue.