On the nature of the system

The concept of the system is one of the important inventions of modern social thought. It assumes that the world, society or the political order is structured within a system. It tries to decipher this assumed system, to discover how it works and to trace its internal relations. In searching for this system within reality, the closer the systemic features it claims to see or find come to perfection, the greater the likelihood that they are a mental production and imputation of the social scientist. Yet he often fails to notice that it is he who has imposed the metaphor of a system on a reality that is relatively chaotic in nature.

Against Emile Durkheim, who conceived of social diversity within an organic unity, Talcott Parsons argued that this approach reduces society to static organs, whereas social units also comprise the relations of systems that are in dynamic relations with one another. According to him, societies could be better understood within the metaphor of a system, one that likewise functions within the human body and links the organs with one another, rather than through the stasis of organic differences. Yet while both approaches assume that society works in complete solidarity, coordination and self-sacrifice, even the conflicts visible in society are brushed aside as functional processes that sustain the vitality of this perfectly working structure.

Whether thought of as an organic or a systemic structure, there are today ever more signs and evidence that the orderliness attributed to social wholeness is a game of the mind. At the very least, structures are constantly developing and their nature is changing. Second, no one, and indeed no unit, assumed to be an organ of the structure cares about the integrity of the structure. Each unit approaches its own vitality and its own interest, at times at the expense of other organic units. The thesis that society is bound together through the exchange of different interests, that this exchange is by its nature based on interest, and that a chaotic situation is inevitable if these interests clash, is frankly a thesis better suited to explaining what is happening. From the first one only a totalitarian, archepolitical philosophy of politics can be derived, whereas the other offers more realistic data for producing a realistic philosophy of politics.

Anyway, this is a matter of social theory. Let us note these down somewhere just in case and, if you like, continue our discussion from where we left off...

When we say Islamic system, too, we are somewhat speaking of a perfect structure that we have worked out and completed in our minds. At best, reading from today, we attribute a systemic wholeness to what our Prophet lived and to the model of life he put forward. I do not think we sufficiently appreciate what the relationship of this wholeness is to time, to life and to human beings. When did the systemic features of the model put forward by the Prophet emerge, for example? In the last period of Medina, that is, when the last verse was revealed and the Qur'an and the religion were completed? Was the Islam that the Prophet lived until then an incomplete Islam?

Let us ask the more crucial question: Was the life the Prophet put forward while he was conveying Islam in Mecca not a perfect Islamic life? Then, if we take that historical cross-section, can we derive an Islamic system from it? Perhaps we can pay a little more attention to the fact that the ideal example emerging from the Prophet's life is expressed with dynamic concepts such as "path," "process" and "life" rather than as a closed system. It can hardly be a coincidence that the traditional models concerning Islam are expressed with concepts such as religion (din), worship (ibadet), school of law (mezhep), order (tarik), temperament (meşrep) and spiritual journey (süluk).

Indeed, the notion of "Islam as a completed religion" with the last verse is an understanding decreed by the Qur'an itself. As such, the religion undoubtedly contains the map of all the beliefs, acts of worship and practices of life that will guide believers for all times. But how possible is it to derive from this whole map a system as a precondition of Islamic life? Moreover, how necessary is it to determine such a system as a precondition for a perfect Islamic way of living in all places and times?

Whatever kind of system we imagine, we either struggle to find ideal examples of its implementation in history or, on the contrary, we create those examples through retrospective readings. Take a look, if you like, at the systems attributed to the Ottoman social structure. Which of so many different readings of the system resembles another? Ömer Lütfi Barkan's, Halil İnalcık's, İlber Ortaylı's, or Kemal Tahir's?

There have also been different readings that ascribe systemic wholes to the Qur'an. If there is an indisputable system, why does the system proposed by Sayyid Qutb not fit that of Fazlur Rahman, or Mawdudi's that of Said Nursi? The systems that these scholars, each thinking more systematically than the other, have produced regarding the content of the Qur'an differ from one another. This difference cannot stem from the Qur'an itself, but perhaps from the fact that systematic thinking is a powerful game of the mind. When we get too absorbed in this game of the mind and try to squeeze life into a system or a structure, the likelihood that we will end up outside of life is always very high. After all, the human being who tries to understand the Word of the possessor of absolute knowledge is not absolute but human, mortal, limited, and approaches from within a history.

The burden of an Islamic life is not carried by systems; it is carried by real people of flesh and bone who bear real responsibility. Even if you were to establish the most perfect Islamic system, you could not establish a better one than the Prophet's, but we know what those who came to power right after Hz. Ali made of the system the Prophet had established.

Today the regimes or political systems of the Arab countries, Egypt first and foremost, are each systems that decree in their constitutions Islam as an identity and the Qur'an as the basic source of legislation. The dictators who ruled at the head of each of them for decades legitimized their utterly arbitrary activities, which had nothing to do with the interests of Islam, through these supposedly and apparently "Islamic" features of the system, and some of them still go on legitimizing them in this way.

So the "Islamic" character of the system does not necessarily ensure that the life and practice put forward are Islamic. What, then, is it that ensures what is Islamic? It is clear that we need to confront this question better.