Is Islamism a native movement?

In our article before the holiday we had undertaken an assessment of the human aspects of Islamism. Because of the holiday and the Hajj articles that intervened, we took a short break. But since that subject has been opened, it is necessary, if not to put a full stop and complete it, to advance it to the extent it deserves. Completing it is not possible, because this debate can bear much more talk.

One of the themes generally taken as a criterion in the criticism of Islamism is the quality of being indigenous. Thematically, the interrogation of indigeneity is one of the ordinary tactics of invalidating a given thought or movement by alienating it from a place. Often this tactic works, and those who can be proven to be foreign to these places are liable to disperse in such a way that they never recover.

Often it is also the case that the thoughts or movements in question are so foreign that they cannot say anything to the people of a place. The relationship that thoughts establish, or must establish, with soil, tradition, history and context is of course not negligible. If you ignore Turkey's social imagination, culture and social structure, and come and try to read everything here through class conflict, to put it mildly, you will have lost touch, for example.

On the other hand, indigeneity cannot be the single criterion to be taken as a basis for all thoughts; for it to be so is contrary to human nature. The human being is, by nature, a being not condemned to a place. One is born in one place, one's soul and consciousness are formed in a place, but one has a capacity to transcend that place; otherwise we could not expect any transitivity between thoughts. Yet a thought born in one place can find much better value in other places. Had indigeneity been regarded from the outset as a valid and absolute problem, neither would Anatolia have become Muslim, nor Europe Christian. Looking at the final effect of this last example on Christianity, the change that thoughts undergo in their journeys can of course also be cited as a problem. Of course, thoughts and beliefs do not manifest with the same effects, the same form and effects everywhere.

These are very basic rules concerning the geographical course of thoughts.

What brings, or serves to bring, the indigeneity of Islamism to mind as a problem is that, especially since the sixties, it has been intensively fed by a translation movement. The translation of the books of the leaders, above all of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and of the Jamaat-e-Islami of India-Pakistan, in a sense "revived" Islamism in Turkey.

We say "revived" because Islamism, which in the last period of the Ottomans had been an elite movement owing to a state reflex, when it was subjected to the purge of the Republic, turned, along with the problem of legitimacy, into a popular movement far from the possibilities of nourishing itself intellectually.

This remained, of course, a movement at the level of a conservative inner resistance consisting of folk religiosity, far from being well-rounded. In a sense, until these translation movements, Islamism was largely deprived of channels of expressing itself outside a vague nationalist-sacredist literature.

In this respect, it was inevitable that the new-period Islamism triggered by the translation waves became acquainted, so to speak, with an international horizon and carried it to Turkey before it met and became acquainted with the Islamist past in the Ottoman Empire or Turkey, before it established a link with the tradition there. In doing so it did not enter into a conflict with something that already existed in Turkey, that is, "in this place." Islamism in this place had no continuity in the traditional sense. What could be known of it was not in a traditional continuity but something that, after a long rupture and forgetting, would either be read again or found. Between the interpretations of tawhid by Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır and the interpretations of Sayyid Qutb and Mawdudi, very little difference could be found from the standpoint of the conception of Islamism, and after a while the literature of the new-period Islamism was combined with a broad list of references stretching from Mehmet Akif to Babanzade Ahmet Naim, from Namık Kemal to Eşref Edib, from Imam Birgivi to Said Nursi.

Islamism brought to attention scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and Imam Shatibi, who had earlier attracted little attention or demand within Turkey's intellectual tradition. It is not possible to say that these names had no influence on the later-developing Islamic way of thought in Turkey, or that this influence was forced. On the contrary, these names meant a great deal for Islamic thought in Turkey and taught a great deal. With one difference: as one of the most important themes of Islamism, that no thought is exempt from criticism, they too received their share. This was the healthy thing.

The accusation of indigeneity, curiously, is a classic criticism that conservatives directed at Islamists in the last periods of the Ottomans. Let us recall from some dialogues between Yahya Kemal and Babanzade Ahmed Naim that Yahya Kemal described Babanzade's understanding of Islam as foreign to this land, whereas he described shrine religiosity as the genuinely indigenous culture of these places. There, the claim or discourse of indigeneity has no meaning beyond being a simple tactic of power.

Moreover, a thought does not possess a superiority merely because it is indigenous. The only place where indigeneity turns into an advantage is where exclusionary-oppressive fascistic feelings toward foreigners have a good market, and Islamism has no business in those markets anyway.