On the search for systems in the Islamic world

The debate we joined in this column some time ago on the concept of the Islamic system was, in my view, not the kind of thing we could pass over. It needs to be continued. If approached sincerely, this debate can offer a fertile opportunity for reflection in which we can see many problems concerning our condition and our direction. The journal Altınoluk has given space to this debate in its latest issue. In the issue, which also carries very valuable articles by Ahmet Taşgetiren, Hasan Kösebalaban and Beytullah Demircioğlu, an interview with me on the system debates appeared. Let us continue our discussion from where we left it by sharing some parts of the interview, the whole of which appears in the journal:

Let us begin with the question: Is the system important for Muslims, in the context of the results that the Arab spring has produced and will produce?

Of course, it first depends on what we understand by system. A Muslim's life is arranged within a certain system. The world we were born into moves within a system ordained by God. The limits, nature and working order of this system may at times look different depending on interpretation or point of view, but it is certain that there is an orderliness. There is no lawlessness; on the contrary, there is a perfectly functioning order. It is possible to discover the rules of this order. This is an order made possible by every being other than the human obeying God without dispute and without rebellion. God wants humans to obey Him, and therefore wants them to determine their lives, like those beyond the human, according to the rules God proposes. But in this matter God the Exalted Himself exercises no compulsion. He leaves the human free to choose in this. When a human obeys, in a way he falls in step with the order, the harmony, the system of existence. When he does not, he steps outside this system. But the faculty given to the human is that he is not condemned and obliged to remain within this system. The human is the only being that can remain outside this system.

Of course, when we take it in its widest sense, this is the system of creation and the human arranging his life according to God's rules in order to conform to it. Yet system debates are understood in a somewhat simpler form as political system.

Of course, system debates are rather political debates, but in the widest sense they are not independent of the matter of creation. Can Muslims establish a system at the political level and tie everything to that system? Can we build a life that can take away from people the possibility of sinning and ensure that everywhere only the life God wants is lived? This is one of the questions the system debate provokes, in my view. Establishing a political system is important; indeed all politics is directed precisely at the effort of establishing this system. For Muslims too, a system that can make possible a minimally Muslim life, that will not constitute an obstacle to it, and that will make it possible to carry out the public rulings of Islam. Of course it is important to be in search of this system. It is important to establish such a system, but one must know that this system can never put the human out of the equation. There is no system that will put the human out of the equation and establish the perfect order in our minds. System debates generally also reveal a strange yearning for the disappearance of human will.

How so?

Like this. A kind of Messianic role is in a way attributed to the longed-for system. The system, or the Islamic system, is seen as a moment of salvation in which everything will be set right, a kind of moment of miracle. What kind of thing is such a system, and, since it will in the end be established by human hands, what is the reality of the human who can establish and sustain it?

Does what you say mean that it is unnecessary for a Muslim to be concerned with the structuring of a system?

No, on the contrary; if the effort to establish a system is understood as a reflection of a meticulousness about life, there is of course no problem. In fact the system debate can on one side be welcomed as a search for Islamic politics. There is Islamic politics, but an Islamic system is somewhat imaginary. Because there can be no question of the Muslimness of beings who do not have a real personality to the extent of being accountable before God. The state, for example, is not a personality that will give an account to God. Nor is the system. So how can a formation that will not give an account before God be Islamic? What is Islamic is at the same time what is volitional. Because a claim to Islamicness occurs within the framework of the most basic moral principle, that is, through the action of those who have the freedom of acceptance or rejection. The deed of someone whose freedom to rebel has been taken away, even if it conforms to Islam in appearance, is not Islamic. Therefore we can welcome the effort to make the system Islamic only as an interest in the conditions of a Muslim participation in politics.

What is the connection between Islamic politics and the Islamic system?

Islamic politics is the performance of politics with the basmala. The servant who says the basmala when doing everything else also does politics for God, in God's name. But under what conditions and within what political program or stance one is to act is entirely a matter of the dynamics of life. When we attribute too much meaning to the system, we come to suppose that there is a single body of rules valid everywhere. Yet the situation of Muslims, their strengths and weaknesses, the conditions of the life they live in, the position of the people with whom they will establish a social order together, reach agreement or quarrel, leave them a broad political field and the freedom to produce countless political practices. When you fixate too much on the concept of system, just as you fall into the haste of imposing a monotonous mold valid everywhere, you will also certainly have difficulty establishing this mold's relation to reality. Because the mold is imaginary; it has no connection with life.

In saying this you are not giving up on Islamic politics, but you are questioning the concept of system. Yet those who look critically at the concept of the Islamic system generally look coolly on Islamic politics too.

That may be. Islamic politics, as in everything Muslims do (or should be), their conducting their politics too based on Islamic values and references is a requirement of their Muslimness. That is why, of course, I say only that I find demands for a system naive; otherwise Muslims need not hold back from the effort to seek and realize the better, the more Islamic, of everything under given conditions. Islamic politics can have countless practices and therefore manifestations. There are commonalities in all of them, but it is not easy to say that these commonalities produce a systemic orderliness. A grammatical orderliness, a sunnah, can of course be imagined over this practice. This, as you will appreciate, would be a bit a matter of intellectual performance. Muslims have a sunnah, and this sunnah, as its name says (a path), conforms to the requirements of road conditions.