The balance of "ruling" and "wisdom" for theology

I am in Diyarbakır again, five days later. This time the subject is the importance of faculties of theology and religious education in the context of social peace. The Diyarbakır Faculty of Theology is hosting this year the eighteenth of the annual regular meetings of the faculties of theology. The deans of Turkey's theology faculties, whose number has passed fifty, are also conducting a deliberation on religious education and teaching and on theological discourses.

Religion is expected to contribute to social peace, but this corresponds, especially as an expectation of those in power, to the expectation that religion will play the role of a legitimizing ideology against injustices or contradictions that continue and have become the character of a particular order. It is also known that religion, in one of its forms of manifestation, has always played this role throughout history. The observations on which Marx's inferences about religion rest were probably these kinds of uses of it.

Yet religion is not always an institution that works as the customary legitimizer of the order and the ideological apparatus of the state. The whole history of the prophets is a history of examples in which religion disturbed established orders, indeed shook, disturbed and upset orders that continued for better or worse but necessarily stood on injustices and oppression.

That is why religion's answering to a need for an ideology that would secure social peace is something that religion in its original form opposes in the first place. Instead of contributing to social peace unquestioningly, religion stands against the oppressions that break this peace, draws attention to the contradictions that threaten that peace, and demands their correction and the redress of injustices. Religion's priority is not peace but justice, though there is no firmer foundation for peace than justice anyway.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Görmez, the President of Religious Affairs, who gave an opening and concept speech at the meeting, underlined, in keeping with the spirit of the venue, that religion puts forward the law of brotherhood rather than the rhetoric of brotherhood. When people are left to themselves, when they are subject to their own whims and desires, they are so divided and tense that they become "wolves to one another." Yet there operates such a process that God fuses together the hearts of people who are enemies to each other and makes brothers out of those who were enemies.

Islam, in the end, produced a community out of tribes and individuals who hated one another and were enemies of one another, who became brothers to each other with all their being. That process is itself a miracle. But as selfless as those people were toward one another, they respected one another's rights, without doubt far more than that.

Today in Turkey there is no theoretical or theological problem in the way of religious education seeing other people as beings who, in their essence, possess every right at least as much as itself. Unfortunately, however, in practice our theology too can sometimes be put to the service of resolving existing contradictions with dry rhetoric of brotherhood, without touching on law and without observing law. In this respect Prof. Görmez's warning approaches the subject from a very good place for reviving the discourse of brotherhood between Kurds and Turks, which has begun to cease working beyond a certain point.

A very important point to underline in Prof. Görmez's speech is also the distinction he drew between "ruling" (hüküm) and "wisdom" (hikmet). According to him, in many parts of the Islamic world the Islamic sciences remain stuck on the dimension of ruling. Yet every ruling has a wisdom as well, and when this wisdom is not taken into account, extremely anachronistic interpretations or practices of Islam can result.

For example, on what Islamic "ruling" does the statement of a scholar from Saudi Arabia these days, "The churches in Arabia must be demolished," rest? In truth, this statement, which lacks a basis even in the dimension of "ruling," has no share whatsoever of "wisdom." Despite this lack of wisdom, from the moment it was uttered it has found its way into the headlines of hundreds of newspapers in the West and has become a kind of pretext for the already existing excessively Islamophobic discourses about Islam.

In truth, this distinction between wisdom and ruling could be the beginning of a different and new approach for the Islamic sciences. If the tradition of maqāṣid al-sharīʿa in Islamic history and its extremely strong history of interpretation were perhaps sufficiently put to work today, the traditional references that might be needed for this new approach would be derived from there in sufficient measure.

This should be the beginning of a solution-producing, problem-focused process of deliberation among all theologians or persons belonging to the Islamic sciences in the Islamic world. After all, in many parts of the Islamic world, people who take Islam into account have by now assumed responsibility for matters touching every area of life.

Let us also pass over the times of a theology that touched life in no way at all. Theology is now a far greater part of life, and in this new period it seems that theology will be tested far more with real cases.