The Islamist choice: politics against metapolitics

Throughout history Muslims have lived through every kind of political position or experience. Because they have a completed book and a constitutive reference experience that began in opposition, continued with power, and from there passed through a successful period of the rightly guided caliphate. The wholeness and multidimensionality within this constitutive experience has throughout history shed light on the Islamist quest of countless Islamic communities, whether living in power or in opposition, whether in the abode of Islam (dar al-Islam) or in the abode of unbelief (dar al-kufr) or war (dar al-harb).

To this you may add the diversity of models in the experiences of the prophets whose stories are told in the Holy Qur'an and each of whom is an example for Muslims. There is, for instance, Moses and the struggle for the liberation of an oppressed, enslaved people. In the early stages of this struggle, all the hardships of the education of the Children of Israel toward a monotheistic line are narrated as a lesson in life. Again, there is Joseph, who was placed at the head of a system already established and operating on a particular political culture and tradition, by virtue of his qualities of honest and successful administration, and who brought his own people out of the catastrophe of famine thanks to his successful management. The relationship between the Islamic struggle performance he displayed in the process and his other work is highly instructive. Likewise, just as with David and Solomon there is an almost complete story of power, there is, in Abraham, Lot, Salih, Shuayb, the People of the Trench (Ashab al-Ukhdud) and many other examples of opposition or oppression, a rich representation of the diversification of the monotheistic stance as it meets life, of different positions of struggle.

This diversity stems from the fact that life itself is dynamic and diverse and that Islam is truly a religion of life and of the world. Therefore confining Islamism, which proceeds from the constitutive reference of Islam, to a merely historical and conjunctural opposition is nothing but a new and external construct about Islamism.

Mumtazer Turkone says, "Turkey has changed. Who changed it?" and, "If we are looking for agents within modest limits, we must give first place to those who once defined themselves as 'Islamists,'" but he says that after making this change Islamists have completed their task, and that they found annihilation (fena) in the state that harnessed them to this work. To be able to see it this way is, in a sense, a matter of perspective, of course. Because he sees it this way, he says that Islamists have now turned to being occupied with piety and religious affairs and building mosques, that they have consented to a kind of shrine-keeping (turbedarlik), in the words of dear Murat Guzel. What were Islamists expected to be? Or why should they have needed to put distance between building mosques, piety and themselves?

In fact, if he had a more realistic definition of the political, he would not make such a naive distinction between politics and piety, and he would see that all these works are also works that correspond to different states of Islamism (right or wrong is a separate matter). Ali Bulac falls into the same error here. On the one hand he criticizes the Presidency of Religious Affairs, loading it with an apolitical meaning, and on the other hand he complains about the politicization of Islam. Let us content ourselves for now with noting how interesting it is that these two complaints can be made at the same time. Let us move on to that section later.

To continue, Turkone says, "They trim and trim former Islamists and make them politicians; Islamism is carefully framed and hung on the wall as a flying carpet that has been used to climb up in politics and whose work is done." What is more interesting than the propositional content of this statement is its demeaning tone. But let us nevertheless proceed from its content of meaning. Two questions come to mind.

First, since Islamism by definition and nature is something political, how is it that only former Islamists become politicians? Weren't former Islamists already at the very heart of politics? What is thought to be political?

Second, who is doing this to Islamists? Who produces politicians from former Islamists, who hangs them like a carpet? Don't these Islamists have choices of their own? Evidently a change of line by former Islamists causes such analyses. Did someone force Islamists to do this, or did whatever happened happen by Islamists' own choices? If it is a choice, do they have an explanation of their own regarding this choice, or has everything happened through an unprincipled abandonment? How can this verdict be reached without giving any place to those explanations? These are questions that must be asked in all seriousness.

Turkone's main preference, which we determined earlier, is that these things in the world are in fact determined at the metapolitical level and that our choices have no value whatsoever. I criticized the metapolitical approach in an article of mine titled "The Missing Link in Turkish Political Thought: The Political" (Divan Journal, issue 19, 2005). A relative of this approach is all conspiratorial thinking, another relative is Marxist thought, which holds that whatever is happening is in fact an epiphenomenon of great capitalist power games, and the main source is Hegel, who constitutes a metaphysical reference for this entire mode of thought. In all three cases the political level is cancelled, rendered invalid.

Against this thought, Islamist thought and practice stand directly with the concept of "will" (irada). If you ask what is the most important message of Islamism today, I would say, humbly, that it is the message that human beings draw their own destiny themselves, and are therefore primarily responsible for their actions. Indeed, calling for will against fatalism has been, not only today but since the first century of Islam throughout history, the subject on which all Islamic renewal (tajdid) movements, jihad movements and murabit movements have dwelt most.

In purely theological situations in which people somehow relate what befalls them to a divine destiny, the cause of will, where it functions only as a spontaneous ideology with a theological content, has had effort (cehd) and responsibility as the subject of sermons and admonition. This is one of the main themes that immediately link contemporary Islamism (you see, such a qualification resolves many things: "contemporary Islamism," this is a qualification that allows us to focus on the more specific aspects of the Islamism we are discussing today) with ancient Islamist movements.