Let us not waste the Islamism debate on nominalism

From the moment the debate was opened, the attitudes and reactions that emerged have made one basic reality about Islamism quite clear: this is in fact a debate taking place among certain intellectual circles. Neither the language nor the scope of the debate has taken on, or seems likely to take on, a mass dimension. Those who insist on setting Muslimness against Islamism, while in essence proceeding from an entirely Islamist concern, can rest assured. Islamism has never been a concept meant to replace the concept of the Muslim, and in fact it never made such a claim. Frankly, I have difficulty making sense of people at a certain intellectual level responding to the debate in such a nominalist way.

In the introduction to my comprehensive study Political Thought in Modern Turkey - Islamism (İletişim Yayınları), which I began in 1999 and completed in 2004, I pointed to one difficulty of studying Islamism in Turkey and said this: there is a political phenomenon we identify as Islamism, but the greatest problem of this political phenomenon is that its actors do not nominally assume the Islamist identity.

At that time I drew attention to at least a twofold legitimacy problem for the concept of Islamism: on the one hand it is regarded as entirely outside legitimacy by the dominant political discourse, while on the other it is disdained by the very circles that could be labeled Islamist through a certain conceptual abstraction. That is, the circles that can be described as "Islamist" only as a conceptual abstraction consider the concept of Muslim sufficient as an expression of identity in place of the concept of Islamist. Some did so because they found it unnecessary, since Muslimness already contains whatever is meant by Islamism; others did so because they in fact rejected the political level altogether.

Yet those who rejected the political level also kept displaying a thoroughly political existence to the end, kept influencing politics, kept changing the world. Perhaps they are in a political state like Molière's Bourgeois Gentleman, that is, they do not know the political.

And yet, as Mümtazer Türköne also accepts, there is a movement that can be identified as Islamist, even if through abstraction, and this movement changed and improved Turkey, moving it from being an authoritarian regime toward a more open, more democratic, "better" point. In producing this effect, this movement was the movement of those who called themselves "Muslim" with at least a somewhat more particular emphasis. This "particular emphasis" cannot be brushed aside. It was precisely the place where you could see an Islamist will, energy, demand, movement, and to read it you apparently need to know at least a little of the alphabet of the matter.

Therefore, Islamism makes no claim to substitute for the concept of the Muslim. On the contrary, at such a level of abstraction it is a concept that could destroy itself, deeming its own function complete once the real meaning of being Muslim is known and understood by everyone. It serves as a warning that comes into play to remind people that by saying "I became a Muslim" they have not been abandoned, and that being Muslim is a responsibility whose price must be paid. When it is forgotten that the primary meaning of being Muslim is to reject servitude to anyone other than God, when Muslimness turns into a mere cultural or national affiliation, when those who say "I am a Muslim" begin to regard servitude to others besides God as routine, in an environment where the Qur'an has been sidelined as knowledge and guidance, the matter of Islamism is a warning that comes into play. And the ultimate aim of this warning is nothing other than the restoration of the concept of the Muslim.

If I need to make a clarification of what I have said so far: in saying that I see Islamism "in some contexts" as a result of a "functional narrowing" in the concept of the Muslim, I am not proposing the concept of Islamism as an alternative to replace Muslimness. Moreover, the functional narrowing of the concept stems not from the concept's own inadequacy but from the wrong use of it by those who use it. Thus I am in fact pointing to an eternal way of coping with an eternal problem in human history. What can we do, ideal conditions of communication, never distorted, have never operated among people.

Ideal communication requires constantly following how language, or more specifically words and concepts, are transformed as they circulate among people. If people who say "I am a Muslim" have not adopted the Qur'an as the sole guide in their lives, then what is understood by Muslimness has not found its place. Those who say they are Muslims yet practice, and continue to practice, racism, classism, regionalism, elitism, tribalism and clannishness have understood nothing of being Muslim.

The definition of Islamism held by those who try to reduce it, under modern conditions, to a reaction against Western imperialism and to marginalize it is too narrow and too superficial. The Islamist reaction is, at root, a reaction against the corruption of Muslims, their drifting away from the values of Islam, and the stances of those who say "I am a Muslim" that contradict the most fundamental values of Islam. Islamism is a movement directed, before or rather than exclusively against the West or non-Muslims, against so-called Muslims who resort to paths other than Islam. In this form it has appeared continually since the earliest times of Islam, even if it was not called Islamism.

To say that the name Islamism was used by al-Ash'ari does not mean that al-Ash'ari was the first to represent Islamism; it only shows that the concept has not gone entirely unused in Islamic history. Moreover, it is highly likely that al-Ash'ari did not mean by the concept what is understood by it today, but he also has a political struggle, and as an invitation to the authentic Islam (as he thought it to be), he is an Islamist to the very end.

Saying that the Prophet Muhammad was not an Islamist must be a further stage of nominalism. As a contribution to this nominalism, let us remind you too that the Prophet Muhammad was neither a Shafi'i nor a Hanafi. He was neither a Shiite nor a Sunni. He was neither a Salafi nor a Sufi. Where do we get to from here, I wonder?