Islamism's first message is to Muslims, not the West

It is quite natural for different definitions or approaches to emerge in the debate on Islamism. But to see right away from differences of definition and approach a light shining toward secularization, and above all to feel joy or consolation over the exhaustion of Islamism, is interesting but exceedingly hasty. Let us only remind that in Islamic history, apart from the years of felicity when the Prophet was alive, there has never been a period in which even the most fundamental matters of Islam were not subjects of debate.

In fact these debates have at times been the scene of violent disputes, but even these disputes were expressed within the language of religion and did not play a secularizing role. That the Islamism debate carries a claim to a more authentic Islam is also inevitable; to draw from this a sign of its despotism or absolutism is again an expression of a naive ignorance of the language of both religion and politics, and we must say so. For no language of religion has ever been seen that does not regard itself as right and others as wrong. That a relativist language that regards everyone as right in his own way could be valid on the political ground is nothing but a superstition that the liberals try to make us swallow.

The language of liberalism itself, which expects us to believe this superstition, is excessively absolutist. Above all, the liberal language itself is extremely skilled at categorically falsifying and excluding politics incompatible with itself. The authoritarian, exclusionary discourse it displays in this respect appears as a typical example in its definitions of Islamism.

Yet the political language of Islam has, throughout history, an approach that regards the right of others to exist as a matter of concern even in situations where people see themselves as most in the right. Even Sayyid Qutb, regarded as one of the most radical representatives of this political language today, defines jihad, in Milestones, the manifesto of contemporary Islamism, not so much as an effort to Islamize people as the securing, in the most radical sense, of people's freedom of religion and conscience: after political pressures are removed and people are left freely alone with their consciences, whoever believes in whatever, believes. He also identifies this definition as the basic motive that guided the jihad movements in Islamic history. There are of course also those today who understand jihad differently, but this is the matter.

It seems it is necessary, when speaking of Islamism, to remind that the concept itself was not proposed as an identity alternative to the Muslim. Yet even those who identify Islamism as a historical phenomenon and talk about it overlook that the great majority of the persons or movements they call Islamist do not call themselves Islamist. Whether it is Abdülhamid, the Young Turks, or persons who have stood out as Islamists, the "Islamist" quality of these figures is a designation attributed through scientific abstraction. The great majority of these names do not call themselves Islamist. So it seems that, although they did not call themselves Islamist, they had a "distinguishing stance" that made it necessary to call them Islamist.

When we come to that distinguishing stance, what common features do they have that require us to limit it historically only to the nineteenth century and to a reaction against Western imperialism? Mehmet Akif Ersoy, for example, as a typical Islamist, is he only an anti-Western figure? Is his ever-oppositional character dominant, or his side that defends the survival and reform of the state?

Mehmet Akif is a personality who stood out in this period with a call to return to Islam, and his struggle is directed inward, that is, toward Muslims, rather than against the West. He cried out against Muslims' supposing the Qur'an to be "a book sent down to be recited in graves and to tell fortunes." According to him, Muslims have clouded the true meaning of Islam with innovations and superstitions, have moved away from Islamic values, and have thereby prepared the ground for the calamities that have befallen them today. He rebelled against the laziness and fatalism that Muslims legitimize with resignation (tawakkul). He strove to establish the use of reason against blind imitation, and knowledge against ignorance.

All the themes Mehmet Akif put forward in this rebellion you can find in all earlier movements of renewal (tajdid) or revival (ihya). In his rebellion against the Muslims caught unawares by the Mongol invasion, Ibn Taymiyya was saying more or less exactly what Akif said. The same things can be heard also in the call of Imam Rabbani, who bore the title of the renewer (mujaddid) of the second millennium, to Muslims in India who, under the influence of Indian mysticism, had abandoned themselves to innovations and superstitions.

Therefore you cannot finish off Islamism by imprisoning it in the context of a reaction against Western imperialism. Islamism's primary business is with Muslims; making Muslims place the Qur'an at the center of their lives, and remember Muslim brotherhood against deviations of tribalism or nationalism. It is a fact that today in the world Muslims are reading the Qur'an more with each passing day, that they are making it a maxim that guides their lives more, that a stronger desire for unification is making itself felt among the world's Muslims, and that a will and a politics arising from this are coming to the fore. If so, this should also make it unnecessary for us to look for other signs of Islamism's inherent vitality.

Mümtazer Türköne has defined Islamism as an ideology whose root is outside. He proceeded from the fact that Namık Kemal, Ziya Pasha or the other Young Turks composed the ideas he describes as Islamist under the influence of the milieu in London and Paris. In fact, this also shows that Türköne still does not know any definition of Islamism other than what they expressed, or that he thinks they composed Islamism once and for all time. Yet they were not the first Islamists, and none of those who joined Islamist thought or movement later was significantly influenced by those he names. Indeed, to remember that they also had Islamist ideas, Türköne would need to write a doctoral thesis a hundred years after them.

Moreover, evaluating ideas as "rooted outside" is also an incorrigibly nativist understanding. I had criticized this understanding earlier in several pieces here too. Think what would be left in our hands if we were to judge ideas as "rooted outside." Is Islam itself native? Would this not lead us, a quarter step later, to the Ka'ba too being the Arab's?