"Always being in opposition" is not among the Islamists' promises

May God grant him well-being, dear Mümtazer Türköne, who last year declared the death of Islamism and dug its grave and buried it, has now set about performing its autopsy. Will he perform the autopsy by taking it out of its grave? Or, in fact, unable himself to be quite sure that the Islamism he had earlier thought dead has truly died, is he exhuming it from its grave to kill it again?

There is evidently a state of doubt. One cannot live with this doubt, take it from me. I think, at this rate, he will declare the death of Islamism many more times, and it will be because he can never be sure of it. Just as French Islamologists like Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel periodically, every few years, declare the end, bankruptcy, failure of Islamism.

If we recall, Roy and Kepel are now issuing the death notice, this time because Islamism has come to power in many places, for the same Islamism whose bankruptcy they had pronounced because it had failed to come to power in many parts of the Islamic world. We can understand its being regarded as a failure for not coming to power, but we have never been able to understand how Islamism is regarded as a failure for having come to power. For a political movement, is it not one of the most natural goals that the projects it ultimately puts forward be found convincing by the masses and receive favor and attention? How can a political movement whose claims have been accepted by the masses and which has been given a chance at power be regarded as a failure when it makes use of this chance?

A series of articles on Islamism have been published these days. The multiplication of these debates is undoubtedly a good occasion in terms of giving Islamism the chance to express itself anew and thereby to achieve its own reflexivity. Even if the questions have been asked wrongly, let the correcting be on us. We will not be too lazy to do it.

For example, the question that İhsan Dağı asked at the opening of two articles he published back to back: "Is it possible to do Islamism while in power?" This is also a question that follows Türköne's assumption, which finds no political position suitable for Islamism other than opposition. When it is opened up a little further, this assumption is supported by presenting data to the effect that Islamism has advanced from the beginning by making changes in its discourses. That is, it is evidently found strange that Islamism is changing, discursively or as a political position. Islamism or Islamists must have a core that never changes and must never change whatever happens in the world.

In response to Roy's umpteenth declaration of the end of Islamism, I remember an article I wrote in 2000 in Tezkire Magazine: The subject was again the changing of Islamists, and moreover there was no question of power for Islamists either in Turkey or anywhere in the Islamic world. In fact, if you look only at the positions in that debate, you can comfortably argue that nothing has changed at all. The question I asked in that article, and which we are obliged to ask again today, was this: Whose expectation or claim is it that the Islamist discourse or practice should not change?

As far as I know, Islamists make no such claim. Of course there are also Islamists who hold this claim; they have no business with politics anyway, they only fight. But for Islamists who have adopted politics as a path, the path is already a dialogical political practice, and its most fundamental claim and practice is ijtihad. That is, when the era, context, position change, the political position and discourse are affected by it. How, I wonder, is one of the most famous provisions of the Mecelle, "the change of rulings with the change of times cannot be denied," understood?

Of course, Islamism's discourse while in opposition is one thing and while in power another. There is nothing incomprehensible about this. While we are at it, let us remind again that the 19th-century Islamism whose "birth" Türköne, who finds no power suitable for Islamism, claims in his doctoral thesis is an ideology of power. But now he himself, and Dağı, and Menderes Çınar, to whom Dağı refers, judge that all of Islamism's skill and dynamism lies in its opposition. Under the AK Parti government they expect from the Islamist intelligentsia an opposition peculiar to this dynamism.

Those among the Islamists who have found a discourse or a path for opposing the AK Parti are doing what they would do anyway; of course we cannot interfere with them. But beneath the calls to return Islamists to opposition there are much stranger expectations. Islamists are expected to answer the expectations of the leftists caught in the vise of ultranationalism, or of the Kurdish opposition of the oppressed that cannot get beyond nationalist chauvinism. Vis-a-vis the AK Parti, Islamism is respected only if it responds to these expectations. Why do they expect from Islamists the opposition that they themselves could not manage, or that they smear all over their faces by drifting away from reason, reality and conscience with everything they do? This is the question that really needs to be asked.

"What use will the 'intellectual capital' that Islamists have built up all these years be, what will it be put to?" asks dear Dağı. I expect him to appreciate that the AK Parti, in today's Turkey, is not behind any political address that opposes it and invites Islamists to oppose it. Let him just look: on the Kurdish question, who has proposed or implemented a more just, humane and democratic program? Kurdish nationalists, liberals, leftists?

On the democratization of the country, the fight against tutelage and corruption, securing economic justice, and developing a conception of the state based on human dignity, who has had a better vision or practice?

In fact, if he wishes, he can see what the AK Parti has done as the operation of that intellectual capital that he worries about. Let nobody take offense; we will not be modest at all. What the AK Parti has achieved in power today is something that no opposition political movement in Turkey could even see in its dreams. Islamism never promised something like "opposition only, whatever happens." It is in any case impossible for it to promise such a thing, because its original model, the Messenger of God, carried out opposition in the best way too and, when the time came, also established the most virtuous government recorded in history. Hayrettin Karaman has put it very well: from Islamists you may perhaps expect to be critical at all times, but they have made no promise to anyone about being oppositional.