The claim to truth, Muslims and politics

It is a crushing reality of politics that political debates are not determined by the search for truth. Those who enter a political debate, those who take sides in it, those who join in with cheers, have no concern for finding the truth, or for holding on to it with both hands once they find it. The ultimate aim is to supply data that will support an argument constructed in advance, and to shove that data in the face of the other side.

Of course, this turns politics, and political debate, into a tedious squabble of no value whatsoever. For it brings to the fore a personality mold that frustrates the good-faith expectation that everyone's heart will soften and eyes will open before a new piece of information, data, document or verse: a mold that is ruthless toward truth, blind of the eyes of the heart, deaf of the ears of the heart.

Some might claim that things are not very different in philosophy or in science, and not only in politics. Indeed, countless observations can be made that scientific endeavors are conducted not out of love of truth but so as to feed paradigms that people have already settled on. There are even observations that the success of the whole history of science owes itself to scientists working to falsify one another and to undo what has been done. Is it not precisely on this observation that Karl R. Popper's placing of the falsificationist impulse of scientists at the center of scientific progress rests? Without doubt, we must do justice to this observation without neglecting the weight of ordinary scientific practice, which looks from someone's eyes and someone's window in order to confirm someone.

Still, the assumption that, in politics as well as in philosophical and scientific debates, people carry on their existence without being in any way influenced by the arguments or claims of the other side makes life unbearable and intolerable.

If that is the case, there is no possibility of changing anything, nor any point in striving for it... Yet both politics and the human condition begin, before anything else, with acknowledging the existence of "other" people, that is, of those who hold an attitude or an opinion different from yours. One who carries no hope of change either in himself or in his interlocutors has no place in politics. It is also obvious that those whose eyes and ears are closed to the realities and words of others can produce no value.

In fact, this attitude also contradicts the claims of the postmodern age in which we live. In an age when having a claim to truth is equated with bigotry and even with a proneness to terror, the fact that people are in reality displaying the most inflexible stances and attitudes ever recorded by history is a situation that truly needs explaining. It turns out that even those who invite people to empathy, to openness toward other values, to a democratic attitude, cling to all these values only until their own despotic, totalitarian values are accepted. Once their own worldview is settled, it is immediately installed in the rank of absolute truth, and after that the only question comes down to how the hapless deviants who oppose this absolute truth, the deniers who murder the truth, are to be eliminated.

The sensitivity regarding the tendency of truth claims to lead to exclusion or despotism is in fact not unjustified. The Western world is full of examples of catastrophes caused by both the religious-traditional practices of these claims and their modern-postmodern liberal manifestations.

The only examples in which this cycle was broken are the civilizations founded by Muslims. To hold a claim to truth and, while regarding the truth claims of others as false, still allow those claims room to exist and to live together. I am right and you are wrong, but this does not require either of us to perish or to depart from here.

Furthermore, my truth is a truth that carries within it the possibility of error, and your error is an error that carries within it the possibility of truth. That is why the civilizations that people with this understanding built over centuries were multicultural and displayed a mosaic structure.

So much so that even today, in all the lands once ruled by Muslims, very different cultures are able to live together, and this coexistence began to pose a problem only in modern times, with the adoption of modern conceptions. Moreover, some orientalist discourses have been able to attribute the persistence of such a mosaic structure within Islamic civilization to Islam's weakness in forming a "melting pot." Yet it is far more fitting to remember (or to remind) how that melting pot was poured out in the West through fascistic practices.

Today, the most important pretext of Islamophobic theses is that Islam has an excessively strong claim to truth. The invitation by modern or postmodern Western politics for people to give up their truth claims is a thoroughly deceitful attitude, because they themselves never give up this claim.

Yet having a claim to truth is what is most in keeping with human nature. There is no need to try to suppress it with false, exaggerated rhetoric of tolerance; examples show that it cannot be suppressed. That the most ruthless political practices or attitudes come from champions of exaggerated tolerance should be instructive enough, and if it is not, one should listen to Nietzsche's observations about the voluptuous eunuchs of tolerance discourse.

In sum, the success of ensuring that others can live within one's civilizational borders without giving up their claims belongs only to Muslims. This also explains why Muslims were made witnesses over people, and why they were made a middle community (vasat ümmet) with the competence to judge justly among people.

If you wish, you can also read this as an explanation of why the actors of the democratization of Turkey today, which will produce justice and happiness not only for its pious but for all segments of society, are the devout conservatives.