Real liberals, real leftists or real Muslims

If you are not a liberal, can you decide who is a real liberal?

You can also restate the question as "if you are not a leftist or socialist, can you decide who is a leftist or socialist, or if you are not an Alevi, can you decide who is truly an Alevi?" You end up at the same door.

If you presume to decide who the real adherent of a way of thinking you do not belong to is, at the very least you will be accused of "being an outsider cheering from the sidelines".

To take part in a debate over the authenticity of a way of thinking or a political-philosophical stance, one needs, at a minimum, to have a stake within that way of thinking. For years there were people who, from outside, presumed to decide what real Islam is or is not for Muslims, and who pontificated on this recklessly.

Undoubtedly the aim of such audacity was nothing other than establishing domination over Muslims. This attitude continues even now. The labels "moderate" or "immoderate Islam" never express a search for real Islam either; they express a search for a Muslim who will be politically subordinate to oneself.

Trying to operate the jargon of authenticity from the outside for a political or religious stance always carries the risk of backfiring. Most of the time you have neither found the authenticity you claimed nor been able to escape becoming even more corrupted because of the political gain you were eyeing with this claim.

For all that, it is not the case that there can be no dialogue, communication or togetherness among people belonging to different sects or persuasions. The possibility of this does not depend on an assessment of authenticity about others. What is needed is only the construction of a common world, or a minimum of commonality for coexisting on the basis of mutual respect in a common world. After all, deciding whether those who are able to relate to one another are more authentic or less authentic in the eyes of the broader communities to which they belong is an entirely different level. Personally I never enter the debate over who is a real leftist and who is a real liberal. But in the debate over who is more meritoriously attached to leftist or liberal values, the debate among leftists or liberals always draws the interest of outsiders.

The choice I make among those with liberal pretensions is related not to which is the more authentic liberal, but to in which of them I feel a human quality, or at least a love-hate feeling toward myself. In the end, even if I cannot decide who is more real between the liberal claim of those distinguished by their Islamophobic discourse against Muslims, who along the way could stomach both the headscarf ban and the coup, and the liberal claim of those who, on the contrary, defend freedom for every kind of thought in the most radical sense, I can surely decide that one is a friend and the other an enemy.

When a leftist who is able to hold a good dialogue with me is described by the left community as "conciliatory, revisionist, collaborator," our reaction is of course not to decide who the real leftist is. Nor am I the one who will decide how much of my interlocutor's dialogue with me suits his own persuasion and how much requires deviation from this persuasion. Of course, the book that my interlocutor claims is also important; his attachment to that book and his claim of consistency with it are not entirely independent of dialogue either. After all, the fiqh of the People of the Book, which in Islamic culture accepts others as they are and defines legal situations, is built entirely on this awareness. That people have a book, and that it has been publicly declared, is not a small matter.

On the other hand, political subjects may adopt different strategies in the process of communication or politics, and they may decide accordingly, seeking friendly or hostile positions. Although everyone is very prone to claim the opposite on this, what generally determines positions is not conformity to theory, doctrine or principles but the shared feelings that communities set in motion against one another.

We see love, hatred, jealousy, envy, feelings of inferiority or superiority taking shape by turning into complexes with their own appropriate patterns of political behavior. What kind of "modern-postmodern prince" or "messiah" syndrome the left's seeing itself as the only worthy actor of progressive developments in the world has produced is plain. That this prevents it from seeing and recognizing revolutionary subjects, developments or positions other than itself, and that it cannot even see that it thereby places them, according to its own classification, in the position of utter reactionaries, itself depicts a "leftist tragedy."

In the end, if we cannot avoid speaking here of an indivisible community called the "left," we can speak of a community behavior having manifested out of the dialectic of theory and practice.

The problem with this community is that it is hard to guess exactly what its book says to it... That it is extremely prone to very easily distorting even the book it made up itself according to political positions...

When we see an honest left or liberalism that conforms to its own book, we will of course not join them or accept their theoretical or philosophical claims. On the contrary, the real debate, the real politics will begin at that point. But without deceiving one another, honestly, we will know with whom we are debating and with whom we are doing politics.