At the limits of the possible: friendship, morality and politics

We have heard many complaints that political movements acting to shape the world according to their own utopias lose the human being first of all. A utopia is a perfect world constructed in the mind, but its perfection extends only as far as the limits of the human being's own horizon, imagination and desires. A world designed within the limits of a historical and social horizon is bound not to fit the dynamism of life, which is dramatic in its essence. For the dynamism of life always exceeds every kind of human system design.

If those who build their utopias were to present them purely as art, as their own dreams, to people, perhaps there would be no problem; that too would remain a color, a voice, a call within human plurality. Yet when the utopias that are somebody's

dream become the goal, the destination, the Zion, the Red Apple (Kızılelma) of a political movement, they also turn into an oppression, a tyranny that places hostile distances between people.

All utopias, in order to be realized, also prescribe a program of transformation for all people in total. This transformation envisages people turning into something other than what they are now. In a racist utopia, perhaps genocides, perhaps humiliation, perhaps ethnic cleansing are deemed fit for those who are not of our race.

The socialist utopia envisaged as bloody and arduous a transformation as possible. At the end of the transformation to be carried out by the dictatorship of the proletariat, neither a person of any religion nor any class stratum would be left. The envisaged destination, all the desires and dreams projected onto the future, must also feed a hostile attitude toward other people, toward others, in today's world. The definition of friend and enemy will be made accordingly.

Of course, just as much as utopia, there are also cases that reach into the past, carried to the present from events and tragedies that remained in the past, whose bills are presented to the people of today, cases that are reopened in every age. Like the unending bills presented to people of today over what happened at Karbala. There can be Asad and his Shabbiha, who pursue the vengeance of Imam Husayn at Karbala, or the war-insatiable mullahs of Iran.

Here, if the righteousness of Imam Husayn is to remain as an inheritance, should it remain to these? The uprising of Imam Husayn, who was martyred at Karbala, was above all against oppression, against tyranny, against power being stolen from the hands of the people and taken into the monopoly of one person, one dynasty or one clique. Yet today, while whatever Imam Husayn opposed is being practiced in the ugliest way by those who claim to own him today, they make innocent people live thousands of Karbalas every day.

Even so, it is clear that, in the carrying of a tragic event of the past into the present as an inheritance, a confusion of roles that distorts everything is on display. But the feelings conveyed to the people of today through such sanctifications of the past in their distorted form, the hatred that cannot be dispelled, deserve attention. It is one of the examples that can shed light on our considerations regarding taking friendship as a foundation for a contemporary political philosophy.

Against approaches that produce constant grudge and unresolvable enmities toward others in your own utopia or in the politics you carry over to today from your own conceptions of the past, friendship is a quite healing virtue. Of course, by carrying this friendship, as we have also said before, beyond the concept of perfect and idealized friendship.

Friendship is not a scarce potential, as is supposed, but a virtue that can be revived and brought back to life wherever human beings are. Muslims experienced this. From those who were fiercely hostile to one another, a society of friends-brothers who loved one another was built. Those who hated one another discovered in one another the source of love through the blessing God granted, loved, and were loved. A community that loves one another for God's sake, that sees one another's difference as an acquaintance, as a beauty that is the manifestation of the true Friend, and makes it an occasion for familiarity. Not condemning one another for color, language, race or sex, on the basis of virtues, in the name of strengthening and representing virtues. Even the rights of those who do not share these virtues being observed,

with the consciousness that he too is a human being created by God.

The essence is affection (muhabbet). The essence of religion is also affection. Friendship and affection are the forerunners both of religion and of morality. Christian theologian moral philosophers say, "it is not friendship that rests on morality, on the contrary, morality rests on friendship." This saying is where the search that Nietzsche undertook in his famous "Beyond Good and Evil" found its answer. According to him, "what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil."

When solid and good grounds and foundations for love and friendship come into being, it also takes justice out of being a distant ideal or a lost value. The proposition that morality, even religion and justice, rest on friendship may sound a little strange in the modern understanding. Yet Aristotle's aphorism on this matter formulates the matter very well: "When people are friends they have no need of justice, but when they are just they still need friendship, and the truest form of justice is thought to be of a friendly quality."

This is Wael b. Hallaq's starting point in his book on the impossibility of the modern Islamic state. Hallaq explains that in the pre-modern Islamic tradition there was only an Islamic governance whose moral, legal, political, social and metaphysical foundations were strikingly different, and that there was no distinction between the legal and the moral. On the one hand, colonialism, by corrupting the organic fabric of Muslim cultures, thoroughly confused Muslim communities and their political outlooks. On the other hand, the modern state, with the institutional, calculating relations on which it rests, has made almost impossible the formation of a politics founded on the human and friendly relations on which a Muslim society rests.

Thus, although the impossibility of a modern Islamic state may tend toward an eulogy for Islam, these theses are undoubtedly debatable. The impossible state may at the same time imply that a friendly political philosophy is also impossible

too.

Yet we should be in search not of the impossible but of the possible, and within the limits of the possible there is surely room for a friendly politics

as well.