"The Impossible State"

Designing models and utopias that are impossible to implement in the world and forcing society and politics to reach them has had very painful, tragic consequences throughout history. Since utopias are impossible in their very essence anyway, ultimately and at most, by putting pressure on existing conditions, they force a change in a certain direction even if they cannot go all the way. In this respect their historical role can be positive up to a point. After all, when people do not like the present situation, they dream collective dreams for something better and act with a political motivation toward realizing it.

Utopian political projections also provide important data for understanding those who defend them. Starting from who dreams of what, one also understands what people are going through and how they perceive what they go through. From these designs we can tell how much a person wants for others what he wants for himself, and how open his heart is to embracing, hosting or wishing well for how many people, and how much human difference and diversity.

We said, for example, that we can see from socialist utopias how narrow they are, that they set aside no space for anyone other than the human type they have designed. In nationalist or racist ideals, of course, the situation is no different. But in Jewish and Christian visions of the future, too, the situation is no different.

Islam shows a radical difference in terms of making room in its own vision of the future for people other than itself.

In the Holy Qur'an there is a narrative that recognizes people other than Muslims and builds a projection of living together with them until the Day of Judgment. Moreover, the Holy Qur'an does not do this merely as a vision of the future. In this Book, which will be the primary reference of Muslims until the Day of Judgment, the rules of a life that is actually continuing with non-Muslims are laid down, actually lived, and defined as a lasting form of relationship. One may marry (their women) among them, eat their food, that is, sit at their tables, treat them well as long as no hostility from them is seen, and their rights are safeguarded within a sacred framework.

There is no other discourse or politics that, while in government, that is, in power, secures the rights of people other than its own with this friendly approach. Since the modern world and the modern state generally draw their inspiration from approaches that are not friendly at all, this politics of Islam seems impossible on these horizons. That is why it is quite normal for Wael B. Hallaq to regard the Islamic State as an "impossible state." That the Islamic state is impossible in the modern world or in the format of the modern state is, according to him,

not a deficiency of Islam but of modernity.

With the national ideologies on which it bases its legitimacy or raison d'être, the modern state, with an approach friendly not to the human being in general but to a certain nation, race, territorial affiliation, by separating morality from law, has damaged beyond repair the social fabric that an Islamic state could hold on to. The political practice or philosophy of Islam cannot be separated from religious feeling and perspective. In this perspective there is a religious-moral responsibility toward all creatures of God, as the Owner not only of all people but of all being. Therefore the awareness that those who are not of one's own faith too are at least created, provided for and watched over by the same God binds a person to an approach parallel to this watching over. This approach of Islam toward those of other religions, which can in fact be considered exceptional, comes from this broad vision.

In sum, the format to which any state in today's modern world must conform is in essence alien to the human being, and establishing a different kind of state is also not possible in today's world.

The nostalgic references that Hallaq, a Christian professor of Palestinian origin who spent many years researching Islamic law and has shown a competence in this field that cannot be ignored, makes to the model of human relations, law, religion and morality that Islam has put into practice in history find their place as a very powerful critique of modernism. In an interview he gave to Al Jazeera, he did not hesitate to say that, as a Christian, he would prefer to live in this political order (Sharia) that Islam established in the past over living in a modern state. Hallaq, who with these words answers "to a certain extent true" to the question of whether he is not in fact using this model of Islam as a tool in settling accounts with modernism, has had his characterization of the Islamic state as "impossible" in the modern world received, interestingly, as glad tidings in anti-Islamic circles. It could even be perceived as a new breath for the periodically repeated prophecies of "the end of Islamism."

Hallaq of course speaks in a context very different from addressing those with such simple expectations of glad tidings. When listened to carefully, it is immediately noticed that he does not say anything that would excite those expectations. On the contrary, he also gives serious warnings to those with that expectation about their present stance, attitudes and the degeneration they are exposed to.

Yet, to say that it is impossible today to repeat a philosophy, an ethics or a politics that Muslims, inspired by Islam, put into practice in the past at the level of state and politics is not in keeping with the nature of Islam as a religion of life, even in the name of a critique of modernism.

Such an emphasis on the impossibility of applying Islam's state practice in today's world, even if in essence a critique of modernization, risks merging with the Orientalist discourse that says Islam does not belong to this age. Exonerating Islam more than necessary from the extreme degeneration of today's world turns Islam into an impossible ideal. Yet, as Hallaq too sees very well, Islam has an understanding of religion that is in accordance with realities, from within realities. It produces the fiqh of the possible, not of the impossible. With an understanding of realism that teaches not giving up the whole of what cannot be obtained in whole, it at the same time nourishes the will not to surrender to wrong practices and to try to change them.

Of course, it has no fixed, closed system that can be applied in the same way in all times and places. Such a conception of a system is contrary to the realities of life anyway and is inspired by the disease of modern utopianism. After all, whatever is contrary to the realities of life cannot be in accordance with Islam.