In the name of loyalty to Hayreddin Karaman

When our friend Ersin Çelik called me and asked me to attend the evening of fidelity that Yıldırım Municipality in Bursa would hold in the name of Hayreddin Karaman on the night of September 30, after a moment of hesitation I frankly regarded it as an invitation for which no reason could be valid. By some wisdom, it was as though all the programs had been piled onto September 30. That day, right after the meeting of the Justice and Democracy Forum in Istanbul, I was due to fly to Qatar for the Islamophobia Conference to be held by Georgetown University in Doha.

Priority had to be given to the fidelity program, of course. Our debt of fidelity to the Hoca is very great and cannot be paid off by attending a program, but being there would perhaps keep us, a little, within the circle of fidelity to a scholar. Thankfully there was another flight to Doha later in the day. I would miss the morning session, but the session in which I would give my talk was in the afternoon anyway.

Ersin Çelik, Ömer Lekesiz and Halime Kökçe have written the details. At the program "A Life Devoted to Knowledge: Fidelity to Hayreddin Karaman," held at the Tayyare Cultural Center, a book published by Yıldırım Municipality Cultural Publications and written by Hayrettin Karaman, and a special hymn album with lyrics by Karaman and music by the musician Mehmet Kemiksiz, were also presented for the participants' appreciation. Distinguished names among the Hoca's students or admirers also told their stories of meeting him, being influenced by him, and fidelity to him. Mehmet Görmez, Ahmet Saim Kılavuz, M. İhsan Karaman, Tahsin Görgün, Mürteza Bedir, Mustafa Ağırman and Ferudun Yılmaz each, with their own special anecdotes and brief, pithy speeches, bore witness that he had performed the duty of a scholar in the finest way.

Personally, I first met the name Hayreddin Karaman, like everyone else, while studying at the Imam-Hatip High School, through the Arabic-Turkish Yeni Kamus, Arabic Sarf-Nahiv and Arabic Texts books that he prepared together with the late Bekir Topaloğlu, and later through the Fıkıh Usulü (Principles of Jurisprudence) textbooks. Our Imam-Hatip years were the late seventies and early eighties. Years in which we decided to change our lives with the books we read, and became still more attached to the book with the lives we had changed. The condition of Muslims at home and in the world is plain. Sixty years have passed since the fall of the Ottomans. The whole Islamic world is scattered like organs without a body and without a head. A leadership is awaited, and whichever direction it comes from, everyone is willing to follow. That is why every kind of stirring anywhere in the world excites us and makes us follow it with interest and hope.

But for Muslims to deserve this leadership, they need to solve their problems among themselves, they need to be strong, sincere, righteous, faithful and knowledgeable people. Generations had been raised by an education system far from Islam, and wasted. New generations needed to be raised. It was not a job that could be accomplished with a decrepit religiosity that had completely set aside reason, science, will, the subject, and bookishness. One had to cling to effort and aspire to wisdom. A way out, a rebirth, an awakening was needed. There was a small minority in the country that grasped this, longed for it, and was troubled by it. This needed to be turned into an exodus movement of the new generations.

While the name Hayreddin Karaman appeared before us with the concept of "generation," and with his seriousness, concern and sincerity in scholarship and research, with the concept of "ijtihad," and with his talk of reopening its door, he drove comfortable religiosities to distraction. When I first read his books on Ijtihad in Islamic Law and Unity in Islam, one of the first formats of how Islamic action should be had been laid down in my mind.

Ijtihad was not, of course, only a matter of reopening the classical, frozen packages of fiqh. Nor did it consist merely of reopening a door that had stood closed for centuries. The matter is of a nation over which a deathly torpor had settled taking ownership of its own will, extricating itself from an ancestral understanding of religion drowned in innovations and superstitions, understanding sound Islam, and understanding and shouldering the duty that falls to it under today's conditions.

Ijtihad is in fact the fundamental matter of all Islamic movements throughout history. Within it are reason, knowledge, evidence, and, above all, the revival of the will that will ensure the construction of the Muslim subject, and jihad.

The traumatic effect of the concept of reform in the memory of the circles that accused his revival attempt of reformism went back to the project that had been attempted on this religion in the twenties and had come to nothing. The sensitivity that Turkey's Muslims developed toward the concept of reform because of this trauma could be understood, but it did not remove the need for renewal (tajdid) within the religion, which our Prophet himself had spoken of. In truth, what mattered was from whom this attempt at renewal came. From the standpoint of Muslim society, Karaman was "one of us," and of course his warnings and attempts at renewal could not be viewed with suspicion, since none of his proposals was independent of reason, evidence and logic. Every proposal of his, every attempt of his, had an evidence on which it was based, one familiar to all Muslims, and a Muslim-like reasoning in which this evidence was assessed.

None of those who expected reform, change, historicism and modernity from Muslims was "one of us," and their reason for wanting this was not a stronger Islam but an Islam that was compliant, that would not cause them trouble, that would ease their hold on power. What was expected, attempted and ordered was in fact nothing other than an Islam that would destroy itself. The true adherents of this religion, whose essence is sincerity, have no difficulty distinguishing who is "of us" and who is not.

The criteria that Karaman Hoca applied in his later-written book "Pioneers of the Islamic Movement," which has so far reached 5 volumes, are certainly criteria that he himself also carries with merit. In fact they are criteria that unite him, within the same framework, with those who undertook similar movements around the world while embarking on building a new generation in Turkey. What is common to the struggle of all these names is that they certainly have a struggle that cannot be reduced to mere reaction to the West. That their ethnic or national affiliations were disregarded in Karaman Hoca's compilation is also a fitting expression of something very important about the essence of Islamism. Although Islamism in those years was of course directly connected with the idea of the Caliphate and therefore with the Ottomans, it is not a thought or stance reducible to the Ottomans, just as it cannot be reduced to one age.

On the other hand, while nearly all of the names in question took a stand against Western imperialism or modernism, they stand out for conducting their real great struggle as a movement of reform and renewal against the corruption of religion by innovations and superstitions.

In my high school years, the anecdotes narrated especially by my valued Arabic and Fiqh teacher Yusuf Sarıkaya built a legend in our minds about his diligence, meticulousness, clinging to evidence and sincerity. Frankly, that legend was in later years an important factor in the formation of the discipline I acquired in my way of reasoning, in my research and thinking.

Karaman has never deviated from the line he was on in the years when I first knew him, and has walked that line to its end, whatever its requirement. He did not withdraw into an ivory tower and say knowledge for knowledge's sake; he tried to produce the fiqh that Muslim life requires even in the most intricate situations, and in doing so he did not shrink from the attacks, taunts and social media trials of ignorant people far from able to appreciate him.

In the Islamism volume I prepared in 2004 for İletişim Yayınları, I tried to gather my piece about him under the title "Sources of Authenticity of Turkish Islamism." Of course, an authenticity, with its errors and its merits, that perhaps only Muslims can feel and recognize.

It is seen, then, that our burden of debt regarding the Hoca is great; I hope that on this occasion, by at least confessing this debt, we may have lightened the load, and I wish him a blessed and fruitful life, and for us greater benefit from his knowledge.