The Qur'an, history and the Israel problem

History is greatly affected by what we live through today, which is why it is rewritten in every age, reshaped in every age, realised anew in every age. So the science of history is not, first of all, the task of knowing what happened in the past in the most objective, most real detail and bringing it to today. It is something that begins above all with knowing today, because what directs us to any event in history, to the knowledge of any people or person, is our present interests, our present struggles.

A history we make without knowing well what takes us to history is a history lacking consciousness. History therefore begins, above all, with knowing today, with keeping our side well placed today and with determining friend and enemy well.

But who will do this? The odd thing is that, depending on who makes history, history changes. Will an Israeli Zionist make history, or a non-Zionist Jew? It changes according to the accounts of the two, because the places where the two are positioned today are different. Have no doubt, both will bring us a different history. And will a British official historian who writes the history of Palestine see what the Palestinian Muslim has lived through and be able to put it before us as history?

Bingöl University Faculty of Theology hosted a very good international symposium last weekend. At the symposium on the theme of Qur'an and History, besides the quality of the Qur'an's being a source of historical knowledge, the Qur'an's views on history were also dwelt upon. Of course there is also a place in this discussion for the debates held on the dimension of the Qur'an's being the subject of a history, its being a product of history.

How, through such symposia, universities in Anatolia connect to the international university network and can contribute to the production of universal knowledge deserves to be taken up separately. We have written and drawn a great deal on this, and I would like this to be recorded as one example of what we have written. But the opening conference of the symposium we gave together with Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma. Both in this opening conference and in the first sessions in which Prof. Şinasi Gündüz, Prof. Mustafa Ağırman, Prof. Mahfuz Söylemez, Prof. Mustafa Özkan and Prof. İdris Şengül took part, the subjects on Qur'an and History kept coming to references to Israel's genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and its historical roots.

That is, today for the Muslim world a record of Israel, and therefore of the relations of Jews with Muslims throughout history, inevitably comes and settles in the centre of history. Because today there is no more important matter that the world's Muslims are living. In the light of this matter, all of European history, the history of civilisation, the history of science, the Crusades, even the collapse of the Ottomans at the end of the First World War and the history of the Republic of Türkiye founded in its place can be rewritten.

Even if we do not write, some people want to write, each in their own way, within the atmosphere of this event. When our popular historian in Türkiye, who has no skill left but to water down history, reduce it to the level of gossip and pronounce on the most delicate matters, speaks with complete flippancy of the Palestinians having sold land, what he displays is not only a lack of historical consciousness. He has in fact chosen his side in his own way, and from that side shown the face of the event as it appears to him. He is not on the side of the Palestinian who has been under occupation for 75 years, subjected to every kind of oppression, whose wife and children are torn apart by bombs; he has determined his side with the racist, oppressive Israel that murders them cruelly, with not an atom of mercy in its heart. From there, it seems, it looks that way, or is wanted to be shown that way.

For the Israeli racism that regards itself as superior to all people and has classified all people under categories of serving it or being hostile to it, this perspective of course has a reward. Those who take this reward to be something great can adopt such nonsensical attitudes to curry favour with it. The typification, of which we can find plentiful examples in history through the parables the Qur'an gives, is that of those who sell the knowledge God gave for a small price, the wretches who think they will profit from this foolish trade.

Indeed, the basic principle the Qur'an inculcates against those who in their present wretchedness exploit history with a literature of glorious ancestors is among the foundations of historical consciousness as well: What is left to you today of your ancestors' glory, their good deeds, their heroism, their nobility? Were the ancestors on whose legacy you perch, with all those virtues, really your ancestors? How is your connection with them evident? After all, historiography under very modern conditions is also a field wide open to every kind of illusion and propaganda contest. May all you do not amount to such an abracadabra? But even if you do have a connection with those ancestors, it is plain that today you have no share in any virtue of those ancestors. The Qur'anic maxim says: No one bears another's sin or merit. Man has nothing but what he strives for.

Leaving aside the empty words of those who put on racism with an imagined-ancestor literature, it would be fitting for a Qassam Brigades slap to land on the face of each of those who try to smear with "their ancestors had sold land anyway" the heroes who today, let alone selling their land, are waging an epic struggle not to give up a single span of it at the cost of their lives.

Good heavens, is this a slander to be thrown at men who, before your very eyes, face down the densest armies recorded by history, four and five of them together, American, European, whatever scourge, with their cruellest bombs and brutalities, in order not to let their land be trampled?

Even supposing their grandfathers were like this, it is clear that their grandchildren today write the epic poem of loyalty by ascribing it to İzzeddin el-Kassam, an Ottoman officer who struggled loyally to the Ottomans to his last breath and the last drop of his blood. Even supposing, we say, to understand that there is shameless historical falsification here too, it is enough to look at the valour of these grandchildren.

In the 1910s, when perhaps no one had a foresight about where the matter would go, some land may have been sold. Besides, how can it not be seen that those who sold that land had left Palestine and that those who remained are precisely those who today resist not selling their land?

As for who left Palestine defenceless and sold it to the British as the cheapest, easiest and costless gain of their history, let us take that up as a separate file.

To understand history correctly, one must above all stand in the right place, beside the right people, and see through their eyes.