Exalting the word of God is the reason these lands became a homeland

That a debate over the caliphate is being hastily manufactured out of the Gaza rally held at Galata, with its magnificent scene that will go down in history, shows first of all how effective and apt the message sent from Galata was.

That one of the rally's participants was punched, as if by a bull seeing red, upon seeing the flag he was holding, on which was written the Kalima al-Tawhid, the indispensable condition of being a Muslim, and that a caliphate debate began over it, points to what kind of Pandora's box Gaza has opened regarding our history, our personality, our culture and identity. I set aside the possibility of how knowingly and with what planning the young man who carried out that attack did it, or whether he did so as part of someone else's plan. It may also have developed quite spontaneously, but the environment of jahiliyya that drove that young man to this act, and of course, more importantly, the evil that immediately organized over this act, turned directly into an assassination attempt against the initiative at Galata.

What makes Turkey a homeland is its reason for being: i'la-yi kalimatullah. Without this reason, neither could the Turks have held on in these lands, nor could the War of Independence as we know it have been fought. The reason that makes these lands a homeland is the very word written on that piece of green cloth. A person's password of entry into Islam, the first condition of a person's being a Muslim, is to know it, accept it and strive to raise it. Of course, the bond between us and those in Gaza lies in that word too; the bond between us and everyone anywhere in the world who rejects servitude to a servant and accepts being a servant only to God lies in this fundamental covenant. The Kalima al-Tawhid is the very basis even of our National Pact.

That someone who has gone through Turkey's education system may not recognize this word is a grave matter in itself; if he recognizes it and still attacks it, it is an altogether different danger, a serious national security problem. Of course, the Arab hostility that has been thoroughly provoked lately is also turning into hostility to the Arabic language, and what the provocateurs who have taken on this task of incitement trust most is the ignorance of the masses they provoke and whip up.

Yet however ignorant he may be, we cannot think that any Muslim child could knowingly show disrespect to the Kalima al-Tawhid. But the provocation we face has taken ignorance, with hypnosis techniques, to the point of a mankurtization. Those who are provoked must think of nothing, must let no doubt enter their minds, must become such that if they saw their brothers, fathers and mothers they would not recognize them. Otherwise, what does it even mean not to recognize the Kalima al-Tawhid? That is your condition for being a Muslim. That is your guarantee of liberation. That is your chance of being saved from those who try to mankurtize you and make you their servant.

In fact, among the effects the Al-Aqsa Flood has had in all fields is that it has opened to everyone an opportunity for a reckoning with the order of the world we live in, with its hidden and open powers, with our history, with our identity. Perhaps Gaza reminds us, on this occasion, of our relationship with the Kalima al-Tawhid, but it also exposes the ignorance of the Kalima al-Tawhid on the part of a young man raised in a society that is 99 percent Muslim and educated enough, moreover, to study at a good university. That the Kalima al-Tawhid's first evoking the caliphate is a separate scandal, but the psychology beneath the anger felt toward the Caliphate, remembered even if only on this occasion, also needs to be examined separately.

On the occasion of the Al-Aqsa Flood, this society is in fact being forced, and will be forced, to face many things. We badly need a social psychiatry. A psychiatry that will take us down to our childhood and make us account for what we lost where, that will measure what we went through and what effects what we went through left on our personality and consciousness.

There are, of course, those who are interested in and who embrace Gaza and Palestine, but why is it that for some this anger, this learned estrangement, this chosen distance? Really, what happened in 1917? How did Gaza fall? How did Jerusalem, under Ottoman administration for a full 400 years, pass into the hands of the crusaders? How and why did we withdraw from Palestine, Damascus, Aleppo? How did we give up the Caliphate, for which aid poured in from all over the world, especially India, in the War of Independence we fought afterwards, when it was such an enormous power, a resource, an authority, even a homeland in a broad sense in our hands? Something must have forced us to renounce a homeland, a power, a resource, a global political influence, a recognized legitimate leadership, mustn't it? Otherwise how could a nation ready to sacrifice its life for a span of homeland soil knowingly, and even gladly, have renounced so much homeland soil?

Resul Tosun of the Star newspaper has in fact reminded us of this on the occasion. "When the caliphate was abolished, Seyyid Bey, the Minister of Justice of the time, who explained the reasoning, said in summary, 'Since the caliph in Istanbul is incapable of fully applying the sharia, we are giving the task of applying the provisions of the sharia to the assembly.' Indeed, the first paragraph of Article 26 of the 1924 constitution, which set the republic's factory settings and enumerates the duties of the assembly, is worded as 'Ahkam-ı şer'iyyeyi tenfiz.'" That is, the caliphate was not abolished, it was transferred to the moral personality of the Grand National Assembly. But afterwards, this transfer too was deliberately ignored, and Turkey effectively renounced the caliphate mission entirely, which is in fact the perception in the world too, and thus Turkey virtually resigned from the leadership of the Islamic world. Did it resign of its own will, or was it forced to resign?

Truly, as our friend Mehmet Metiner says, the caliphate is largely a political institution, and in Islam the political authority can historically have very different forms, and no religious obligation is attributed to any of them. But we should neither ignore cases in which the religious and the political intersect and even cannot be separated, nor forget that what we are talking about here is, in any case, entirely the history of Turkey's political power. At this point there is the question of why a political leadership we held was resigned from and why this resignation was accepted as a victory, as a revolution. Evidently we were forced to resign; as a country that had emerged from the First World War in defeat, we could not have stayed in that office. In that case, presenting this constantly as a victory, a gain, can hardly be considered normal behavior. This abnormal behavior may perhaps be seen as a reflection of things, as an effect of the traumas we lived through because of the event, but it is quite clear that it harbors heavy complexes that we have passed over without ever talking about them or facing them.

How and why can today's young people perceive as an object of hatred a political institution that throughout history bestowed upon the Turks the leadership role over the Muslims of the whole world? What kind of drilling is this, what kind of consciousness?