To whom did we give greetings and turn out to be indebted?

Of course, no one can claim that the Islamist intellectual has been successful or ideal at every stage of his trial with power. That includes my own experience, but it is also bound up with the distance between the ideal and reality, a distance that has never been closed and never will be.

What became of Platonic politics was shown, in a rather tragic and somewhat comic way, by Plato's own Syracusse experience. In fact the great mistake begins with idealizing our ideals. There is no experience in history of trying to squeeze reality into the utopian, perfect worlds we construct in our own minds that did not end in disappointment. Essentially, such utopian visions proceed in a direction as impossible and as contrary to humanity as Zionism. Because they run against history, against reality, against human nature. What we imagine as ideal is largely bounded by our human limits, by our mortality, while reality always exceeds ideals.

Politics very often works by suspending ethics in the name of the necessity and transitory nature of the road that must be traveled to reach that distant ideal utopia. When the ethics of the road is separated from the ethics of the idealized destination, nothing of the destination's ethics remains for the present day. We, however, have said from the beginning that the road cannot be separated from the destination, and that there can be no value, no ethical rule, that is to be postponed until the ideal regime you plan to reach in the future. If there is an Islamist political experience worth discussing on this matter, it must be evaluated from this angle.

The AK Party itself has repeatedly said, through its most authoritative voices, that it is not an Islamist party. Perhaps Islamists could not have been a political movement able to come to power on their own, or perhaps the conditions of Turkey made a choice not to load the whole burden of Islamism onto a single political movement. This in turn brought with it the AK Party's taking shape ultimately as a coalition party that also includes Islamists.

Even in this form, in freedom, democracy, human rights, development and independence, there have been achievements that no political movement has had the fortune to attain until now, breakthroughs that Islamist intellectuals can claim with pride and without any complex. Neither the left nor any other politics has managed to show even a little of this degree of consistency between political claims and real politics.

Seen from this angle, I of course have no difficulty seeing and understanding the feelings behind the desire of some, especially of the left, which imagines a monopoly over intellectuality, to dismiss the Islamist intellectuals' experience of power with the simple clichés "they became advisers, deputies, bureaucrats, they turned right, they became pro-government."

But since the subject has been opened, let us repeat: in its 22 years in power, despite many of its attitudes, actions and policies that we have also seen and suffered a great deal from, and criticized when the occasion arose, the AK Party still stands far more to the left, far more democratic and progressive, by the standards of leftist politics. What kind of counsel did the left, which imagines a monopoly over intellectual power, give to which political movement in Turkey, and by how many millimeters was it able to move Turkey forward?

If only those who criticize the AK Party from the left today could criticize it in terms of the leftist values they really claim. For example, if they pressed for a more humane, more universal line on refugee policy. While all leftist movements in the world are friendly to refugees, why might they have remained stuck in a right-wing, fascist line in Turkey, for instance? Why do we not hear a soothing voice on this subject from any leftist intellectual? That is exactly why I say: if you are going to be the opposition, do it by objecting to the AK Party's coming almost to the point of yielding to the pressures of fascist policies on its refugee policy. Or object to some AK Party officials (or intellectuals) being excessively absorbed in Kemalist theology at every inappropriate occasion, and we would agree with you, and see something in the name of leftist virtue and appreciate it. This would both help you consolidate your leftism and prevent the very rightward drift of the AK Party that you complain about, and it would be a good deed for humanity too.

The left in Turkey has never managed to produce its own reasons for existence. It either took to the streets at Gezi, whose obvious supporters were the finance capitalists of Turkey or the world, or followed FETÖ, or tried to manufacture a messiah for itself out of the Kurdish movement. When opposition to the AK Party so blinded it, it could neither put forward any value claimed to be relevant to our day, nor was any political goal it claimed left to it.

Seen from this angle, does Ruşen Çakır's pouncing on Esat Arslan's discourse that makes the AK Party or the Islamist intellectuals indebted to the left or the liberals not feel like the zeal of a bankrupt merchant? The statement that "had the Islamists not drawn value from the leftists on 28 February or after it, the RP would have been imprisoned in its exclusionary and othering politics based on sharia" is an utterly thoughtless statement. And is that not enough for Arslan, who goes on to say "in a way, the leftists and liberals made a decent man of the AK Party"?

What kind of memory is this, what kind of misreading, what kind of ignorance of oneself and of the other? Then and even now, Islamists have never held back from being in communication and dialogue, by the most civil standards, with any self-aware segment of the country. These communications and dialogues may at times produce political alliances or quests for positions, and at times divergences on certain issues. Now how can these dialogues, these settings each joined with regard to its own situation, make Muslims indebted to the left? What kind of mind, what kind of calculation is this?

As the saying goes, we greeted someone and turned out to be in debt.

Every kind of dialogue surely has some benefit. Every kind of political alliance or debate surely adds something, and of course may also take something away. But what is it to treat Islamism as though it had "borrowed" the alphabet of politics, democracy and many other things from the left, against the thousand-year-old deep-rooted political tradition of these lands, and then to show up at its door like a creditor?

Moreover, and more important than all of that, in all the communications Islamists have established with leftists or others, they have always had the concern of telling them something as much as listening to them. Lately I have been trying to underline this approach as "the politics of friendship." "The Genealogy of Islam and the Left" in fact also contains an invitation to the left toward Islam as a politics of friendship, and the date the book was written, except for the sections on "the Gezi condition of the left" and on "the Kurdish question," goes back to the years before the AK Party was even founded.

...And it tells that the real story of the world takes place not between classes or between the right-wing and left-wing sons of Hegel, but between the sons of Abraham (the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael). It is nothing other than the motives in this fight that today place Habermas, the greatest living philosopher of the left, and others in the same rank as the perpetrators of genocide. Let us look at it from here as well.