In sociology and religious education: who intends what, and what is granted?

The most important discovery that has led us beyond the positivist optimism of social engineering in sociology is that the unintended, unplanned, even entirely undesired consequences of projects are far more decisive than their targeted results. This discovery in fact came after a series of disappointments that undermined sociology as a discipline or profession. When it was seen that almost none of sociology's first predictions about the transformation of religion, nationalism and the peasantry, about the shape industrialization would ultimately take, and about how classes would form and what they could do had held true, sociology had to turn back and reflect on itself, and chose to advance along a channel of a kind of "reflexivity."

If I say sociology, I of course also expect the objection: which sociology, whose sociology? After all, the discipline has no course determined by a single hand and channel. What I am speaking of is perhaps mainstream sociology.

The framework that the famous British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who advised Tony Blair in the last period of his career, laid out concerning the limits and possibilities of social engineering under the well-known heading of the "unintended consequences of action" opened an important and equally necessary line for reflexive sociology. Even if you expect social engineering from sociology, society itself is not a field like construction or a machine in which all the components or factors of the project can be identified and applied in a laboratory environment. Society is a living field, and the knowledge you produce about it can at the same time change and transform society. Even if that knowledge is not strong enough to transform society, no knowledge can calculate all the factors within society. That is why it comes down to resorting to the expressions of literature and poetry: "there is a fate above fate."

What was expected from sociology in Turkey was, in its crudest form, exactly a social engineering; but the politicians who expected this from sociology expected it at a time when sociology had given up its engineering claims. The result was of course going to be frustration. As a result of the engineering they carried out, they did a great deal of excavation and demolition, but they never managed to do what they wanted to do.

For the society they wanted to build, they demolished the old society, with its institutions, its social relations and strata, and its ways of life, and tried to build another society by implementing projects they had designed according to their own minds. What emerged never satisfied even them, and they never got the feeling that they had reached the target they had designed in their heads. The great disappointments they suffered, and the tension of resistance, when remnants of the old structure began to revive again from the areas they could not penetrate, upon the ruins of the society they had demolished, are another expression of the political history of our century.

In the end, with the social engineering project put into practice, a target society was sought to be reached, and was not reached. Indeed, there were times when with the things they did they also opened the way to developments they did not want at all. Of course this is not something that can be written to their credit. The Qur'an, which they had translated into Turkish so that it would be read and the (God forbid) nonsense in it understood and young people thoroughly put off, was perhaps read even more thanks to this, and far from putting people off, entered people's lives more. The purpose of opening the Imam-Hatip schools and the Faculties of Divinity was stated as raising "enlightened clergy, sociologists of religion, historians and philosophers" who would better explain to the masses the reality of religion, which at its core is superstition. But in time these institutions evolved into quite another place, and today they have also raised the intellectuals and the experts in the religious field that the Muslim people need.

Of course, over time, among those raised in those schools there are also theologians of just the kind those social engineers wanted.

What we have described is a short history of the reality in which we are still living. In essence all our institutions and relations take shape from within this history. In criticizing and evaluating existing institutions, we must not stray from the context of this history and these sociological conditions. Otherwise, nothing is easier than speaking big words with as utopian an idealism as possible for today. We can all want the most perfect of everything, but without forgetting what historical processes and struggles we would have to pass through to want this, or how we have come to be here now...

In the comparisons we make today between the Faculties of Divinity and the madrasas, we must not forget that the matter is much deeper than comparisons about which one's curriculum or founding philosophy is what. The late Prof. Dr. Erol Güngör, to whom I referred before, examines the subject under the heading of intellectuals who will lead the Islamic world, which is in an awakening in the age we live in, and represent Islamic thought in the political and intellectual field. The question is much deeper than whether theologians or madrasa graduates will do this.

The relations of these intellectuals with the people or the state is a separate and of course important question. But on this too, neither is the state always the same state, nor are the intellectuals always the same intellectuals. This relationship does not have a single form valid for all times and all contexts.

The fiqh of the century-long history of state-religion relations in Turkey is not the same for the earliest times as for today. How can the relationship between religion and a state that regards religion wholesale as superstition, tries to destroy it, and takes as its mission to fight against religion and the religious, be the same as the relationship between religion and a state that regards religion as a free sphere of people and takes as its mission to secure these freedoms?

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Our valued friend Ergun Yıldırım of the Star newspaper summed up our articles, in which we addressed the process of populism and relations with the state in the context of the Faculties of Divinity and the madrasas in all its complexity, with a sentence I could never use: "Starting from Erol Güngör, Yasin Aktay argues that the madrasas' independence from the state led to harms. Because he states that attachment to the people leads to superstitions."

A wrong summary, of course; it has turned out just like a summary by the CHP media. Even though I have said many times, on the contrary, that the madrasas' struggle for survival against the secularist state represents the spirit that still continues to feed the Faculties of Divinity today.

The subject really needs to be carried beyond a madrasa-divinity dichotomy, without usurping anyone's due, but also avoiding unnecessary exaltation.