Is there an Islamic world?

BAKU

We ask and write this question from Baku, where I am on the occasion of a conference on Islamophobia. When we speak of Muslims, who number roughly 2 billion in today's world, we are speaking of a "world": the Islamic World. That Islam possesses a world means, on one hand, having a common belief, thought, a minimum shared culture and religion. How many of these 2 billion people feel they belong to this world, that is, to a world different, separate and special from the remaining 6 million?

On the other hand, what we call civilization, with all its materiality and the instruments, channels, languages and everyday habits through which this materiality makes itself felt, has connected the whole world to one another in a completely different way and produced in all people a completely different perception of the world. Yet within this same great world, people feel many things differently, perceive differently and experience differently. Within this same world, people build different sub-worlds to assign their belonging to.

These sub-worlds are determined by their own friendships and enmities. The boundaries of worlds are set by these friendships and enmities, and no one is permitted to enter anyone else's world without permission. However much they may want to, the 2 billion Muslims cannot become unproblematic inhabitants of the Crusader and Zionist world; even if they wish, they cannot forget the origins of their own world. Because every day they face enmities that remind them where they are from. The issue of Islamophobia from which we suffer today is not, as we suppose, a matter of today either.

Hatred of Islam is related to the forms of perception that other worlds produce at their own lines of defense. It comes into play as part of the founding narratives of their own worlds concerning the Muslim world. Perceptions are the reaction of bodies formed in this world.

Although Muslims today form a world with their population of 2 billion, the lack of a political body is their most important reality. To say this does not mean, of course, that the condition of Muslims 100 years ago was perfect. Neither 100 years ago nor before that were Muslims living in an entirely unproblematic environment with regard to being a political unity in the world. When we speak of the history of the caliphate, only very rarely can it be said that an Islamic unity was established that embraced all the Muslims of its time. Throughout the whole history of the Abbasid caliphate there was a structure in Andalusia that still felt itself to belong to the Umayyad caliphate. In the time of Saladin Ayyubi, and also in the time of Yavuz, who later took the caliphate from the Mamluks and established Islamic unity for 400 years, the caliphate was far from representing a unity. But what was achieved by the establishment of this unity is well documented in the history that followed.

Today we say that the most important weakness of the 2-billion-strong Islamic world is the lack of a political will that would establish this unity. Had this unity existed, no Islamic country would of course be standing by as the Zionist murderer Israel massacres Muslims so savagely in Gaza today. What is sought here is not a crude and anachronistic revival or re-establishment of the caliphate, but a Muslim unity through which the existing 2 billion Muslims could take upon themselves, as Muslims, a threat directed at Muslims and show their reaction. By saying that others than us are more at fault in establishing this unity, of course no one can escape a responsibility.

Thanks be to Sinan Tavukçu, President of the SDE Foundation, who has presented, in the flavor of a summary documentary, many initiatives put forward in Turkey to establish this unity on the road to the War of Independence. To mention only one initiative, in November-December 1919 an Islamic Congress was held in Sivas in three sessions.

"Unfortunately there is not much information in local sources about this Islamic Congress, whose first session was held on 11 November 1919 in the Zara district of Sivas and to whose executive committee Mustafa Kemal Pasha was also elected. The reports of this conference, which was closely monitored by British intelligence, have been opened to researchers in the British state archives.

The Muvahhidin Society, which organized the Sivas Islamic Congress, was one of the organizations that planned to organize an Islamic revolution in the Muslim countries under the colonial rule of the Entente Powers, the victors of the First World War, in order to bring them to independence. The 18-article Statute of the Muvahhidin Society that organized the Congress has survived. The statute of this society, which was founded secretly and evidently had a strict discipline, is summarized below.

In the first article of the Statute, after it is stated that despite the progress of civilization fanaticism still reigns in the world, and that therefore religion must be made use of in order to resist every kind of attack directed by religion, the aim of the Society is declared as: gathering all the Muslims of the world around the Caliphate and securing solidarity among them, provided that their autonomy and regional and cultural independence are taken into consideration. The Muvahhidin Society regarded the occupation of Islamic countries by Western states as a result of Christian fanaticism. This viewpoint had also been adopted by the cadre that was conducting the national struggle at that time. Indeed, Bekir Sami Bey, who gave the opening speech of the first meeting held on 11 November 1919, stated in his speech that we are obliged to cling to Islam in order to resist the fanatical attacks of Christianity, and that it is for this reason that the Society, whose program he read, had been founded.

According to the Statute, in accordance with certain verses of the Holy Qur'an, all Muslims will in principle rush to rescue and help their brothers. For this reason every Muslim is a natural member of the Society. Non-Muslims who do not oppose the principles of the Society will be in complete safety under the protection of the Society.

In the Statute, striving for Muslim peoples who are not actually independent, or who are under the colony or authority of foreign powers, to obtain their independence in accordance with the national principles also adopted by European states is declared the foremost duty of the society. Following the attainment of independence of these countries, 'ittihad-i Islam' (Pan-Islamism, in the Westerners' term) will be put into practice in accordance with the decisions reached by the Assembly of the Muvahhidin Society, which will be formed with the participation of representatives from each country and will meet at the seat of the caliphate or at any town near it."

Tavukçu's account continues of the activities of this society, in which Mustafa Kemal himself took an active part. Many conclusions can be drawn, but with respect to our subject this is very clear: even if the caliphate had not been abolished, there were very serious searches throughout the Islamic world about what form it would take and what kinds of functions it would perform. Probably, even had the caliphate not been abolished, it would no longer have remained in its former state, and would have been making its way toward becoming an institution that changed and developed and, of course, was updated according to the conditions of an Islamic world that had lost power in that conjuncture.

Today no one can propose that we continue from where we left off a hundred years ago. But neither can anyone ignore that the present helplessness of the Islamic world is a problem of unity and initiative.