How can the Islamic world be mobilized?

As of today, Israel's genocidal aggression has reached its 243rd day. Lowering the bar of baseness further with each passing day, it is announcing, teaching and showing to those who hear and those who do not, to those who know and those who do not, to those who see and those who do not, what a scourge Zionism is for humanity. Zionism is an ideology that has been visited upon humanity as a plague. There is now no one who fails to see its racist supremacism, founded on bearing no responsibility, no love, no compassion and no selflessness toward other human beings. Unless this dangerous monster is stopped, everyone will get their share of its aggression and violence, as indeed they already are.

Of course, Zionism is not limited to Israel; indeed, Israel is only one link in the larger Zionist project. The order that the United States, which today exercises global hegemony, has established in the world is an order of occupation that touches nearly everyone and takes something from everyone. Under this order no one is safe in their property, life, religion, intellect or lineage. Even though we have insisted since 7 October that "the only place in the world not under occupation is Gaza," the free people of Gaza pay the price of this resistance to occupation with their lives and with their homes and homeland being brought down upon their heads.

The world order presented to us under so-called modernity's ornaments is in essence a Zionist order, and it leaves people in the following dilemma: either you will give up your dignity, your personality, your freedom, and the security of your lineage and intellect, and live within the narrow comfort zone on offer, that is, become a slave to another slave; or, if you step outside of it, you can see in the example of Gaza what will befall you. All the nationalist regimes that emerged in the twentieth century put their own peoples into set moulds and stripped them of their personalities, their minds and their freedoms. They removed people from being themselves, imprisoned them within the identity moulds offered to them, and made them worship the walls of those identity prisons that they had turned into idols.

Who can say today that Germany acts like Germany? How much do the Germans read and how much can they understand of a Kant, a Hegel, a Goethe, a Heidegger? To what extent can a German today think like a German and act like a German?

And is the game played in the Islamic world any different from this? There are those who find it incomprehensible that the Islamic world, with its population of 2 billion, displays such ineffectiveness in the face of what is happening in the world, in the face of the insolent, humiliating and destructive aggressions aimed at Islam itself and at Muslims. Yet there is nothing strange about it, and it cannot be explained by population. In the early period of Islam, although they were very few in number, Muslims were able to produce a will that would change the whole world, and a mind and an architecture that would establish an order. For they were one, and they had a head who would direct the existing population toward a common goal, an ideal and a harmony of the political body. When Muslims, with such a vast population, attain an organization that lets them feel a common bodily integrity, no power will be able to stand before them. But until that point, even if their number were not 2 billion but 100 billion, the situation would not change.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, at the AK Party group meeting in the Turkish Grand National Assembly, once again expressed his outrage at the whole world's silence over what is happening in Gaza, and voiced his reproaches to the Islamic world with these words: "I have a few words for the Islamic world from here as well. What are you waiting for in order to take a common decision? Dogs are eating the bodies of martyrs. Israeli soldiers are violating their sanctity. Babies' necks are being torn off. People are being burned in tents. When will you display a resolute stance? When will the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) protect its Palestinian brothers? Allah will hold you, will hold all of us, to account for this."

No one can claim that the OIC has no trump card in its hands, or that it could do nothing even if it wished. In fact, this was precisely the reason its founder, the late King Faisal, gave for establishing it. Even if Muslims, with their huge populations, cannot become a single state, which is not required for this anyway, they can at least adopt highly effective stances on many issues. As its very name says, countless steps taken on the basis of "cooperation" among Islamic countries can turn the world's Muslims into a force as effective as their numbers and impossible to ignore.

During his term as chair between 2016 and 2020, Erdoğan persistently tried to activate the Organisation for cooperation along these lines. Likewise, in the face of the violations against Jerusalem and Gaza in those days, he held two extraordinary summit meetings in Istanbul, in 2017 and 2018. Looking at the conditions and commitments of each country, it is very difficult to say anything optimistic about what contributions or returns these meetings brought, but let us look on the bright side nonetheless: even if each of them has different and binding commitments, such meetings serve as a reminder that they have a responsibility by virtue of being Muslims or by virtue of governing Muslim peoples. It is impossible that they have no positive effect at all. It is worthwhile to revive the remaining bonds by reminding of them, working them, making them work. There is certainly much more that Turkey can do in this regard.

It is very valuable that, in the intense diplomatic traffic of Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, which runs toward every corner of the world, the Gaza issue is an important item on his agenda wherever he goes and whomever he meets. It is also among the best signs that what Turkey is doing is not limited to what is visible.

We must not forget: politics is the ability to take initiative. Precisely because the OIC is headless, it is, so to speak, as if it had never existed ("keenlemyekun"), yet it is also a great opportunity for turning the 2 billion Muslims, who exist as a potential, into an actual force. Turkey can take more initiative in order to use this ground well. Instead of asking what the OIC is good for and reproaching it, one should try to set into motion this organisation of which it is the strongest and most reputable member. Of course this requires diplomatic mastery, and today that mastery exists in Erdoğan more than in anyone else in the world. Let the political mind kneaded with that mastery try, once more, to ask what can be done in this matter.