Which Sharia?

Thinking with stereotyped clichés, speaking in slogans, staying within the narrow frame of ideology is the business of ordinary people. Politicians, whose job is to manipulate people and to manage and make them obey in line with their own interests, do not convey their messages by setting thought in motion, encouraging and practicing thinking. The free development of thought and its going as far as the limits it can show never suits them. Thought is acceptable, respectable and legitimate only if it takes them where they want. They have no use for thought that does not take them where they want, that does not make the masses obey them like lambs.

Sometimes sophists who come out in the gloom of the role of the man of thought and, once they have gathered enough followers, tie the work to the slogans, clichés and ideologies of certain politics, professionally carry out the duty of making the masses subjects of shrewd politicians. Among them, of course, there are also those who do this work in good faith, without knowing what what they are doing means or what it serves. Even the tragicomic situation of being unable to see what kind of historicity the big words they hammer out under the name of historicism are the product of is not very original. It is an ordinary state of heedlessness and misguidance that repeats itself throughout history.

The Sharia debates in Turkey have never been anything other than a field where only slogans are spoken, giving no opportunity for the slightest deepening of thought, knowledge or wisdom. Those who abolished the Sharia of Islam in this country made their own sharia dominant in its place and produced a cliché of a Sharia onto which they loaded all evils in order to justify what they had done. Our expression "made their own sharia dominant" is also a figure of speech; in fact their Sharia is nothing but a patchwork, an import-substitution made without understanding, without knowing, from Christian Switzerland, from decrepit Rome, from here and there. They fabricated a Sharia that suits neither the history, nor the custom, nor the sociology of the Muslim Turk, and for a hundred years they have been ruling this country with this sharia. This sharia is nothing but this country's adapted version of the larger sharia of the Western Bedouinism, in Vahdettin İnce's recent characterization on tezkire.net.

The most fundamental fact that those who these days lash out at the Sharia of Islam as if it were the cause of all the calamities that have befallen us in the name of religion or of all political processes overlook, or that even they themselves overlook, is that for at least a hundred years there has been no trace of the Sharia of Islam in this country.

The identity of Sharia and Islam is of course something that cannot be established without a few explanations. Sharia is an attribute, a characteristic of Islam. There is no Islam without Sharia. Just as there cannot be Judaism without sharia, Christianity without sharia, any religion or political ideology without sharia. Indeed, there is no Kemalism without sharia either, and there is a Kemalist sharia that has been in force in this country for a century. There is a sharia of Western Bedouinism that has been in force in this world for two centuries. This bedouinism abolished the Sharia of Islam and took its place when the Ottomans were defeated in their war with the West in the First World War. Today the Islamic world is, one way or another, governed by the sharia of Western Bedouinism. No one has the right to load the cause of any negativity he lives through onto the Sharia of Islam. Those who do so do it only in order to strengthen, justify and sustain a sharia that is valid on behalf of the imperialists.

The state to which the Western sharia has brought us today is plain for all to see. It made the world live through two great world wars, and in these wars it brought about the slaughter, in the most savage, most barbaric way, of more people than the sum of all the wars in world history. How many nations subjected to genocide, how many civilizations buried in history there are on the record of the sharia of Western Bedouinism, of which the sharia among us is only a branch. As if this were not enough, in order that the civilizations buried in history may never revive and stand up again, it continues a massacre of history and knowledge as well: with its orientalism, its historiography, its science, its discourses of democracy, human rights, development and modernism. Of course, in all this, with its local agents as its most suitable servants.

Is someone who does not know that the condition of validity and existence of the Sharia of Islam as a law is a political body, power and authority to be called a theologian, a political scientist, a sociologist? Some countries that today have written the Sharia of Islam into their constitutions as a reference, and whose basic mission is in fact to strangle every kind of Islamic formation, may be causing confusion. By saying "Look at the state of the countries governed by Sharia," these countries serve as precedents to justify the crime committed against the murdered Sharia. Is it so hard to understand that the governing elites of those countries are themselves collaborating plunderers of Western bedouinism?

As if Muslims could not agree among themselves, as if there were a great many disputes about Sharia, as if there were already a great many madhhabs, as if all of this meant that the Sharia is no longer valid? Whom is all this being told to? Is there a human society without disputes? What maxim, what law has ever been free of discussion? When the Sharia was abolished, were the modern sharias of today substituted for it perfect, agreed-upon laws, innocent of every kind of dispute, debate, corruption? And if the Islamic political authority that makes the Sharia of Islam possible existed, would they not see that disputes, differences and ijtihads too are included in the whole of the Sharia? That outright ignoramuses who do not understand, do not grasp, that it is political authority and power that rescue laws and knowledge somewhat from disputes and form a consensus, crowd the scene as theologians, philosophers, sociologists is in fact a sign that certain bells are tolling for certain people.

They have put to work every crier they have, trying to protect their sharia, which for a hundred years has brought humanity nothing but lies, tricks, corruption, trouble and calamity.

They are trying to present as a fait accompli, and load onto the Sharia of Islam, the entire responsibility for the world they themselves have ruined and made unlivable. As if the Sharia of Islam had ruled for a hundred years and failed to keep pace with the age, failed to read the time, lagged behind history, had a great many aspects incompatible with science, reason and developing sociology, and now if we put it on the table and reformed it nicely all problems would be solved.

Looked at from one side it is stupid, from another it is squirrel-like, cunning, from another it is treacherous.

Not for the stupid and the treacherous, but for those who want to know the truth of the matter, let us recall this simple fact. The Sharia of Islam did not fall out of use because it could not keep pace with the age; it fell out of use because the Islamic world was defeated by Western Bedouinism 106 years ago. From that day to this, not only has that Sharia not been applied, but the ijtihads it requires for this age cannot be made either. None of the negativities lived since that day has anything to do with the Sharia of Islam, which has had no actual validity whatsoever. Perhaps there is a ritual meaning, within their own sharia, in once in a while remembering the Sharia of Islam and cursing it, in the world they themselves have ruined and exploited barbarically, cannibalistically. But after this hour no ritual can save this bankrupt world of theirs.