The divisions even a wolf would not make, and the role of Muslims

A piece of news that appeared on screens, and perhaps on newspaper pages, in recent days: "The richest 1% of the world is said to take 45% of world income. The 99% of the world takes the remaining 55%." It is one of those news items that give no particularly original information that nobody knew, that is, a kind of stating-the-obvious news. That is why I do not feel it necessary to give its source. Such news, with other figures and other striking examples, frequently throws in our faces a truth about the injustice of the world we live in. Perhaps this situation was expressed most strikingly by Necip Fazıl's rebellious poem: "Let ten servants wait for ten coins of God's; nine for one person, one coin for nine. This division a wolf would not make, were he king over the lambs."

This striking situation of income injustice in the world we live in deserves every kind of opposition, even revolt. Of course, those who built the system on this balance, those who hold the money in their hands, are equally skilled at taking the measures necessary for the system to run in this way.

You would say that the larger crowds who take low shares of income should unite, revolt and take their rights... That idea has always been an attractive and quite stimulating one. But the whole matter, of course, is in uniting these crowds, raising their consciousness, moving them into action against the small minority that takes the larger share. In the 19th century this injustice must have taken a still more striking form, so that a social science literature arose with the mission of correcting this situation; it did not stop at doing social science, that is, at merely interpreting the world, but also tried to get ahead of it and direct it, to change it.

Marx took on the mission of correcting these inequalities and called the workers of the whole world to unite, to rise up against capitalism, which exploits people to the marrow, and then to establish a system based on equality. But it fell to him to give the tragicomic historical account of how the first masses to answer this call got stuck in Bonapartism. The historical conditions had not matured sufficiently, so it was inevitable that these uprisings, ahead of their time, would produce such results. What was the right time for it? When exactly would these injustices be eliminated? What would be the reckoning for the oppression, exploitation and wrongs that would be endured until they were eliminated? These questions, of course, would require Marx to wander into metaphysical waters well beyond him.

In a WhatsApp group where the routine news item I mentioned above was shared, a very valued intellectual-academic friend of ours repeated what could be called a routine question or warning of this kind of discussion: "In fact, this picture indicates that Muslims, who claim to be an alternative civilization, should focus on income distribution injustices. But unfortunately the places where income distribution injustice is highest are Muslim geographies, and this subject does not attract the attention of the Muslim intellectual at all."

Muslims' claiming a civilization is a mode of discourse from which I have always kept my distance. In fact, a civilization emerges as a result proportionate to the historical struggles, visions, practices and capabilities of Muslims. Indeed, in history Muslims have built civilization(s). But setting out to build a civilization, claiming a civilization, is something else altogether, and I cannot imagine it being at the center of the discourse of an Islamic movement. The prophets opposed servitude to fellow human beings and all the injustices and oppression it produced; this is at first a destructive mission, and like all destructive missions it met with fierce resistance and punishment, and most of them merely gave their warnings and left. Civilization is perhaps only a possible result, not a goal.

To focus on income injustice, on the other hand, is of course one of the most important missions of Muslims. And Muslims do not do this only with theory. With the belief that the poor have a right over their wealth, and considering that provision is entirely from God, they pay their zakat and spend in charity (infaq) beyond zakat. In fact, in ordinary Muslim practice this finds its place abundantly as a sociological phenomenon. But when the matter is that "the places where income distribution injustice is highest are Muslim geographies, and the Muslim intellectual pays no attention at all," one needs to pause a little there.

First of all, as in the recent debate on Sharia, today there is no Islamic Sharia that can be held responsible for what has been going on in the world, at least for the last century. The rulers called Muslim are governed according not to the Sharia of Islam but to the sharia of the colonialist Western civilization (or, in Vahdettin İnce's expression, the Bade Bedeviyet, the "Wine-Bedouinism"); they live by it, they think within its boundaries. The code name of this Sharia in the Islamic world is Kemalism (the model of de-Islamizing political and social life).

In the rise of the Islamic movements corresponding to the post-colonial period, what was first objected to was social injustice. One of the books that first introduced Sayyid Qutb to the Islamic world was titled "Social Justice in Islam," and the other "The Battle between Islam and Capitalism." Both are texts with the force of manifestos of post-colonial Islamism. He was tearing down no less than he criticized the Westerners these governorships (colonial governor-ships) of Muslim appearance that had beset the Islamic world. Those who want to see what the response to this opposition was should look today at the dungeons of these countries. The most respected scholars of Islam in the Islamic world have either been killed or are in prison at this moment. Everyone knows that in the Islamic world the kings, emirs and dictators, who perhaps hold a significant portion of the world's wealth in their hands, are a leg of the tripod, so to speak, of the international order of exploitation in question. Islam is not responsible for any of their practices.

There have, here and there, of course arisen quite varied experiences of Muslims in opposition and even in power, beginning from the start of the post-colonial period and carried down to the present. Among these experiences, countless very vulgar, tasteless and bad examples of Muslims' test with wealth can also be shown. But even in Turkey today, the proportion of the so-called conservative capital, which conducts its business with some slight influence from Islam, to total capital is a drop in the ocean. Despite all its vulgar appearance that emerges in its test with money and wealth today, conservative capital has never been able to be included in that 1% slice. Within the structure of finance capitalism, where the really large sums are gathered and the whole world is exploited to the marrow, there is not a single Muslim.

Muslims need to have a stronger and more effective emphasis, theory and struggle regarding today's distorted income distribution. But they must also not allow the crimes of the existing Western and Westernist sharia to be loaded onto them out of the blue, by some sleight of hand.