Taha Abderrahmane as a message

That Taha Abdurrahman has found in Turkey a warmth of reception that he has not seen in other countries, not even in the place where he was raised, is an event that needs to be understood and deserves to be dwelt upon from many angles. Perhaps it may be open to other kinds of reflection, but in terms of its intellectual life, Turkey has never been closed to ideas from outside.

Of course, a significant part of the reflections may stem from nativist sensitivities. There have always been circles that see the fact that Turkish intellectual life has not remained closed to other ideas as a weakness in terms of producing its own original, native thought. According to them, there is no thought through translation activities; even if there is, it is not native, and when it is not native, it is not sound. Yet in human history ideas have always been fluid; just as they have not stopped in one place, so, when they move and are carried to another place, they have not remained as they were where they first emerged. When ideas are understood in another place, they already develop by being transformed within the comprehension of that place, perhaps better understood, perhaps distorted, perhaps revived through an entirely different synthesis. Did not our Messenger (peace be upon him) say in the Farewell Sermon: "let those present convey these words of mine to those not present; perhaps they will understand better"? Although those present there were the best people who have ever lived in the history of humanity, what does the possibility that the "absent" people to whom they would convey these words might "understand these words better" mean?

Are we ready to think about the fact that understanding a word better may not always mean being better? Understanding a word better is also related to how much that word concerns the person. Indeed, understanding a word and accepting the word, believing in the word, may not mean the same thing.

If the nativist sensitivity were exaggerated a little, it would become necessary to impose a customs control on every kind of thought, religion and tradition in Anatolia, Islam included. Yet there is no effective customs control against ideas. Which idea will be how effective in which geography is decided, again, by the needs, perceptions, acceptances or demands of the inhabitants of that geography. In the end, from the moment a foreign idea is read in a society, it has by that very fact entered that society's tradition in certain proportions, either by being accepted or by being rejected.

From the translation movements, it can be said that the Turkish reader is a reader who has proved his maturity in giving due value to the ideas produced in every part of the world, in lending an ear, and in trying to understand.

The ideas of Taha Abdurrahman, however, are in fact only just beginning to be read. It has not yet become fully clear what exactly he says and what he tells the Muslim Turkish reader. But in the first reading of him, or in the pre-understanding (as the hermeneuticists see and name it, as an ontological stage), there are very important things to which what he says corresponds.

This position corresponds largely to the desire in Turkey to close the distance that has by now opened wide, for some time, in their view, between Islamic thought or philosophy and the political, ethical or social practices of Muslims. Probably this situation also points to a kind of creative paradigmatic crisis atmosphere for Muslims.

The interest and expectation toward Taha Abdurrahman is of course not that he will touch and solve all our intellectual or ethical problems with magic formulas he has developed. In this regard I think that a sufficient level of awareness has formed about how much role should be attributed, whether to the translation activities of certain periods or to the movements of thought that develop from within.

But let us admit that recently the distances that have opened in practice between theory and practice, knowledge and action, politics and values create in Muslims feelings that do not accept the situation but also do not yield a healthy result; somewhat melancholic, somewhat nostalgic, somewhat utopian, at times (in fact in the forms that pervade all of them) cynical feelings. In such times, even if under the influence of such feelings, many questions accumulate. However logical the old answers of religion or theory may be, they cannot satisfactorily meet new questions pronounced with new experiences and in a new language. As questions accumulate, it leads to a kind of paradigmatic crisis, and these crises drive people to new searches.

The world of our age offers an environment that consumes authorities of thought, writers, even clergymen very quickly. When the atmosphere of social media that brings everyone face to face with everyone is added to this, seeing figures in whom people placed hope for a time, and in whom they thought they had found the answers to all their questions, become laughingstocks within a few days must have quite a different effect.

Necdet Subaşı spoke of a condition called "religion fatigue," but this fatigue is not an issue belonging to religion alone; it is a problem related to "truth" in general. That is why this environment can easily inspire the concept of "post-truth." Of course, the contribution, taken together, of our social media theologians, who turn the most fundamental ethical and doctrinal issues of Islam into a tabloid subject and have them consumed, to the formation of this slimy environment is also plain. In fact, that, in response to the post-truth perception or the feeling of religion fatigue inspired by this slimy environment, there is a serious and creative concern in people also becomes evident in the interest shown in Taha Abdurrahman.

Because what people first feel in Taha Abdurrahman is the faith, sincerity and seriousness that he feels and makes felt about divine revelation. Moreover, in his interest in philosophy there is no trace of the attitude of the aforementioned theologians, who behave like confessors toward the West and, while there is a wretched, bankrupt Western civilization to be challenged, historicize Islam in the name of so-called criticality, destroying its institutions and values from within.

On the contrary, he stands out as an influential thinker who also challenges the West with a deserved self-confidence that points to Islam as a religion, as a source of tradition and values, and as a rich conceptual treasury for a possible Islamic thought. While defending the unity of faith and deed, of thought and action, of ethics and politics, he takes knowledge not as a source of power as Westerners do, but as a trust, as a contract (misak) with the Creator about assuming a responsibility, and builds all his thought upon this.

Moreover, in all his works he never shrinks from pointing to the emotional-political motivation that drives him to the logical way of thinking that proceeds almost like the construction of a geometric structure. And this motivation also reveals the philosophical strategy that makes him one who acts on his knowledge and closes the distances between knowledge and action, between thought and politics. That motivation is Jerusalem's having been occupied, and the state of Muslims as defeated and occupied before the Zionist Western civilization.

This trauma that he experienced in 1967 drove him to do something in the name of Islam, in the name of Muslims. What he has been able to do was to work on a message that now stands before us as Taha Abdurrahman, with his whole philosophy and stance.

Positioning himself, in his last lecture in Ankara, as a sentinel of thought against the absolute evil that today manifests itself as genocide in Gaza was precisely the pithy expression of this message. Let us continue from here later.