Philosophy, rhetoric and beyond, on the occasion of Taha Abderrahmane

We were continuing our reflections on Taha Abdurrahman when the martyrdom of Ismail Haniyeh, and then the death of the esteemed historian Professor Mikail Bayram, intervened. Because of this inevitable interruption, and the reactions we received to what we had written, we saw that speaking about Taha Abdurrahman could occasion discussion of some other matters as well.

First of all, let me remind you that in the articles in question we did not go much into what Taha Abdurrahman says. On the contrary, in both articles we tried to read the intense interest shown in four separate lectures by Taha Abdurrahman. That is, we tried to interpret not Taha Abdurrahman himself, but the readings of him and the expectations about him.

Although these are of course not disconnected from one another, they are very different things. Thanks to the warnings of hermeneutic philosophy, the knowledge that what an author's text says is one matter and how it is read, understood or made sense of is another should by now have become the alphabet of everyone who is literate in philosophical reading and writing.

Personally, I have not ascribed to Taha Abdurrahman, or to any thinker, writer or even scholar, a miraculous power to solve all our problems at a stroke. Nor should one, of course. Today the level of Islamic thought in Turkey is far from turning any person into a cult, making him infallible and making him an authority to be followed, and is much more complex. To say that Taha Abdurrahman has a new language, points to important matters, and offers a reasonable solution of his own to certain problems is not to say that he could be a flawless, perfect authority of taqlid who will open our way in all our problems. That I have had to explain these simple facts in this way, as if explaining to a fool, is because I see that the agenda concerning Taha Abdurrahman is being steered by some circles right away into a channel of this kind.

Taha Abdurrahman is a man who has produced nearly thirty works in many fields such as politics, ethics, philosophy, fiqh and modernity, and who in these works has tried, in particular, to produce a very original lexicon from Qur'anic terms and a philosophical language and formulations based on this lexicon. He is of course in dialogue with Western philosophy, but not in submission or defensiveness; he tries to find a language in which, perhaps, they too can understand. In doing so he can be both right and wrong, and there is no claim to absoluteness or objectivism in his discourse. There is a humility, like that of the classical Islamic scholars, that concludes its words with "God knows best." At the end of his words you feel an invitation to think about the verses of the Qur'an and about Islamic thought from another angle not tried before. But, as I said, perhaps at times with some strain, at times perhaps with exaggerations, but many times with commentaries that leave one in admiration.

In fact there are many scholars and many people who did, and still do, what he does by other means. After all, all books are read for the understanding of a single book, the Book of God, and no book and no word that any human being writes about the Qur'an can be a better, more eloquent and more definitive address than the verses of the Qur'an. Even so, we cannot close either our ears or our eyes to the signs that draw attention to the meanings of the Qur'an's verses that sometimes escape us and that can show us the miracles of God's verses. Scholars exist for this. Scholars exist not to take the place of the Qur'an, but to open the verses of the Qur'an to us, to prepare us to see them, to show the wisdom they contain, and to carry us to the light of the verses.

Great professors, academics in the field of Islamic philosophy from whom we have never heard a single substantial word, article or work, can dispose of Taha Abdurrahman, who has written some thirty books and put forward a philosophy of this originality, in a sentence or two in the style of coffeehouse gossip. They finish him off at a stroke by saying that he says nothing original, that all he says is nothing but rhetoric, and that, far from challenging the West, he thinks with Western concepts.

In fact this is an attitude not worth mentioning or touching on at all. It is not an assessment or a critique. It is a state of closedness that can be explained entirely by appeal to psychological motivations. But I would say that it is not worth that either; yet it is typically a state of moral and intellectual wretchedness that keeps turning up in front of us, getting under our skin, picking fights.

Those who said that there is nothing original in what the famous German thinker Martin Heidegger says, and that what he said had been said earlier by this or that person, were of course more serious. Had they spoken with that level of seriousness, we would have given those who say Taha Abdurrahman has said nothing original Heidegger's own answer, which is no longer original, but repeated. The philosopher said: "That is true, but you too must sense from time to time the fact that there is nothing that has not been said under the vault of heaven. Yet I still say that my saying these words to you now, today, is utterly unique; the same scene has never been repeated before."

There is no great philosopher at all to whose entire discourse the label of rhetoric cannot be applied. It depends only on an attitude. An attitude of the kind in which Walid ibn al-Mughira, twisting his tongue, bending his mouth, and scowling before the Word of God, said "this is nothing but an impressive sorcery." God forbid, of course, that anyone's word deserves a sanctity like the word of God. But Nietzsche explained so beautifully that beyond a certain point even scientificity, which has been positioned as an absolute otherness to rhetoric, is in the last (indeed the first) instance nothing but rhetoric. Which of the Western philosophers whom some of our novice philosophers have only recently begun to watch with admiration has a philosophy exempt from the affliction of rhetoric? But the intellectual communities that formed there, or "epistemic communities" of the kind the late Hüsamettin Arslan spoke of, by talking about one another, flattering one another, exalting one another, and lifting their nonsensical rhetoric to the level of great truth-bearing philosophies, created the myths of a "Western philosophy" or an "Enlightenment philosophy."

Without doubt we know that, relying on the Qur'an, that is, on a far sounder reference, at least a considerable part of Taha Abdurrahman's words stands on solid ground, far from rhetoric. We do not, in any case, expect him to put forward a philosophy far more advanced or far more original than what the Qur'an shows.

Unless, that is, the motivation that drove him to do philosophy was a kind of murabit post, a responsibility of vigil in his own way, for philosophy against the absolute evil embodied today in Israel, Zionism and Western imperialism. Does this motivation alone not make him worth reading, discussing and raising one's voice for these days?

There is also the story of the Gaza lecture that he decided to give, on the last day of his Ankara visit, as a reaction to Netanyahu's reception with applause in the US Congress. I was going to write that story today, but, later then.