Taha Abderrahmane's vigil of ideas against absolute evil

There are factors that lead people to do science and philosophy, or to think scientifically and philosophically against superstition, religiosity, mythology and irrationality. Most people suppose that this motivation is a rational, scientific or philosophical discovery or drive. Yet the superstitions produced in the name of science, even in the name of reason, rival in proportion the superstitions and mythologies produced in the name of religion throughout history. Even those making scientistic claims noticed within a short time that this was not so, and began to dwell on negative dialectics.

The renowned philosopher of science Paul K. Feyerabend expressed, quite pithily in his book "Farewell to Reason," that the factors that lead people to act scientifically are not scientific at all, and that the motivations that lead them to be rationalist are not rational at all. Of course, although thinkers such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among the philosophers of the Enlightenment, in which the theology of rationalism was constructed, spoke at length about the fact that pure reason is never to be found in nature, all that is left of the entire Enlightenment clamor is the idols of reason and science that are now worshipped.

In fact, in today's philosophical circles a serious awareness has formed on this matter. What we are saying is neither a new discovery nobody knows nor a bold claim. There is a serious state of self-consciousness that philosophy or science has never been able to get away from the rhetoric and mythology from which it has tried to distinguish itself from the very beginning. This awareness is lacking only among those of us who follow Western philosophy from afar with great admiration, but understand it very differently from what it is.

The way our own people read Western philosophical texts or figures needs to be considered separately. What do the persons they read say, and what do our people understand? It is quite clear that our people perceive Western philosophy at a level of objectivity almost purified of rhetoric and mythology. Why do they do so? Because they need idols. Because, after distancing themselves from God for one emotional reason or another, under social or society-driven influences, they begin to fill the void that forms with scientific or philosophical beliefs, which they imagine to be non-belief, yet which they believe in as one would believe in God.

As Taha Abdurrahman says, this state represents, as strongly as possible, a state of "forgetting." It is a process that leads human beings to oblivion (nisyan) of their own existence, of the reality of their createdness, of the truth that they have a Creator, and of the truth that there can be no one other than this Creator who could give them real knowledge about their own existence.

Proceeding from the fact that the word "insan" (human being) includes the dimension of "nisyan" (forgetting) as much as that of "ünsiyet" (intimacy), Taha Abdurrahman opens a very important philosophical channel on the premise that, not only today but throughout history, the most widespread and habitual mode of human existence has been afflicted with forgetting. Through this channel he tries, by means of his own philosophical way of thinking, to bring a new opening to secularization, the separations of religion and politics, of ethics and politics, science, civilization, philosophy and many other separations. He stirs up, as it were, a wind of thought that will set still waters in motion and make the leaves rustle (see his book Din Ruhu [The Spirit of Religion], Pınar Yayınları). It is an ambitious undertaking that should shame the die-hards who, without ever seeing or listening to the many horizon-opening and interesting connections he builds through the words of the Qur'an and the transitions between words, simply dismiss it as "rhetoric." Moreover, he himself presents his work as a most modest proposal. Never mind.

Taha Abdurrahman himself explains on every occasion what drove him to do philosophy, and this decidedly makes the philosophy he does far more meaningful for the Muslims of our age. This meaningful story begins with Israel's occupation of Jerusalem in 1967. The state of helplessness in which the whole Muslim world, despite its enormous population, found itself that day before the Zionist Western civilization created in him a resentment, a lesson to be drawn, and a motivation to make amends. Thinking that the Palestinians were already doing this with their lives and their actual struggle, and that he could do it by way of philosophy, he attributes to the philosophy he does a kind of murabit mission. What he does is a vigil of philosophy for the Islamic world, a philosophical ribat dedicated to resistance against, and liberation from, the occupation of minds, an occupation like that of Palestine.

On the last day of his visit to Ankara, during which he gave several lectures, Taha Abdurrahman was deeply affected by Netanyahu's reception with applause in the US Congress. After his meeting with the President on Thursday, and at the President's suggestion as well, he thought he had to respond to this, and, not sleeping until morning, he prepared the text of the speech titled "Absolute Evil and the Vigil of Thought on the Frontiers," which he was to deliver on Friday at the Külliye.

The speech is, in fact, a text that places Gaza and Palestine almost at the center of his own philosophical journey. In the text he explains that the Palestinians have more than answered the covenant of "misak," which he treats in most of his books as a key concept of the ideal existence of the human being on earth. Between Kant's "radical evil" and Hannah Arendt's concept of ordinary evil, he conceptualizes the evil displayed by Israel today as "absolute evil." Those who know the concepts know that this evil, which Israel today represents with excessive arrogance and an aggression, belief, theory and relish harmful to humanity, is, according to them, an unparalleled evil. But more important is that the good that Palestine sets against this absolute evil is not a good that merely defends itself and tries to save itself, but a universal good founded on the covenant, one that holds goods for all humanity and approaches absolute perfection.

"The whole world is living a situation similar to what Gaza is living... absolute evil is roaming all over the world. It has even taken the whole world captive just as it took Gaza captive. In the grip of absolute evil, all wills, near and far, are being rendered inert. The destruction that absolute evil monstrously causes no longer sets wills in motion; minds, whether of intellectuals, scholars or thinkers, stand frozen. The wholesale annihilation of the world provokes no one."

Today, "the torment inflicted on one Palestinian is, in effect, a torment inflicted on the whole world."

"In this age no one can be the equal of the Palestinian resistance fighter in fulfilling loyalty to the covenant. Fulfilling the requirement of the covenant in fact means fulfilling the requirement of humanity. For as long as humanity is integrated with the quality of the divine covenant, the Palestinian resistance fighter has been chosen, as a requirement of his revolt against absolute evil, for two important missions that encompass all humanity. The first of these is the renewal of human values, and the second is the liberation of the human being in the world."

Thus Taha Abdurrahman draws attention both to the fact that what is happening today is not a simple and singular event, and to the universal aspects of both absolute evil and the Gaza resistance facing it, and at the same time establishes the link between his own philosophy and this universality.