"Tezkire" against racism: ignorance, scandal, threat

Racism, at the point it has reached today, is in a single word the greatest scandal of a modernity that set out with enlightenment, egalitarian and humanist claims. Yet this scandal does not stem from the ineffectiveness of some solution modernity claimed against racism. It stems either from modernity having turned out to be too big for its claims, or from its having hidden, knowingly or unknowingly, far deeper racisms beneath those claims.

One of the greatest qualities lately attributed to modernity is being aware of itself, being able to reflect on itself. As if other civilizations, other nations were utterly devoid of this quality. Even this quality, which they call self-reflexivity, modern man has used as a means of considering and showing himself superior to others. Other nations, Easterners for example, do things, but they are not aware of what they do. We, on the other hand, are aware both of what we do and of what "they" do.

Positivist science instills this feeling in Western man, or in the colonized man who sees himself as Western, to a terrible degree. Thus the racism virus seizes and takes captive, incurably, a scientist who speaks with humanist claims, with claims of equality and human rights. If you ask, he is not aware of this. He is not even aware that he is not aware. That is why the great majority of people you can plainly see engaging in racism claim that they are not racist. Because they are not aware, because they do not know themselves. Just as they do not know themselves, they do not know others either, and as for Allah, who created them from nothing, who gave them, with all their features, the qualities they boast of, their blood, their lives, their races, they do not know Him at all. Had they known, they would not have fallen into the ignorance of swaggering over a quality that they contributed nothing to forming, that was entirely given to them.

The best word to express racism is perhaps "ignorance" (jahālah). The racist is ignorant. If what he claims superiority in is blood, he is ignorant enough not to know that this blood has no special quality whatsoever. If it is physical features, or the place of birth, or sex, whichever it is, proceeding from the point that he made no effort at all to acquire these, he is blind enough not to see that he is in fact no different from any other animal or object, let alone any other human being.

A person's claiming to be superior to others by virtue of the qualities "given" to him is also a lowliness. We know that the first to do this in human history was Iblis. Iblis claimed to be superior to Adam, who was created from earth, because he was created from fire. Yet Allah, who created him from fire and Adam from earth, had written different roles for them. Neither of them could know better than Allah whether they were suited to the role written for them. Iblis had no problem with knowledge. He was as knowledgeable as could be, but his knowledge could not save him from falling into this ignorance.

Today there is probably the greatest accumulation, circulation and use of knowledge ever recorded in human history. There is information about the reality of race that is as objective and scientific as can be. There is definitive information that race has no scientific basis, that it was invented socially and politically, yet people still do not give up chasing after an idol to worship. Despite so much knowledge, people cannot restrain themselves from falling into this jahiliyyah, and the consequences are grave for all humanity. That Israel today feels no pang of conscience whatsoever over the genocide it is committing against the Palestinian people comes from its racism. That the Western world too sets aside all its criteria in the face of this genocide comes from the racism virus having rendered all its values inoperative, having taken its mind away. The mind of the West, washed in those baths of enlightenment, goes on sinking into a swamp of jahiliyyah as archaic as can be, like racism.

The latest issue of Tezkire, the quarterly journal of thought, politics and social science, has come out under the title "Racism: The Jahiliyyah That No Knowledge Can Remove" precisely to portray this archaic disease. In these days when we suffer from racism of every kind, even if it cannot be removed by knowledge, we need addresses, reminders, warnings and sermons in the tone of a "tezkire." Tezkire has tried in its own way to do these reminders and warnings with the studies, articles and book reviews it presents.

The journal, published under the general editorship of Yunus Badem, had its issue edited by Ufuk Nejat Taşçı, who is also in the dossier with his article titled "Colonization, Western Racism and Identity Crisis in Africa: Hybrid, Subaltern or Other?" In his piece Taşçı tries to explain the identity crises that emerged in Africa after the decolonization period through the reality that there is no such notion as post-colonialism. In the journal, while Mahmut Hakkı Akın's article takes up the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of American sociology, "in the face of anti-immigrant sentiment and racism," Sümeyye Sakarya, whom we know from her brilliant pieces on tezkire.net, appears in the dossier with an article titled "The Other and Modernization from the Public Sphere to Genocide in a Post-Race World." Mustafa Demirci addresses the foundations of present-day racism by examining Joseph Arthur de Gobineau's arguments and thoughts on racism and their influence on the development of racism. The piece by Nadiya N. Ali, Lucy El-Sherif and Hawa Y. Mire, "Islamophobia and Proximities to Whiteness: Organizing Beyond the Brown Muslim Question," focuses on the manifestations of racism as Islamophobia. Aydın Aktay's article, meanwhile, sheds a different light, in an age when consumer culture has become an important part of life, through the feelings and thoughts that the discourses in the series Kızıl Goncalar gave rise to. Şahika Akın's article makes a valuable contribution by strongly comparing two political parties in Turkey and Germany known for their anti-immigrant stance.

Kamil Ergenç's piece, "On the Characteristics of a Political Culture Centered on Blood," begins with questions as cautionary as can be: "To what purpose is the Turkish power to save independence and the republic linked with blood? Is the nation embodied in blood or in language? Does blood determine character? If so, does a blood transfusion also mean a character transfer? Is giving blood/receiving blood something beyond a simple medical act? For example, if we give a Muslim's blood to an idolater, does he too become a Muslim? Or the opposite..."

Now tell me, "how many, how mnay people are there in this whole place who go as far as seeing their skeleton in the mirror?" (with greetings to İsmet Özel). What kind of blood did Moiz Kohen, one of the Zionist pioneers of Turkish nationalism, carry?

Sıbğatullah Kaya's piece, "A Slippery Ground: Nation and Nationalism," and an interview M. İhsan Özdemir conducted with Bekir Berat Özipek likewise present highly cautionary, rational and awakening analyses especially on the transformation of a discourse that has resurfaced in Turkey as anti-immigrant sentiment into racism. Özipek's statement carried into the title, "Hostility to Refugees Will Not Bring Power," is a warning not only to those who covet racist discourses and look for a road to power, but also to the government that has fallen into the supposition and the sorrow that it is losing something along this road.

In the last section of the journal there are book reviews on racism by Emine Çift, İlhan Bilici and Esra Sekiz. The closing words of Çift's piece evaluating Guido Barbujani's book "The Invention of Races: Science Against Racism" are a deeply shaking question for our age to be able to emerge from the eclipse of reason it is passing through: "What kind of place would the world be if we had spent the effort we spend on bringing out our differences on revealing our similarities?"