This constitution has planted a Kenan Evren inside everyone

"When the unthinkable domain is expanded in a particular intellectual tradition and sustained over centuries, the intellectual horizons of reason diminish and its critical functions narrow and weaken, because the domain of the unthinkable becomes more resolute and leaves very little room for the thinkable. The unthought consists of the accumulated problems declared unthinkable within a given logosphere. The logosphere is the linguistic-mental space shared by all who use the same language to express their thoughts, representations, collective memories and knowledge according to fundamental principles and values asserted as a unifying worldview (ideology)."

These words of the famous Algerian Islamic reformer Mohammed Arkoun (The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought, Dar el-Saqi, 2002, p. 12) are in fact among those he often repeated in order to open the Islamic intellectual tradition to criticism. According to him, Islamic thought, which at first played a revolutionary role by coming with the claim that many problems and many domains declared unthinkable in earlier traditions were thinkable, in time formed its own tradition and over the centuries expanded these unthinkable domains enormously, thereby diminishing the intellectual horizons of Islamic reason and narrowing and weakening its critical functions.

Arkoun's most important example is the shape that the question of whether the Qur'an was created or uncreated took in history. According to Arkoun, a faction that gained power over time in this field set important limits and closed the field to thought. Thus such a cycle (turning into the very same thing it had overthrown) that took place in the history of Islamic thought in a sense renders Islamic thought ordinary and indistinguishable in the eyes of all other thought. Thus Muslims, too, are left with no difference from others. They too, when they attain a certain position in thought, follow the same tracks as those they opposed, and when they come to political power they follow the same line of action as the others.

Frankly, these words of Arkoun are a very great injustice to Islamic thought. None of the domains he calls unthinkable within Islamic thought has ever been unthinkable, neither in the past nor today. Whether the Qur'an is created is not unthinkable; it is a claim that was thought through and refuted in compliance with all the requirements of thought. Despite this, in every period there have been those who returned to the same idea and repeated it, who sometimes found strong interlocutors in the intellectual sense and sometimes did not. From time to time, the fact that an idea has become the official view may have placed certain limits against its being thought or accepted. If you look at it that way, there were also very strict limits, immediately before, against thinking that the Qur'an is uncreated. The first great Mihna event in Islamic history was carried out precisely by the libertarian Mu'tazilites, who are claimed to have thought the unthinkable. The Abbasid Caliph of that time, al-Ma'mun, belonged to the Mu'tazila, and his views were in the position of the official view, and he pressured those who thought otherwise. However, even if the debate over whether the Qur'an, that is, the word of God, was created was subject to certain restrictions as such official-view matters, Islamic philosophers, scholars and thinkers never refrained from thinking about this subject and advancing theses in both directions.

Arkoun points to the problems created by those who regard the Qur'an as revelation from God letter by letter acting with an authoritarianism that treats their own interpretations of this revelation almost as revelation too. Of course, although the Qur'anic revelation is from God, none of our interpretations of it are from God; they are human. Even the person you consider the most bigoted knows this. But to take the simplest example of this identification and attribute and generalize such great bigotry to Islamic thought is one of the greatest scandals of both Arkoun and all the historicists. Whether it be the question of destiny, the question of will, the questions of soul and body, or all the thorny questions one can imagine, in Islamic thought there has never been any authority holding sway that would render them "unthinkable" or "unthought." The Noble Qur'an's own obvious discourse is a constant invitation to think about everything, to reason, to reflect, to ponder and to question, and to confront the heaviest questions in these matters with self-confidence.

Which subject have Muslims in history avoided thinking about, which problem have they shrunk from confronting? Today, too, Islam gives a self-confidence that will not avoid or shrink from thinking about anything great in this regard or confronting any reality.

While saying that this criticism of Arkoun's toward Islamic thought is unjust, we have also always invited fairness toward the period in which he advanced this debate, toward the conditions of Muslims. In the period when Arkoun made these criticisms of Muslims, all Muslims were left to themselves, able to live and think only in extremely narrow cells among the forbidden domains that the official ideologies imposed by the colonial administrations planted over their heads declared "unthinkable," "untouchable," "unchangeable." For example, in Turkey, were the "unthinkable" domains before Muslims imposed by the Islamic intellectual traditions or by the ideologies proclaimed by the very administrations at their head?

If we tried today to measure the domains of Kemalism that have been declared "unthinkable," they would cover 780 thousand square kilometers. In our last article we touched on it once, and how many sounds of mines exploding we heard. We still cannot think about the real specifications of the Ottoman collapse that began on the Palestine front and the subsequent transition to the Republic in Turkey under British occupation. Nor how changes that took place entirely against the people, at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands, could be "for the people"... Nor how all the deeds and words of a human being, however successful and founding, who was disputed, quarreled with and controversial among some, could become beyond discussion, absolute and a reference...

The reason I came to this point by way of Arkoun is to show, since the occasion has arisen, the standing of those theologians inspired by the likes of Arkoun who, after so much critical chatter, come and get stuck in Kemalism: for what sake can one endure misguidance after guidance?

We said that in a constitution already changed in every part, if even the first 4 articles are not to be touched at this point, there is no need to go to the trouble at all. Because what gives this constitution the character of the September 12 coup constitution is nothing other than this imperious and ideological content that other constitutions do not have. If the target is the September 12 coup mentality, that mentality exists only there. This may be the only subject that could arouse any possible excitement in people about the new constitution. If, now, one says "new constitution" and says there is no problem with those articles, then it would be far better to say let it stay scattered. Why should a matter be opened that will in the end give that mentality one more layer of armor of untouchability?

We said that the imperious language contained in the sentence "its amendment cannot even be proposed" most badly affects, even determines, our social character and personality. Just look: in response to such a small proposal for discussion, how many people, without regard to either the content's CHP-ness or its September 12 coup origin, have turned into dictators. It turns out this constitutional language has planted a dictator in everyone. Each dictator that has sprouted shouts, bellows and commands, in his crudest, most imperious and threatening language, about forbidden domains that cannot be thought or crossed. What, pray tell, has been left to you as inheritance in the domain closed off by the September 12 dictator?

In closing, so as not to be unjust to Arkoun either, let us note that he also made the observation that the limits created in the intellectual sphere by the dictatorships established in Islamic countries under post-colonial conditions have formed far denser "unthinkable" domains, and that this has increasingly become a more acute problem for us:

"In Muslim countries, this policy helped expand the domain of the unthinkable and the unthought because a double censorship, from above imposed by the state and from below imposed by public opinion, was and still is applied to intellectual and cultural activities, especially to matters related to religion. Many intellectuals came to internalize this double control in the name of the Nation or religion and added self-censorship to what was already imposed from outside."