How can a Muslim not be looked at?

We have said that every Muslim who offers a proposal on how a Muslim should look at things runs the unavoidable danger of using an absolutist language. Indeed, religious language grammatically contains such an absoluteness. Many sociologists have even counted this language, as an objectivist language, as a source of fundamentalism. Of course this is not a source peculiar to Muslims; indeed, even in the most superficial assessment, it can be seen that Islam is the religion least affected by it.

Although this objectivist language manifested itself in Islamic history in something like Salafism, certain non-Salafi Sufi circles, ostensibly claiming greater tolerance, have adopted an interpretation more categorical, absolute, and exclusionary than the Salafis' on matters of everyday practice and interpretation. For instance, the exclusionary language and practices put forward in Türkiye in the name of Ahl al-Sunnah present an interesting model in this respect. In fact, the mainstream Islamic line that developed historically as Ahl al-Sunnah had distinguished itself precisely as an attitude of common sense and wisdom that recognizes and appreciates differences of interpretation. Even so, the practice produced today by interpretations that try to close off this path with their own historical and subjective views is nothing but a typical religious tradesmanship.

We said that the question of "how a Muslim should look" is a very important question, the most important one determining a Muslim's existence in every situation. Let us refine the expression a little: What is decisive is the very concern, the very quest, that makes one ask such a question. Otherwise, everyone knows that the answer given to this question may differ and may vary according to a person's knowledge, age, gender, and culture. That is, we must say that disagreement is permissible for Muslims on this and many other subjects.

When Mohammed Arkoun, with his enlightened mindset from the French intellectual milieu, came back and spoke of how in Muslim history people had been unable to think about many subjects, even closing them off as "unthinkable domains" and never entering those private realms, he could easily have been challenged with the question "on which subject, for example?" There has not been a single issue throughout history that Muslims thought about and did not debate. In certain periods of Islamic history, some closures may have arisen on some subjects through the officious influence of rulers, but their effect was very much confined to a period, or in the same period or in earlier or later periods those subjects were again debated by other Muslim thinkers with courage, self-confidence, and in all their dimensions.

On the contrary, there have been far more Orientalists or self-Orientalists who, starting from Muslims' disagreements, have claimed that Muslim thought has no internal coherence and is too diversified. Even today, those who say that Islamism cannot put forward a single view on certain subjects, what sort of Islamism can they possibly be seeking? Do they want an absolutist profile of Islamism?

There have been Orientalists who saw the "mosaic society" metaphor, which expresses the religious or sectarian pluralism that appeared everywhere in Islamic civilization, as a result of Islam's inability to penetrate cultures. This is, of course, a claim that overlooks at what price the homogeneous social structures formed throughout the history of Western civilization came about. The price was bloody repressions, excommunications, inquisitions, massacres, and deportations carried out to create a homogeneous society. The reality behind the perception of the mosaic society is not a weakness of Muslims in transforming the different into themselves; on the contrary, it is the capacity of Muslims to accept the so-called "other" as "other."

Likewise, those who rush with great zeal to write the end of Islamism on the grounds that it no longer upholds today, as it did then, the claims of "revolution," "Islamic state," and "Islamic government" made in the seventies or eighties, what else could they be doing if not pursuing the absolutization of a historical view of Islamism?

Moreover, we hardly think they can even read properly the Islamist discourses of those years. Even when the Islamic state was being discussed, we know of a host of debates objecting to what it meant. Islamist thought never produced a uniform model valid for all times. Overall it was a claim, but within this claim there was always intense debate and disagreement. Overall, a claim and a disagreement that never exhausted or eliminated its own reason for existence and its meaning.

Ultimately, the most fundamental claim of the Islamic state, the Islamic movement, or all manifestations of political Islam is that a Muslim is a servant of God, and only of God. Its historical reality and quest was a resistance or revolt against occupation and colonialism. No one can say that the conditions of imperialist occupation and colonialism that bring Islamism into being on a world scale have disappeared today. The Islamic world is still under occupation. Colonialism has encompassed everything, from its lands and riches to its minds and wills.

Assessments of how Islamism is undergoing transformation today, to one degree or another, that neglect the dimension of occupation and colonialism can understand nothing about either Muslims or Islamists. They can never understand what Muslims are really going through and from what kind of jurisprudence some of their behaviors may derive. Commentary that neglects the dimension of occupation and colonialism only thickens, a bit more, the walls of occupation in minds, knowingly or unknowingly. Especially when those making these assessments are people who have taken refuge on the other side from within Islamism, with their personal experiences, their disputes over sharing, their traumas, their loss of faith and their rage. Everyone, in one way or another, evaluates according to their own stance what these people's angry confessional discourses about Islam and Muslims correspond to. That these statements find favor in the enemy camps where they have taken refuge is of course not surprising. Everyone is trying to justify their own path and style.

We do wonder, of course, what those who follow Arkoun and express disappointment over the abundance of unthinkable domains concerning Muslims will dare to think in the Kemalist harbor where they have taken refuge. Can they dare, with the same ease, to ask the most fundamental questions about Kemalism right in that harbor, to reflect on them, to probe the realities of history?