Can there be no morality in politics?

While I was reflecting on the memoirs of Beşir Atalay, a man who set out on the political stage on an Islamist foundation precisely in order to make the world we live in a better place, an invitation arrived in my inbox to a conference by Taha Abdurrahman titled "The Principle of the Unity of Morality and the Morality of Politics." The Islamic Thought Institute, chaired by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Görmez Hoca, is once again hosting the renowned Moroccan Islamic thinker Taha Abdurrahman, whom it hosted last July with a series of conferences and meetings. Moreover, this time it is at the Presidential Complex, and the subject is the relationship between politics and morality.

In fact, I had been thinking that Beşir Hoca's book should be taken, beyond a simple book presentation, as a text and an example that deserves to be dwelt on much more, precisely in terms of Islamist and principled politics, morality, and realpolitik. There is no harm in dwelling on these subjects on the occasion of Taha Abdurrahman.

In fact, both Beşir Atalay and Taha Abdurrahman are merely occasions for dwelling on these subjects. They are occasions to stop every now and then and ask what we are doing in politics, what we set out for, where we have arrived and what comes next, occasions to hold up a mirror to ourselves. At the Külliye, in the same format as the earlier ones but this time on politics and morality, we followed a Taha Abdurrahman conference together with a fairly large and attentive audience, most of whom care about morality in politics, or ideals and principles, and of course about the question of Islam.

So these questions have not entirely disappeared from people's minds, and have not diminished at all. Taha Abdurrahman's... no one listening there has an empty store of knowledge or concern regarding ideas on the relationship between politics and morality. Everyone already has certain answers of their own, but there are serious distances, perhaps lived distances, between these answers and what they live. The tension produced by these distances makes people more open to thinking about these subjects and to listening to someone competent, if there is one.

By coincidence, Beşir Atalay was at the meeting too. I had come to the conference having just sent to the newspaper the article in which I said that he should concentrate more on precisely these subjects. I regarded this as a sign of the need to bring these subjects together, and half jokingly told the Hoca when we met at the end of the conference.

Against approaches that exclude morality from politics, or that, even if they do not exclude it, advocate suspending it within a conception of duty and responsibility, Taha Abdurrahman presented his approach underlining the principle of the unity of morality through a geometric design. The geometric design is a philosophical method of advancing one's conceptual framework and arguments step by step, by proof. It is a way of thinking or philosophizing attributed to Spinoza in the history of philosophy. Frankly, this tires the participants somewhat. What emerges is not an enthusiastic and emotional address or a sermon-style talk. It is an approach that invites the participants to think with philosophy. On top of that, when one considers the compulsory interruptions of consecutive translation, which slow the tempo, it becomes something hard to follow. Even so, that everyone in the hall tried to listen to the subject with full attention is, truly, praiseworthy as a mark of respect shown to a Muslim thinker who has devoted his life to thinking.

Let alone the framework within which Islamist politics handles this subject, the relationship between politics and morality has never come onto the agenda in Turkey as a real issue since the founding of the Republic. There has always been a general discontent with corruption and pragmatic, selfish politics, but what reference has been pointed to for a principled or moral politics against this kind of politics? Because of the distance placed, in the name of secularism, between politics and religion, which is the strongest and perhaps the only source of morality in Turkey, politics being free even of morality has virtually become a custom (habitus, rule). If there is no religion either, why should people have to be moral in politics? That is why Turkey's political habitus is closer to a framework of coup-making, individual power and office ambition, opportunism, corruption, and one that belittles and excludes religion and therefore morality.

For years in Turkey, did the official pressures and bans applied against a politics that is moral and takes religion as its reference, through a discourse of "exploiting religion for politics," not tacitly say that politics has no relationship with morality? If the aim was to sanctify religion with this, perhaps it was not aware that it had belittled politics more than necessary. As if politics were too dirty a business for religious people to enter.

Turan Kışlakçı wrote an interesting piece on tezkire.net a few days ago on the relationship between Islam, morality and politics, under the rather provocative title "There Is No Morality in Islam." In Islam, the lawful and the unlawful (halal and haram), as the criterion of good and evil, are themselves the foundation of morality. For this there is no need for a separate discourse of morality. When these are observed, man has already grounded being moral on a very solid foundation, such as worship of God, obedience, and respect for the rights of others. A discourse called morality, which is very hard to ground through an inter-human consensus, does not in any field lead people to the desired morality anyway. Today, those who usurp the rights of others in politics or other fields are not merely acting immorally; they have done something that is haram, they have transgressed the limits of God.

Taha Abdurrahman developed the question of morality in politics largely against the ideas voiced by the famous sociologist Max Weber in his well-known essay "Politics as a Vocation." He seems to have no business with approaches that entirely ignore morality in politics. For Weber is the Western thinker who comes closest to the idea that there is a relationship between politics and morality. Yet he too places morality within the parentheses of duty and responsibility.

Yet for Abdurrahman, inspired by the Qur'an, politics is already in its essence a moral action, and the moral character dominating political action is the morality of trust (amanah). Political action is man's test of fulfilling the trust. The responsibility of a politician who believes in the covenant of trust does not end with applying moral values. He carries out this application with a consciousness of trust. Indeed, his responsibility is not limited to this either. Because he holds the capacity of representation, he must do more and bring the public sphere into conformity with the covenant of trust. Morality carries politics from a narrow field to a broad one.

For a Muslim, the justification or motivation of politics is not, as in ordinary politics, or as both Nietzsche and many political philosophers have emphasized, the "will to power." The desire for personal power is a process of going astray that takes man as far as claiming divinity. That is why a dominant political action not adorned with the morality of trust is man going astray, rebelling, being dragged into tyranny (tughyan) with the claim of becoming divine. Today, within those who live politics as an ordinary action, as the desire for power of the individual or of certain ethnic, social, economic groups, there is also an immanent claim to divinity.

Yet the political action of a Muslim possessing the morality of trust is an action carried out even with the basmala, regarding people's rights as a trust, observing them, in order to eliminate fitna on earth.

NOTE: Much more can be said on the questions and concepts opened up by Taha Abdurrahman. Today at the Çamlıca Mosque Congress Center in Istanbul, he will give a conference under the title "The Crisis of Truthfulness and the Burning Test of Political Reason."