The theologian's quarrel with religion in Turkey

"Dinci" ("religionist") is an abusive term we generally hear from Türkiye's infidels. It corresponds to no objective stance or attitude. It is a vomit of emotion directed at Muslims, a hate speech. In response to our observations on Afghanistan and the Taliban who govern it today, which we have conveyed increasingly from on-site observation, a Professor from the Ankara Faculty of Divinity clung to his keyboard, unleashed his hatred and called us "dinci." The typical informant jargon of someone who has made it his nature to denounce Islamists here and there, saying "they have hidden agendas, they want to bring about a sharia order." Does one have to be a professor for this? The chair he occupies at the Faculty of Divinity is a great pity for the Muslim Turkish people, for the science of divinity, and for his students.

The deep ignorance he displays in every word of the sentences in which he expresses his feeling of hatred toward us is an absurd comedy of nonsense that makes one say "where do we even begin to correct?"

He began by cursing the Taliban, or us who describe it, as "a complete Salafi mentality." While presenting his hatred, he exhibited his thick ignorance. All right, at first nobody knew, and some could say it easily, going by hearsay. Even the know-it-alls so enamored of their own Islam were putting forward, as grounds of superiority over the Taliban, that the most important feature of Türkiye's Islam is that it is Hanafi and Maturidi. Of course, while asserting that this also foregrounds tolerance, reason, openness and human freedom, there was one thing they forgot: that the Taliban too is Hanafi and Maturidi. Today it has been repeated so much that everyone knows by now that the Taliban and Salafism are leagues apart, and only our Divinity scholar has not yet heard. Then let us have him hear it once more: the Taliban, with the Hanafi fiqh to which it sincerely adheres and the Maturidi creed, is the most concrete example of Ahl al-Sunna.

The Salafi label pinned on it arises only from its being attached to what it believes with an uncompromising sincerity, from its not giving up on applying what it believes at the cost of taking on the whole world. When you dig underneath here, it is very clear that the anger and antipathy toward the Taliban stem not from its Salafism but from an envy felt toward the sincerity of its faith, its uncompromising stance toward the enemy, and its posture of paying no heed to the censure of the censurers. Yet it is precisely this steadfast stance that made it victorious against the occupiers. It is a stance that those who, in the same way that they themselves bow before the oppressors, surrender their religion, their identity and their homeland, cannot understand.

The "divinity project" that fashions people like Ibrahim Maraş opens Islam, in the name of historicity, on the assumption that the ruling can always change anyway, to every kind of bargaining with the occupiers and the enemy, and especially to the occupier's orders.

Yes, the ruling can change of course, but who will decide this? The occupiers, or their collaborators who have surrendered to them and are seeking acceptance in their eyes, or the mujahideen who defend their homeland in obedience to the Book of God? The Book did not come merely as written text; it also came with wisdom. And this wisdom is, above all, a faculty taught by the Prophet and given to those who believe in that Book. When this faith is gone, when you open the interpretation of that Book to the sovereigns of the age, or to the occupation and seduction of the age that is sovereign, all that remains is the fitting of the Book to whims and desires.

Accusing the Taliban of "taking a particular interpretation of religion to be God's religion" and thereby, conversely, "asserting the absoluteness of one's interpretation" has become a classic rote formula of historicist divinity. This is not hermeneutics but a very deep psychological problem. A typical sickness concerning (dis)loyalty to God, to His Messenger and to the believers. Examples of this abound in the Qur'an and in history. Religion is sincerity (nasiha) to God, to His Book, to His Messenger and to the believers.

Between what is understood from the Book when this sincerity is absent and what is understood from the Book when this sincerity is present, there is a difference as great as mountains. Is there any possibility that those who are not sincere can decide which is more accurate? Can the historicity of the positivist divinity scholar have a place in the parsing of this interpretation?

Look at the certainty of faith of a scientist, a university teacher and a divinity scholar: he belies, with what he has heard from here and there, but in a very self-assured, know-it-all manner, what I conveyed by going to the scene and what I saw and witnessed with my own eyes, and on top of that he attributes to what we narrated a Wonderland depiction of his own making.

With a defensive, mocking attitude peculiar to the denialism we know very well, in the most wretched state of those who mock when it is a matter for tears... Of course we do not expect admirers of the US to see what we saw in an Afghanistan that has defied the US and the modern world with honor, dignity and insistence on independence, and has beaten them. Does not who sees what there depend somewhat on where and how one feels oneself, on whom one feels friendly to and whom one feels hostile to?

Was not Medina, a blessed, perfect and enlightened land for Muslims, a city in which the hypocrites felt an ever-increasing darkness, a torment? We love those who love God and befriend them. We also find beautiful the worlds they build with sincerity. It is obvious that not everyone will see an Alice there, but we have never seen a wonderland of those who see it as dark either. Their wonderland is the world that today carries out, or turns a blind eye to, the genocide of Muslims in Gaza. Are you very happy in that world of yours?

I also remember the same person's mouthful of taunts at both me and Mehmet Görmez on account of the articles I had written earlier on Taha Abdurrahman. I sensed a strange, envious denialism that, with all its flippancy, dismissed in one stroke Taha Abdurrahman, the author of dozens of books fitted into his 90-year life, about whom dozens of theses, articles and books have been written in the world, by saying "he says nothing." Neither before nor after did I hear of any noteworthy work of his that would attract my attention, nor of any positive approach or contribution of his on any issue concerning Muslims. But afterward I saw plenty of his taunts, his quarrels, his hate-filled statements about this one and that one. What kind of quarrelsome divinity scholarship is this? Why so much hatred and anger? With so many feelings of hatred, what is the motivation of a divinity scholarship that has assigned itself the mission of being an adversary, especially against Islamism in Türkiye? On whose behalf, in the name of which understanding of religion or divinity, in the name of which god?

It is quite clear that this is not the type of divinity scholar that Muslims desire, one suited to the temperament and morals of Muslims. Looking at the mission to which these types ascribe themselves, it is much clearer still that they act very much in line with the expectations of the circles that first conceived of Divinity. As is known, after the faculty was closed in 1933, exactly 16 years later, the mission of the faculty of divinity conceived in the discussions held at the 7th Congress of the CHP and in the Grand National Assembly was defined not as training religious scholars or men of religion as the Muslim people wanted, but as "to be established as a scientific institution and to function as a weapon against religious movements, to prevent and eradicate them" (Records of the Grand National Assembly, vol. 20, pp. 227-284).

Undoubtedly, the Faculty of Divinity afterward, within a short time, surpassed these expectations and on the contrary developed toward a point at which it would respond more to the expectations of the Muslim people. But evidently some insist on remaining loyal to that mission.

He believes in this mission so wholeheartedly that he calls the fact that "the Taliban brought America into line" a "fairy tale." And we, apparently, believe in this fairy tale naively.

Good grief, even America itself has admitted that it suffered a rout in Afghanistan and left in disgrace, and ours still calls this a fairy tale. He is so detached from the facts, living in his own illusory world of belief. Yes, precisely America's invincible omnipotence is a theological creed for some. A creed in which, even if he saw the opposite with his own eyes, he would not believe.

What shall we say? May God grant guidance.