Muslims have their own solutions to racism; they see racism not as a right but as a deviation

Hüseyin Çelik, who says "The Islamic communities and the devout circles stood by as spectators to what was done to the Kurds," needs to explain which Islamic communities and which devout circles he means. The Islamic community that we know and consider ourselves part of never stood by as a spectator to what was done to the Kurds. On the contrary, it was the Muslims of Türkiye who, with a more realistic politics, put an end to the policies of denial that fell to the Kurds' share on the Islamic lands that were broken up after Sykes-Picot. The level reached today in Türkiye, and even in Syria, in resolving the Kurdish question is, from whichever side you look, a result of an Islamic perspective. Had Muslims not somehow had a share in power, had there not been Erdoğan's determined and principled stance, this point of resolution in the Kurdish question could not have been reached.

Or do you suppose that the PKK, which threw the Kurdish people as bait before the imperialists, secured all this with its weapons? Could the PKK, with its guns, have wrung even a crumb out of a Kemalist regime that for sixty years hated the Kurds and saw them as enemies? The guardians of the Kemalist status quo had become the lords of this war, had established their economy upon it, and were in any case profiting handsomely from it. Do you suppose it bothered them that this war went on and that Turkish and Kurdish children died?

SO WHAT IS RACIST IN THIS PERSPECTIVE EXHIBITED BY THE DEVOUT?

Is not looking warmly on the building of a new nation-state in the region through extended Sykes-Picot designs that Israel, the US and the EU incite from time to time a betrayal of the Kurds, or is it resistance against the occupiers and the enemies of Turks, Kurds and Arabs? Our view is the latter.

I wish I had not heard the criticism that Muslims show interest in Muslims at the other end of the world while remaining indifferent to the rights of the Kurds right beside them. Muslims never remained indifferent to the rights of the Kurds; they solved their problems. A little more of the interest Muslims showed in the Kurdish question is the effort to build a new nation-state through the incitement and new designs of imperialist occupiers, and no Muslim Kurd who knows himself can ignore the occupying-Zionist intent and plan behind it. Is the concern of those so-called leftist circles that supposedly champion Kurdish rights more today the rights, identities and personalities of the Kurds, or serving those imperialist plans?

Muslims have a much better plan, vision and philosophy for the Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, Persians and other peoples of the region to live together with their honor, dignity and standing. The ignominy of trailing after a nationalist movement whose service, and whom it serves, is obvious does not befit them and cannot be attributed to them.

IN SYRIA TOO, IT WAS MUSLIMS WHO OFFERED THE REAL SOLUTION FOR THE KURDS

Hüseyin Çelik criticizes Muslims for "being concerned about Muslims at the other ends of the world while being indifferent to the Kurdish Muslims in their own country and in Northern Syria"; I wonder how he would have expected them to be concerned for the Kurds in Syria. If by the Kurds in Syria he means the YPG or the SDF, I can see it only as a scandal, on his own account, that he has not understood what kind of imperialist-Zionist program this structure is part of. In Syria, through the SDF, what the US or Israel promised the Kurds were lands, a right of sovereignty over lands belonging neither to the US nor to the Kurds. A sovereignty whose right of use would never be exercised by the Kurds but would rather belong to Israel. Should we see this as a right for the Kurds? Should we see as a right the opportunities that might arise from Muslim lands being distributed, fragmented and handed over by Zionists from one people to another in this manner? Is this political insight, foresight, fairness?

Let us pass over this: for a full 14.5 years the Muslims in Syria were subjected to genocide under the watch of the very forces that today claim to champion the SDF. While all of Syria was being turned into fire and ruin, a mini-state was being attempted for the SDF under US protection in regions that were mostly Arab. Of course this was not a right.

Let us also recall that when the Kurds in Syria did not even have an identity, it was again Erdoğan who defended their rights. In the constitutional framework the Syrian government offers the Kurds today, at the level of equal citizenship, what right of the Kurds is denied, trampled or ignored? Only Muslims could offer this framework, and they did. Nobody, of course, is entitled to more than his due. It is not as if the Kurds' right is being taken away because the SDF is withdrawing from the injustice promised to it under Israeli and US protection. Let this be known as well.

INSTEAD OF ACCUSING MUSLIMS, ONE SHOULD LISTEN TO THEM

Since it is apt, let us repeat: those who accuse Islamism or Muslims today of being indifferent to the Kurds' problems, instead of making this accusation, have very fundamental lessons to hear and take from Islam. For Islam has its own approach to these matters. This distinctive approach of Islam is an invitation to everyone: an invitation from the wretchedness of racism to being honored by Islam. An invitation to rise and ascend from being stuck on innate characteristics toward existing through what one has earned by one's own effort, choices and the way most befitting a human being. Ultimately, again, an invitation from the enslaving, subjugating dungeon of servitude to man to servitude to God alone.

Islam curses people's boasting of superiority over one another on account of characteristics they bring from birth, that is, characteristics to whose formation they contributed nothing. Since it is impossible for anyone to choose his own race, his parents, his birthplace, his color, his language, Islam describes people's boasting of superiority over one another because of these characteristics, glorifying them and making them a cause, in a single word as "jahiliyyah."

THE EQUIVALENT OF ONE TYRANNY IS NOT ANOTHER TYRANNY BUT THE REJECTION OF EVERY KIND OF TYRANNY

Islam saves people from shrinking in pursuit of a cause by adopting as identity and cause these characteristics, which are an unchangeable fate, and frees them from the dungeons into which that cause thrusts them. Since these characteristics are fate, causes that center on them can promise people not the determination of their own destiny but at most the transformation into victims of fate. Islam, on the other hand, points to a path that opens a person to the horizons of freedom, rather than being a victim of his fate. It saves him from the hands of the taghuts who pull man toward the lowest of the low (asfal al-safilin) and try to make him a slave to themselves through these identity causes. In every kind of nationalist movement there is a narrow and base horizon offered to man. Against this horizon, Islam has a profound critical stance.

A people who are victims of a tyrannical nationalism are always oppressed whom Muslims must stand up for. Every injustice that oppressed people suffers by virtue of being a people concerns the Muslim. To stand against that injustice and its perpetrators is the very condition of standing against gods other than God. Whoever does not do this cannot even say "illallah"; that is, he cannot have truly believed in God, cannot complete his tawhid. This is certain. But when he stands against one taghut, he does not do so to give rise to another tyranny. The equivalent of one tyranny is not another tyranny but the rejection of every kind of tyranny. That nationalisms give birth to other nationalisms is a sociological reality. But Islam's intervention is to put forward its own life-giving alternative to this barren reality. That is why the Prophet trampled both racism and blood feud underfoot as customs of jahiliyyah.

THIS RESENTMENT WILL NOT FREE THE KURDS

That the Kurds have been oppressed throughout the history of the Republic of Türkiye is an indisputable reality. Bringing them to the freedom they deserve from this oppression is also an indisputable responsibility of Muslims. But today a counter-nationalism has come to dominate the discourse on the oppression of the Kurds. From the real oppression they have suffered, this nationalism produces for the Kurds not freedom but a resentment peculiar to jahiliyyah, a Kurdish chauvinism based on hostility to Turks, Arabs and Persians (Acem), which will drag them into an even greater quagmire. This resentment will not free the Kurds; it only makes them follow the vanguards of this resentment.

What Islamists remained indifferent to was never the oppression the Kurds suffered, but the counter-nationalisms of the PKK or of earlier Kurdish leftist movements. On the contrary, while Muslims were being subjected to oppression because they were Muslims, they went on making a deep critique of oppression, which includes nationalism.

Islamists may have made, or may be making, many mistakes, but on this subject in particular they are in the position of critic, not of self-critic.