Even decolonization has become a property! What else will we see?

Last week I shared my impressions of two separate conferences: one on decolonialism (decolonization), the other on occidentalism (Western studies), perhaps another facet of the same subject. That these two pieces came back to back because of the two conferences is in fact a perfect coincidence, for they are complementary subjects. Our interest in these subjects is, of course, perennial; after all, one dimension of the situation in which the Islamic world in general, and Turkey in particular, finds itself today concerns colonialism.

However much distance may have been covered on this front, it is not a scourge that can be so easily repelled. And for Muslims, trying to be rid of it is not merely an intellectual or academic luxury but a matter of existence. For as long as we have known ourselves, these subjects have been vital matters for us. How we know and see ourselves, the colonial condition to which the entire Islamic world was subjected after the First World War, and the struggle for deliverance from it. This is not simply a topic to be exhausted within the internal history of any one country, to be instrumentalized and enclosed within that history. It is the most basic condition of Muslims. We do not know whether it looks this way from afar, but we suggest that those who see it this way, if they have a little sincerity, come a little closer.

Thanks to a piece published a few days ago on Birikim's website under Tunahan Yıldız's byline, we learned that a certain circle has accumulated quite a bit of pain over Islamists' interest in the literature of decolonization. Truth be told, we were not entirely unaware of this, but let us say it was thanks to the pieces Yıldız cites that I realized how much talk had piled up around it.

From the sum of these pieces there emerges an approach that is strange from whichever angle one looks at it: as if decolonialist theory or discourse had emerged long before the present situation of Muslims, and Islamists had clung to this discourse by "instrumentalizing" it for their own power.

The first point to be noted against this approach is that decolonialist theories or academic discourses took shape long after the reality of the colonization of Muslims and the countless struggles they waged against it all over the world. Conversely, it is quite clearly visible from where we stand that the interest in decolonialism of those who do not know that Muslims' discontents and problems with colonialism are far older and more deeply rooted is increasingly turning into a colonial consolation.

When reading Yıldız's piece and some of the pieces he cites, you sometimes feel as if you were reading not an academic article but a meticulous intelligence report prepared by a "Directorate of the Anti-Decolonialism Branch." Who read Said on what date, who translated Fanon, who used which concept in which article, who later arrived at which institution today... Great attention, great sensitivity. But as if Islamists' interest in decolonialism had nothing to do with their own realities, and as if it were one of those matters that they use while marching toward power against equal rivals, or, in more technical terms, merely "instrumentalize."

Of course, the more ironic thing here is that when it comes to postcolonial theory, everything Western academics or the leftist circle interested in this theory in Turkey do is "critical theory," while what Muslims do suddenly becomes "instrumentalization." When Fanon calls for revolution, it is intellectual courage; when Said speaks for Palestine, public theory; when Latin Americans say epistemic colonialism, decolonial consciousness... But when it comes to conservatives or Islamists in Turkey relating the same theories to their own historical experience, a mild air of panic suddenly arises in the room: "Wait a minute, how do you get to use these?"

The sensor that sets off the alarm bell here is of course obvious: the problem is not that the theory is "used" or misused, but who is "using" the theory. For in every case the relation to theory is a relation of "use."

This view alone actually reveals how an appropriated "criticality" is a matter of use. Yet do Muslims really feel the need to use this or that theory? Is the colonial problem to which the whole Islamic world of 1918 onward has been subjected merely a matter of intellectual, academic interest, or of a title-deeded "property"? What is a matter of existence and direct "occupation" for Muslims may be an arbitrary intellectual matter for certain circles in Turkey today who are trying to establish a cadastre over criticality, but for Muslims it is a real matter. That they do not know this is their own business.

Of course, what is felt toward what Muslims experience as a matter of existence and have lived for 120 years is less a theoretical critique than a cultural bewilderment and a class unease. You know, there used to be people who were expected to speak from the periphery toward the center... Their suddenly beginning to talk Heidegger, Said, Fanon, Asad, Mignolo still evokes in some circles a mild feeling of "upstart-ness." What Mücahit Bilici calls "friendly-Kemalist disgust" probably comes into play right here. That is, the problem is not only postcolonial theory; it is that this theory has now become part of a headscarved, conservative, Anatolian-rooted, or Islamist intellectual language.

Yet there is something very basic being overlooked here: postcolonialism has never been merely an academic pursuit for Muslims.

These people did not read Said because it was a seminar fashion. They did not discover Fanon in order to show off before doctoral committees. In fact, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, or Mawlana Abul Kalam Azad, or Mawdudi had already said more than what Said said. And Sayyid Qutb and Ali Shariati said far more than Fanon, and far beyond him, and far more effectively. Of course, as the children of social strata that had themselves been humiliated in an inherent process of modernization, that had been treated as "backward," "reactionary," "elements to be civilized," they also found in this literature a conceptualization of the experience they had lived.

This is nothing to exaggerate. It is not that Muslims, having abandoned their business and being left with no other theoretical or critical outlet, finally clung to this discourse and placed it at the center of their intellectual interest. Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the goal of the entire political struggle of popular movements in the wholly colonized Islamic geography has been to be rid of colonialism (decolonization). Some have succeeded in this to a degree; Turkey has covered great distances.

But colonialism still remains the most important problem to which the Islamic world is exposed. Muslims' interest in decolonization is not a simple intellectual romantic interest but a real one, and before its theory was voiced in academic circles in this way, it rested on a reality, and still does. Even the AK Party's 24-year period in power in Turkey has not sufficed to bring about the decolonization that has penetrated to the marrow of the Islamic world. The struggle it has waged on this path of course has its own problems. Mücahit Bilici rightly touches on that too, but this is not something that should require diluting the necessity, rightfulness, and legitimacy of the struggle for decolonization.

In short, the matter, in its diluted form, is not merely a question of theoretical import. It is also a struggle against a lived sense of encirclement.

For many years in Turkey, conservative popular segments lived in their own country at times as the object of an internal orientalism. These are not fleeting, isolated experiences. Being a little generous, we called it self-colonization at the time. How could those who confronted Muslims, who were seen as communities perpetually "in need of correction," from their dress to their worship, from their accents to their ways of raising children, be characterized?

Therefore, today the critique of orientalism in Turkey finds a response not only as a critique directed at the West but also as an experience of epistemological domination lived inside the country. And as to the translation of these critiques into a political language, what truly disturbs some circles is that this memory is expressed in the language or with the tools of the symbolic capital that they regard as allotted to themselves. Here, in fact, one needs to invite them to question the psychology of regarding Fanon and Said as their own "property," more than Muslims', and the regime of symbolic ownership. Why and from where did they become their property? From where have they obtained the right to this intellectual capital, one wonders? Let it not be a case of being a bridegroom to oneself until someone asks.

It has run a bit long, but it is not finished, which means we will continue.