You wanted to decolonize, and did we stand in the way?

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

We said that we had learned, thanks to the references in Yıldız's piece, that a certain circle has accumulated quite a bit of pain over Islamists' interest in the literature of decolonization. Yıldız's approach, which proceeds in the manner of an "intellectual investigation file," not only profiles the Islamists' positions but also makes us think together the pieces written against them. In this way an expression of a mental tension long suppressed in Turkey comes to light. For instance, thanks to this we read, on the progressiftr.com site, Kemal Büyükyüksel's more sophisticated critique, pitched at a higher theoretical level... Although the language of the two differs, the shared concern in the depths is the same: the adoption of postcolonial/decolonial theory by conservatives, Islamists, and the intellectual current we might call indigenous-national (yerli-milli) in Turkey.

Truth be told, we must first be fair here. Büyükyüksel's piece contains a far more serious theoretical labor than Yıldız's text. What he says about the impasses within postcolonial theory, the limits of negative critique, the risk of authoritarianization in the politics of victimhood, and the romanticism of the people and the local is not to be waved away entirely. The following observation is particularly important: if the critique of Western-centrism cannot establish its own normative ground, it becomes easily open to the risk of producing another centrism. This is a real problem that has been debated not only for Turkey but also for many postcolonial contexts, from Latin America to Indian nationalism.

But it is precisely here that the inner blindnesses of these critiques begin. For the basic problem felt in both pieces is this: the relationship Islamists have established with postcolonial theory is read as though it were largely a strategic, instrumental, and hegemonic operation. That is, there is an air as if conservatives had used Said, Fanon, Asad, Mignolo, or Salman Sayyid not to understand the historical experience they actually lived through, but as a kind of "power-engineering toolkit."

Here one clearly senses a very serious epistemological arrogance, which we had pointed out earlier. As if postcolonial theory were naturally the domain of the secular-liberal academy, and the moment an Anatolian conservative takes it in hand, it suddenly turns into "dangerous populism." In Yıldız's text this is felt in a cruder and more ironic manner; in Büyükyüksel it is expressed in a much more refined, more academic, more controlled language. But the unease underneath is the same. "Wait a minute... How do these people get to claim Said?"

Is it only Muslims who know that for nearly 120 years Muslims in Turkey have been treated as the object of an inner-orienta-lism in their own homeland? Do those who subjected them to this treatment not know it? Why should we expect them to know? If the process is, to begin with, a matter of a country being colonized, then expecting fairness and justice from the perpetrators is futile. The stance to be taken against colonialists can be a struggle of resistance and liberation, can it not?

What if the colonization we were subjected to took place in other forms, in other guises, and these guises in particular were supported and nourished by powerful discourses?

On the occasion of the debate opened these days, let us repeat as a basic piece of knowledge that the situation of Muslims vis-à-vis colonialism is not a subject of fantastical-academic-intellectual interest. They themselves have become the object of a real colonialism that makes them strangers in their own homelands, pariahs in their own native lands. The colonial powers handed out the lands of the Ottoman Empire, collapsed in 1918, as booty, partitioned its territories, and built ideological regimes upon these lands in order to estrange them from Islam. From that day to this, what the Muslim geography has been subjected to is nothing other than colonialism. That these states bear Arab names and are nominally Muslim by religion did not, of course, make them Muslim in essence and function. The reason for their existence was that a Muslim political will should never see the light of day, and so it still is. It is not that no distance has been covered in this regard, but no one can yet say that Muslims in the Muslim geography are masters of their own fate. Colonialism continues in practice, sustained also at the mental level. Were it not so, these geographies, which possess the greatest riches in the world, would not remain in this abasement.

For Muslims, decolonialism is, beyond being a fantastical-intellectual theory, a de facto matter of existence. In fact, those who nourish this theory and discourse are people with real political stances, far beyond those in Turkey who take an interest in this theory. For Fanon himself is an anti-colonial revolutionary thinker. Said is not merely an academic theorist but also one of the intellectual voices of the Palestinian cause. Cabral, Césaire, Mignolo, even Salman Sayyid... None of these are sterile academic figures. Therefore, to deem postcolonial theory "legitimate" only so long as it circulates in university corridors, and "instrumentalized" once it enters the political language of Muslim societies, itself emerges as the product of a Eurocentric epistemological reflex.