His Majesty's theologians and their ravings about the Sharia

"Theologians of which religion are these?" a reader wrote under a post that reported the text of the declaration. What other reaction can you have when you read, from theologians, a declaration titled "Sharia has no counterpart in human dignity!"? Of course the reader probably said so because he equated Sharia with Islam. Otherwise, theologians of whatever religion would not so ignorantly set the concept of Sharia against so-called human dignity. Whoever does so, they would neither count as a theologian nor take seriously enough to engage.

I looked, but could not be sure: since the declaration contains the phrase "these days when the 100th anniversary of the Republic is celebrated," was it published two years ago and republished these days, or has someone put it back on the agenda? Whatever it is, even with a delay of two or three years, it has come back onto the agenda today on one occasion or another. Since they are still fighting a Sharia that was in fact abolished 100 years ago, do they suppose that the country is currently governed by Islamic Sharia, or what?

Are these not like murderers who dig an enemy they have slain out of his grave every day, load onto him all the setbacks and negativities they experience, and kill him again? Behind this spite that tries to load almost all the distortions, negativities and corruptions of today onto Sharia, is there only ignorance, or is it a wholly different malady?

Someone needs to remind them that the 100th year is also the year in which Sharia was in fact removed from practice, and that from that hour onward, whatever negativity, whatever incompetence, whatever theft, whatever backwardness has occurred in this country, the cause and the one responsible is not Sharia but those who abolished Sharia.

In Türkiye the discourse against Sharia comes down to etymology, or to the defense that the content of Sharia is something that changes through ijtihad anyway and therefore cannot be sanctified as the word of God, and so on. All this is empty. Everyone knows very well what is what. Those familiar with even the most basic Islamic sciences know what Sharia means for Muslims. They also know its identity, in its most general sense, with Islam for Muslims.

Trying to dilute this identity with wordplay cannot cover up anyone's Islamophobic, colonial intentions. We know that His Majesty, who from the late nineteenth century tried to implement a terrible genocidal policy against Islam, knew Sharia very well. It is clear from the fronts he opened in his wars and the result he obtained. He also knew very well that, from the moment he opened the discussion that "Sharia in fact has no absolute and fixed meaning, no unchangeable content at all," as our theologians do, he was aiming at the goal "therefore it can be dispensed with." Some dupes running toward this goal, whether it was historicism, modernity or hermeneutics, whatever tempting whisperings there were, pricked up their ears to all of them and set their eyes on His Majesty's knighthood badge.

You will go down into such depths and conduct a historicism debate, apply hermeneutics, semantics, analytics, whatever there is, to the Qur'an and reduce it to the level of an ordinary text, and at the end of the day you will go and become a Kemalist. I could stop here saying that this abasement is enough for a person in both this world and the hereafter. But let it not remain within us; Satan is needed at the torment, let the stones in our hands not go to waste.

A theologian who almost entirely ignores the immense accumulation of fourteen hundred years of Islamic legal history while speaking about Sharia can of course not be an Islamic theologian.

Least forgivable is the heedlessness toward the thousand-year experience of Islamic civilization in law, politics, economics, urbanization, waqf, commerce and public administration of those whose minds, when Sharia is mentioned, bring only slavery, polygamy, the killing of the apostate, women being regarded as second class, and the harem-selamlik separation. Do they not know, then, the Hanafis, the Malikis, the Shafi'is, Andalusia, the Ottomans, the Mecelle, the waqf system, the institution of hisba, the qadi organization, al-Shatibi's theory of maqasid, Ibn Abidin's magnificent fatwa performance, al-Qarafi? Within which legal order was Ibn Khaldun raised? Sharia itself is a path, of course, not a dead text sitting fixed in a book. That living, vibrant institution belittled as the fatwa is itself the place where Sharia meets life. It is a kind of reason in which the link between the fixed text and lived life is revived through interpretation. If so many Muslim scholars are not enough to understand this, must they read Wael B. Hallaq or Brinkley Messick? Let them read.

The more interesting part is that at one point the declaration says "Sharia changes." Fine, good. If Sharia changes, if it is open to different historical interpretations, if it develops through ijtihad, then what is it that you criticize? Sharia? Or a particular interpretation of a particular period? On the one hand you will say "Sharia changes," on the other you will present it like a single frozen photograph frame and attack it.

Is it not the case that, as theologians, you attack in such obliviousness a Sharia with a boundless philosophical and wisdom-based depth, while laicism is presented almost as a sacred savior? Oh my God? At least direct even one percent of the criticism you level at Sharia toward laicism, which is the cause of a thousand and one kinds of cultural vandalism, savagery and massacres in the Islamic world; perhaps your mind will open a little.

For example, start from this simple question: Which laicism? The Jacobin laicism of 1789? Mexico's laicism? Soviet laicism? Kemalist laicism? The laicism that French colonialism applied in Algeria, behind which lies the massacre of a million people? Bourguiba's laicism in Tunisia? Nasser's laicism in Egypt? The laicism of the Baath regimes? These are examples in which, not of Sharia, which in fact has no validity at present anyway, but of the laicism you set against it, you can find concrete, real crimes against humanity in abundance.

Saying there is no single model when it comes to Sharia, and speaking as if there were a single, flawless model sent down from the sky when it comes to laicism, I think, also falls within the job description of His Majesty's theologians.

An even more infuriating thing is of course the title of the declaration: "Sharia has no counterpart in human dignity." This sentence is truly an infuriating murder of reason. My goodness, when you look at the historical development of the concept we call human dignity, Islamic Sharia is the name of the tradition that systematically discusses principles such as the protection of man's life, property, intellect, lineage and freedom of religion and conscience.

Is this a sentence that someone who has never read the maqasid al-shari'a literature would construct? An entire tradition extending from al-Shatibi to Ibn Ashur defined the ultimate aim of the legal order as protecting human welfare. To get up now and declare this entire tradition the opposite of human dignity can be, if not blaring ignorance, blind loyalty to an overlord.

Moreover, the declaration frequently emphasizes the "contemporary world." This is another heedlessness. Because the contemporary world itself has not yet agreed on what is consistent with human dignity. The law that regards the killing of tens of thousands of people in Gaza as legitimate is also contemporary. The law that regarded the occupation of Iraq as legitimate is also contemporary. The law that legitimized colonialism was once contemporary too. The law that supported the apartheid regime was contemporary in its own time as well. So something's being contemporary does not mean that it is reasonable, just or befitting of human dignity.

In fact, the real fear of those who abolished Sharia a hundred years ago yet still keep fighting it today is not Sharia's return; it is that, despite all this century of propaganda and destruction, Muslims still continue to see it as one of the strongest sources of memory and conscience of their own civilization.