A river would come before us; we had been warned

The fund affair has long since gone beyond being a simple stock-market incident. It has reached a scale that obliges us to take stock of a long journey.

We are facing a serious affair that concerns millions of people along with their families, one in which large sums of money, investment funds, capital markets and, finally, trust in public authority are all under debate.

In Turkey, the people who have never had anything to do with the stock market, who have never ventured to put their money into it and make money from money, are still the majority. So at first glance this subject may seem to concern only a certain segment. But because of the effect the resulting losses will have on the economy, even those with no connection to it will be harmed. For the effect shows up as stagnation, devaluation, inflation and a loss of trust, and not a single citizen will be left outside it. Those who get into the stock market, funds and interest actually know this. We have reached a point in the economy where we can no longer say that everyone has his own market, and that everyone's profit and loss is his own.

A social media post I came across on the fund affair expressed surprise that such a strong reaction was being shown to all this, given the legitimized and normalized expectations of those who invest in funds and the stock market, and in doing so it actually exposed the whole distortion of the system. "Those who get into the stock market do so in the first place expecting to make ten for one in a short time. There is no investor who does not expect, who does not desire, that the shares he bought one night will, through one speculation or another, rise tenfold."

If this is true, then since it is known that no trade yields so great a profit in a single day, people enter this kind of investment only by setting their eyes on a gain to which they have no right. The system itself is deeply corrupt to begin with, and the ultimate goal ought in fact to be to abolish this system or to reform it radically. Of course, for Muslims to take part in such a system, to think of earning a profit from it in this way, is a problem in its own right.

I am certainly not about to expel anyone from Islam (to declare takfir) because they do this, but I know full well that a Muslim must never covet such a form of investment. No one can claim that this becomes legitimate because a few Muslims did it, or that it has become a new norm for all Muslims. As I said at the beginning, the general norm of sincere Muslims who know their religion is still never to venture down this road, simply because they find it doubtful.

As for people who have taken part in politics under a Muslim identity and have ventured down this road, and still do, I regard it as a crime whose punishment and sin are many times greater than those of ordinary people. I will not hide it: I see this as a very greedy and treacherous betrayal both of a cause of great honor and of these sincere companions on the road.

In its most general sense, this cause is the cause of freeing people from servitude to other servants, of protecting them from injustice, of safeguarding the rights of orphans who are still young and defenseless, and of protecting and rescuing people from every kind of exploitation (religious, political, economic and moral).

More specifically, it is the cause of delivering not only Turkey but all our oppressed geographies of the heart from the great colonial conditions the ummah has been subjected to for the past two centuries. The great majority of those who have given their hearts to this cause see the world this way, and they have not shrunk, and do not shrink, from any sacrifice on this road.

A long way has been traveled and there have been many trials on this road; the sacrifices of those people of heart of every kind have been seen. On 27 April, on 17-25 December, on 15 July, this nation put its life on the line. In the Turkish lira crisis of the recent period, tens of thousands of people kept all their money in Turkish lira simply because the Reis made a call, and as a result lost half of their capital. These too are the unrecorded deeds of those within this political movement. And it is not only from Turkey: I have witnessed abundant examples, among Muslim Arabs whom I follow very closely, of people who brought their money to Turkey and converted it into Turkish lira, and then watched it melt away in a short time with the reverence of worship and with reliance on God. What do these people want, what do they expect, and what do they see? Are they romantic, ideological figures cut off from reality, or are they simpletons who cannot see that the world has changed, whose dreams remain stuck in nostalgia?

Whoever fails to understand that it is these people who are the real winners, I must say, is a burden on this cause, and ignorant people who keep others from this journey. For one who cannot grasp that worldly wealth is only a test, indeed a trial (fitna), and who does not feel to the marrow of his bones that the hereafter is better than this world and that a believer's real business is to invest in the hereafter, there is no Islamic dimension to his politics, and such people will do nothing but keep Muslims from their path. These are the people of whom our Lord said, "If they went out with you, they would be nothing but a burden to you." They are very clever, very rational, very strategic, and they read the course of the age well. They know very well how to be in the right place at the right time. The only thing they forget, the main thing, is that God is above, that in the end we will die, and that a hereafter awaits us in which we will be called to account for everything we have done, even for everything we could have done but did not, for what we ate, what we drank and what we wore.

A river was going to appear before us. We had been warned. We actually knew. Those who know still know. We were going to be extremely thirsty. That was only natural, because we had come from a very long and tiring journey. But there was a promise we made when we set out on this road. However thirsty we might be, the allure of that gushing river would not tempt us, would not lead us off our path. We would not drink our fill. There was a permitted amount, a handful, just enough to stay alive. We would drink that and continue on our way.

That river was alluring, of course. We had been told this as well. Let alone drinking one's fill, there were those who settled down facing the river's splendid scenery. From that hour on, they began to look at every kind of work for the cause as "romantic-ideological business."

Of course this too was foreseen. Very few would remain, but the journey would continue. We will yet witness the miracles of God, in which how many small groups have overcome how many large ones. As we saw in Gaza, as we saw in Syria and in Afghanistan. What happened there is nothing other than the answer God promised to those who truly believe, endure and stand firm.

Now too we will become fewer, but we will become even stronger. When the time comes, one must not fear becoming fewer. One must know that some crowds we assumed were adding to our strength did nothing but weigh on us. Let us only not deviate from justice. Let us not deviate from justice even when it goes against us or our relatives. Let us not hold back, when the occasion arises, from applying against ourselves the standards of justice that we apply to others. This will never harm us. We are the community of a prophet who said, "Even if my daughter Fatima were to steal, I would not hesitate to cut off her hand."

On the fund crisis, I fully agree with everything our esteemed friends Aydın Ünal, Ersin Çelik, İsmail Kılıçarslan and Hüseyin Likoğlu have said and with their calls. Let no one be a burden on this cause. Let them come forward themselves and step aside. Our President's call and message are quite clear as well.

The moment we begin covering up the faults of one of "our own," we lose the very idea of justice. Worse still, we place grand words that for years gathered people around the demand for justice in the service of petty personal interests.