Whom to endeavour for, whom to serve

We said that abroad there are masses so ready to hear that things are going badly in Turkey, even if they are not, that it is not at all hard for any false news in this direction about Turkey to quickly enter circulation. This situation actually rests on a psychology fed from the same ground as Islamophobia.

More plainly, such news produced about Turkey acts, to some extent, by relying on Islamophobic ideology or feelings abroad; in doing so it appeals to those Islamophobic feelings and feeds and inflames them further. A failed Islam-democracy formulation is a very soothing but, to the same degree, numbing pill for Islamophobic feelings.

In the same way, discourses such as the end, bankruptcy, failure or death of political Islam or Islamism also targeted the same customer base. An AK Party government sunk in corruption or inclined toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism and dictatorship also targets the same customer base. Islamophobes want to hear that Muslims' experiences of democracy, good governance and just governance are an impossible dream. And our own people keep serving up these stories of failure and destruction, having moved to mass production, in order to fulfill the fantasies of the Islamophobes.

This service has increasingly turned into a surreal, fantastical craft. Because its link with reality is increasingly severed, and it can be sold to its customer only once at most. The failure of the story relayed at first to have a sequel inevitably damages the credibility of all these productions. Because in the end Turkey's reality makes itself felt, for them perhaps as a "bitter reality," but for Turkey and for the world's oppressed as a hopeful and illuminating reality. Within that reality there is a Turkey that develops further, democratizes, raises its human rights standards still higher, and improves the quality of its citizens day by day, the more it finds its identity.

Inside Turkey, whose people are Muslim, we were familiar, strange as it may be, with the production of Islamophobic discourse by a secularist ideological segment. For that reason, accusing others of Islamophobia could be meaningless, because while a conception of secularism that could defend the headscarf ban to the very end and almost criminalized every sign of Islam was in vogue in our own country, criticizing some practices or discourses in other countries as Islamophobia could even seem inappropriate.

Now that the campaigns the parallel structure runs against Turkey are reproducing Islamophobia in place of those secularist Islamophobes is undoubtedly a great oddity.

In our last piece we drew attention to whose money, and how, keeps this oddity alive. These activities, which end in Islamophobia, are carried out through aid campaigns run among the people of Anatolia, with money wrung from people's hearts. If the people of Anatolia knew what they were "serving," they probably would not be so generous. So the first deception, the first corruption, takes place here.

Under the heading of service, a discourse was created that stopped flowing waters. This discourse, which no one could question, was heading toward establishing an unrivaled monopoly over sacrificial animal money, zakat, and every kind of charitable feeling.

A middle-aged gentleman who approached me as I was walking on the street in Siirt said this: "May God be pleased with our Prime Minister! Thanks to him, for the first time in years, meat will pass the throats of the poor here, and they will get their share of zakat and charity."

Before I could say "What do you mean?" he explained what he had said: "Under the name of service, no one had been left any room to give aid anywhere else. With the money collected as sacrifice money, not only had the slaughter of sacrificial animals here been brought almost to a halt, but where that sacrifice money went had turned into a complete mystery. Because the sacrificial animals whose money is collected are not slaughtered here; they are said to be slaughtered elsewhere, with the sin on the necks of those who say so. Let us not even touch on the other himmet monies. Everyone had a question about where these collected funds were spent, but no one voiced it. Now it is very well understood where they were spent."

Money like this is channeled to the movement even from the Southeastern cities where poverty is at its extreme and the need for aid is far greater, and this is gradually turning into a serious social justice problem in society.

That money is the right of the poor, the destitute, the orphan, the wayfarer. Now it is seen that millions of dollars of this money are being spent generously in America, in Europe, in the Middle East, to persuade lobbyists, journalists, politicians and opinion leaders to think ill of, and to act ill toward, Turkey and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A perception of Turkey and Erdoğan in this direction is being worked into foreign delegations that are brought to Turkey, taken around, and wined and dined. All of these activities are extremely costly undertakings.

What should those who, with sincere intentions, gave their zakat, their charity, their sacrifice money and their donations to this movement so that service would be done, so that it would be distributed to the poor, think and feel?