"The Ignorance of the 20th Century" in the face of 529 death sentences

In Egypt, the military coup regime has committed one more act of Pharaonism, and through its sham courts has decreed a massacre of 529 people. The civilized world can proudly claim the work as its own. Twitter and Facebook, presented since the moment the Arab Spring process began as the most important perpetrator, indeed almost the sole perpetrator, of this work, are still there today and used far more than yesterday, but they have no effect whatsoever in Egypt against a regime a thousand times worse than the Mubarak era. The same social media networks that contributed to the streets of Ukraine being thrown into turmoil have no effect at all on those streets being tidied up and regaining their former calm...

While Twitter users were hankering after a velvet, a white popular uprising in Ukraine, were they not met with the real thing in popular uprisings and left without even the bulgur at home? They were.

So what does it turn out to be? Virtual entities such as Twitter and Facebook are neither a savior nor a real danger. All the orders they set up, and the traps, and the savior poses, as the name says, remain virtual.

It is worth reviewing, at some point, the heap of careless sociological analyses hastily churned out on the effect of this virtual world on the real world. If one were to look at Twitter, for example, we would have to believe in the existence of an entirely different country in the place of the country we are living in with all its reality. Yet the mountain-sized distance between the Turkey reflected on Twitter and the real Turkey cannot be stuffed into any sack.

One of those living at this mountain-sized distance now is definitely Ali Bulaç.

Regarding the 529 people receiving the death penalty in Egypt, he has judged that the Muslim Brothers are at present awaiting a savior in the person of the tyrannical dictator. He thinks that, since Turkey cut its ties with the coup-makers hastily and categorically from the start, it has lost the right to practice a diplomacy of pardon with Sisi, but he says that Abdullah Gül could well go to Egypt and light a ray of hope for the Ikhwan.

From what distance did Bulaç begin to see that the Ikhwan in Egypt have such an expectation, which in the end amounts to asking the pharaoh for pardon? I have seriously begun to wonder. Let him put this proposal to any Ikhwan member he knows and see what kind of reaction he meets.

We understand, some things look different from the Zaman newspaper, but this is Ali Bulaç and the Ikhwan, my friend. We are not talking about Yılmaz Özdil. In what span of time did he become so alienated from the reality of the Ikhwan, Egypt and Turkey, even of Abdullah Gül? Fine, we understood that too: there is a collective investment decision on Gül, but you must also know how much this proposal would offend him?

Among all these matters, what can never be glossed over is the passing of the esteemed Islamic scholar Muhammad Qutb. The passing of a great scholar who gives precisely the feeling of the "death of a world." I think there is no one who does not know how his elder brother Sayyid Qutb, sentenced to death, on the way to the gallows rejected the offer that he would be pardoned if he apologized:

"A Muslim does not apologize to a hypocrite."

This famous answer of his gave an entirely different meaning and value to everything he had written and said up to that moment, and among the later generation of the Ikhwan this saying has a special place among sayings. The complementary poem of the Rabia gatherings, in its composed form, was written by him:

"My brother, even with these chains, even if you are behind these bars, you are free. Once you are bound to God, who can take you captive?"

Was that the proposal Ali Bulaç would make to people who look at life and freedom this way?

The Qutb brothers have made very important contributions to the political thought and stance of contemporary Muslims. In my view, one of the most important contributions is that they put forward a very powerful philosophy of man, action and history, thoroughly fused with the values of Islam. With this philosophy they tried, starting from the Qur'an and the Sunnah, to give the self-confidence they needed to Muslims living in a complete inferiority complex under the pressure of modernization. To Muslims thrashing in the vise of an apologist and complex-ridden language that constantly talks about why Muslims have fallen behind, Muhammad Qutb pointed to "the Jahiliyyah of the Twentieth Century" as a new horizon. This horizon undoubtedly expressed the construction of a new spirit and philosophy aimed at overcoming the feeling and trauma of defeat.

Together with his elder brother Sayyid, he constantly argued that everything that has befallen us could of course not be the work of the Westerners alone, and that therefore deliverance from this vise begins with ourselves. We could not change the world without changing ourselves, and before blaming others for what has befallen us we had to set about building a new society and world from where we stand.

According to the Qutbs, faith and unbelief have neither a geography nor a history. Both can exist at any time and in any place. Indeed, among those who call themselves Muslims there can arise Pharaohs, Hamans and Balaams, and the masses who follow them, and these can wage their most merciless wars against Islam more officiously than the Westerners. In the same way, there can also be Muslims in the West who truly serve God as is due. This perspective required redefining Islamic thought as a universal thought rather than merely an Eastern thought and mode of existence.

Likewise, according to the Qutbs the ideal Muslim is not someone belonging to the past. In our day too, as long as he takes the Qur'an as his guide, the Muslim presence can be repeated in its most ideal form.

Although these sentences may now sound like well-known truisms, there is undoubtedly a very important share in this of the successful struggle the Qutb brothers waged.

We are witnesses that they performed their duty as scholars as it deserved. May God have mercy on them.