The real hostage in ISIS's hands: Islam

In the Middle East, issues, like people, are intertwined. One cannot be separated from the other. Every issue comes up against the border of another issue, every group of people against the border of another group of people.

Since the idea of carrying out ethnic cleansing in these lands never crossed even the remotest corner of the Ottoman mind, it accepted its people as they were. It tried to govern them as they were. Instead of taking people's differences as given and fitting them to itself, it fitted its own rule to them.

Hard as it is to believe, it realized this ideal example of respect for the human being in this world, and applied this model for five hundred years without any notable problem. Moreover, before it, the Seljuks, and before them the Abbasids and Umayyads, had also applied this model. That is, this multicultural model, hard to believe from today's vantage point, in which all religious, sectarian, faith and cultural groups lived intertwined, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, was in the end an ordinary manifestation of Islamic civilization.

Later the Orientalists, as if expressing their own plagiarism, described this model as a "mosaic society." A mosaic society, that is, a mosaic society as an expression of the incapacity of the Ottomans or of Islamic society to create a homogeneous society in their own geography.

Those who first used this metaphor to describe Islamic societies did not use it, as we do, to express the diversity, richness and beauty of society. On the contrary, they used it to present the coexistence of so many different cultures as a problem from the very beginning. They attributed this difference and diversity to the incapacity of Islamic society to create a homogeneous society.

Looking at the West's own experience, homogeneous, monolithic, centralist social structures do indeed come to the fore. But if you ask what the cost of these structures was, all you will find before you are hundred-year and thirty-year wars of religion, genocide and deportation practices, and the varieties of fascism itself.

Today, having discovered multiculturalism as a value, it is striving to turn even that into a centralized, single-standard practice.

ISIS has nothing about it that deserves to be called an "Islamic State." What it does is compatible neither with Islam nor with the quality of being a state. But everyone has long since accepted its naming of itself thus. ISIS has taken Islam hostage, and those who set out to fight it open fire on it without giving the slightest regard to the condition of the hostage.

Meanwhile ISIS grows even larger, but it is Islam that is being wasted. Under every bomb dropped, alongside the lifeless bodies of Muslims, the destruction of Islam, of the concept of the Islamic State, also takes place.

Those who bomb ISIS, without regard to the fact that Islam is held hostage by it, strike Islam as well. ISIS, which makes Islam and its emblems a shield for itself, feels not the slightest discomfort that every bomb dropped on it hits Islam, and the glorious history and image that Islam wove in these lands over centuries. Unless the two sides have a mutual agreement, we know nothing.

In the Middle East, that is, in fact in the Islamic world, every issue is intertwined with the other. From an operation aimed at the Shiites, Sunnis, Armenians and Kurds are affected too. In fact, a stone you throw at any one of them returns to break your own head to the extent that it hit the other.

The administration of these places requires a rightly guided care, an attentiveness woven with ancient values. Not everyone can do this. Nobody should think they can rule these lands by relying on their cannon, rifle, bomb or airplane.

Dominion over a country is not demonstrated by leaving no stone upon stone and no head upon body. The power displayed in this regard has no value whatsoever. The valuable kind of power, the kind that befits the human being, is the kind that can produce "consent" without needing violence.

The one responsible for the Middle East having been associated with blood and war for a century is neither Islam nor Muslims. Its history that meets blood, violence and chaos is the same as the history of this geography's encounter with Western civilization, its values, its institutions and, of course, its occupation.

THE STONE THROWN BY AYSEL TUĞLUK

In this geography every issue, every subject, every group of people is intertwined. The stone one throws wounds everyone's head. Beginning with one's own.

Does anyone understand whom the stone Aysel Tuğluk threw at the Turkish soldiers receiving the Kurds who had taken refuge in Turkey to save their lives struck? Truly, there is room in this geography for everyone, this geography can bear everything and everyone, but only Aysel Tuğluk, who threw that stone, and the mentality that had her throw it, look utterly out of place there.

Should we understand it as anger at Turkey, which they claim has been massacring the Kurds for years, serving as a refuge for the Kurds? Or is it the result of the trauma over the airs and delusions of early power in the region under the claim of autonomy, and the swagger put on by turning unarmed, defenseless people into subjects, having been shattered in two days in the face of a movement of unknown provenance called ISIS, or what?

Whatever it is, let her now know and understand that the soldier she threw stones at is the only person in the region whom the Kurd can trust when he truly faces a problem in these geographies.

That the Kurds know this, yet those who do politics over the Kurds still have not understood it, is a serious problem. God willing, we will overcome that problem too.