The Ash'arism Symposium in Siirt

I felt that I had neglected for some time to convey my impressions of some of the scientific and academic meetings I have attended. What made me feel this was realizing that my wish to convey the excitement I experienced during the International Imam al-Ash'ari and Ash'arism Symposium, held last week at the Siirt University Faculty of Theology, had been delayed by other matters that intervened.

Yet although a great deal is said about Imam al-Ash'ari in Turkey, and he is the object of a great many prejudices, little is known about him, and he is now for the first time the subject of an international symposium on this scale, and the symposium, held with a rather high-profile attendance, had gone extremely successfully. Indeed, the papers presented over two days by nearly a hundred participants from Turkey and all over the world, known for their work on al-Ash'ari, made for a veritable academic feast.

Moreover, these days, both because of ISIS and in light of the new developments generally taking place in the Islamic world, the need to say new things about the relations between creed-kalam, politics and change, and to reexamine old things, is felt more than ever.

Undoubtedly, no school of kalam has emerged independently of political and social settings. Likewise, every school of kalam, or every conception of God, has had its own particular effect on human action and hence on social life. We accept that fatalist thoughts render people passive spectators of social change and obedient toward political authorities. One of the things we do not take much into account is that it is not very important by whom we think this fate was written.

Do not structuralist ideas, which grant the subject no share in change, also instill a fatalism at whose center stand either nature, or history, or social structures? Thus, by reducing every kind of human agency to a futile and helpless flailing, do they not suspend political activity with a kind of cynical attitude? Who can say that this creed, despite its at times very radical appearances, does not produce a political fatalism?

We can say the same for conspiratorial beliefs. When you think that the world is always run by someone, and that what we do is in fact merely a stage performance of these invisible and incomprehensible hands, you only hold yourself in contempt. In so doing you also accept in advance that you have no effect in the world. To think that you have and can have no effect in the world is to render your own existence void.

The relations between such theologies expressed in a secular format and political and social settings have always been interesting. Marxism generally does not give much credit to the idea that theologies are determinative over material social conditions. It rather thinks that these theologies are products of material conditions, but even thinking about the different effects of different interpretations of the Marxist conception itself as a kind of creed is enough to return this credit. What kind of political effect can a conception produce that nullifies everything taking place on the political stage today as an epiphenomenon of the capitalist world? It is a subject worth asking about and tracing.

Al-Ash'ari is often cited as the principal culprit in all analyses that attribute the decline of the Islamic world before the Western world to mentality. In particular, his approaches to the concepts of will, action and responsibility have been held almost responsible for the Islamic world's weakening in the face of the values of the rising modern world.

Has the excessive emphasis on the humble position of the human being before God, the owner of absolute will, truly led the human being to inaction, to fatalism or to a false reliance on God?

Ash'arism has constantly been cited as the strongest usual suspect of the "decline of the Islamic world, or its failure to keep pace with the development of the West," a question frequently asked since the 19th century.

Yet Ash'arism was valid and effective as a creed in the Islamic world's most brilliant periods of ascent as well. This fact alone shows how fabricated the correlations between worlds of mentality and social change can be.

If a cause is to be sought for the decline of the Islamic world, bringing it and basing it on Ash'arism is, frankly, a very hasty analysis. Max Weber, who established a relationship between the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, turned this analysis into a dogma for the Islamic world.

Yet the famous anthropologist Ernest Gellner shakes this dogma considerably with an ironic question. Gellner says:

"If the Muslims, in their processes of conquering Europe, had been able to go beyond Vienna, in all likelihood capitalism or material development would have first emerged in the Islamic world, and today we would perhaps be reading a work called The Kharijite or Ash'ari Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Ibn Weber. This work would tell us how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could emerge only as a result of 16th-century neo-Kharijism or neo-Ash'arism in Northern Europe."

When there are sufficiently sociological and material explanations of our decline, let us not need a scapegoat. Let us especially not place all the blame on someone like al-Ash'ari, who has not been properly read, and comfort ourselves.

That a university in every province is not at all a bad idea, but on the contrary how it can bring together the entire intellectual depth, history and culture of every province with universal knowledge, we experience more with each passing day through examples like this.

Endless thanks for this hard-to-believe organization to the dean Cemalettin Erdemci, himself a Professor of Kalam, who impresses with his scientific seriousness and competence, to Prof. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, an important asset of the Siirt Faculty of Theology, and of course to everyone who contributed, beginning with the rector Prof. Murat Erman.