“For all our deprivation and suffering, we were happy at being able to fight for all the things we love. But you attack those sides of man unconnected with the idea of the fatherland... You fight as though in a blind rage, giving importance not to systems of thought but to guns and explosions, wanting to wipe out everything... What you understand by Europe is land for your soldiers, stores for your wheat, the industry you have moulded to yourselves, the ideas you repress... You have never believed the face of the earth has any meaning; and this has led you to the idea that everything is the same, that good and evil can be defined in any way wished. Lacking any human or sacred ethic, you supposed the only values on which you could rely were those of the animal world, that is, force and trickery. You thought man was a non-entity, that his spirit could be killed; in the most unfeeling period of history, a person’s effort could have been nothing other than chasing after superiority and his morality, to occupy other countries... You have grown weary of fighting the sacred, and so have rested in this adventure, which consists of smashing souls and laying waste lands...”
These lines were not written about the Serbian murderers; they issued from the pen of the French philosopher Albert Camus, to execrate the Nazi activities during the Second World War. In his essay The Rebel, the Nobel Prize-winning Camus wrote the following, as though he was describing the present:
“... There are crimes of passion and of logic. The border between them is indistinct. But when it comes to premeditation, the criminal code distinguishes between them in pretty clear fashion. This is the time of the perfect premeditated crime. Our criminals are not unarmed youths pleading passion; they are elderly and their defences are irrefutable. Their evidence is philosophy, which serves everyone and has made the killer the judge... Formerly, crime was isolated like a scream, now like a science it is universal. Yesterday it was tried, today it is made law...”
i) The anatomy of the birth of the ‘information society,’ fraught with contradictions
Today, attired in violence, power is used for ethnic massacres. The moral brakes have failed that would put a stop to the aggression. How quickly did hopes fade after glasnost, on which they had been pinned under the name of ‘the New World Order.’ For the powerful had turned the face of the globe into a slaughterhouse. On the one hand, a bloody chaos had run riot in the international arena, while on the other, some experts claimed ‘the psychosphere’ was undergoing a serious process of change. If we can read the ‘zeitgeist’ correctly, the world is long past crossing the threshold of the ‘information age.’ If one looks to the engineers of change, the futurologists, and the observers with vision, the communications revolution pushed open the door of an information society unparalleled in human history. It is said that while approaching the year 2000, the megatrends, the continuous and swift advances in the communications sector, have caused radical changes in man’s view of life. So much so that, while the power which until yesterday was considered the heart of the matter was tied to military or economic factors, it has been placed through this global transformation on the axis of knowledge or information. They say that the 21st century will be the century not of the countries with the largest petrol reserves, or those who produce most cars, or govern gold prices, or boast of being the world’s bread-basket, but the countries who produce the fastest and most powerful chip for the lowest price. The chip under discussion is the micro computer chip which performs the function of numerous transistors.
The purpose of this paper is not to present a panorama of the latest discoveries. Anyway, perhaps you too follow a variety of press organs and know that one may ‘surf’ on the information highway called the Internet, and with one’s lap-top computer, modem, and mobile phone, visit the libraries, play at the stock exchange, do the shopping, and even visit some museums if you still have time, all while sitting on the beach. You have learnt too that through advances in molecular biology, artificial intelligence has been installed in mechanical robots, and through the bounties of biotechnology, the atlas of man’s chromosomes has been drawn, and thus intervening in his genetic material, treatment for fatal illnesses has been made possible. What they say is this, that since the advances in question have led to a mass expansion of knowledge, to the extent that they can be kept up with, so long as the principle of social benefit is adhered to, it promises a brand new Eldorado for mankind, one of peace and affluence. “The information society will bring about a cultural environment in which reconciliation, tolerance, majority, and participation will be more easily obtained. For most of the extremes in the clashes between people arise from lack of knowledge...”
However, while the information society is still at the crawling stage, the ecological balance is being turned upside down by man’s destruction of nature, and as though proving Malthus to be right, our planet is consuming itself. It has been possible for the Internet to become the newsheet of terrorists, and due to the sharp wits of some people, with certain computer accessories and in interactive fashion, to be a means of gratifying sexual fantasies. Moreover, due to commercial interests, the endeavours of genetic engineering are opening up a field of exploitation so wide as to both encourage prostitution, and through cloning to produce Dr. Frankenstein’s, and to produce weapons that having been given their genetic code, will be able to wipe out a race when the trigger is pulled.
This situation is not without people intelligent enough to question the way it is going. If we accept the arguments of those who think like Drucker, and believe the world has reached the threshold of going beyond modernity, and if we try to discover what lies at the bottom of the above-mentioned phenomena by putting it under the microscope, we will be confronted by the scientific revolution, and the industrial revolution, which acted as the scientific revolutions’s midwife. The scientific revolution formed a break in man’s historical process, and without analyzing the anatomy of this break it is not possible to prepare for tomorrow.
ii) Concrete facts about the ‘mechanical universe’ mentality
The scientific revolution began with Copernicus, and was fixed in a particular system with Newton. To define this system briefly: with the additions of Laplace, it is a mechanical order which insists on accepting no explanation other than the determinism of the laws of nature. The world is quite simply like a cosmic automaton. It is a huge clock which works according to physical and arithmetical laws. Bacon’s insisted that these can be understood through observation and experiment. Evolutional progress, which rules time, is entirely a succession of coincidences, so that in the light of Darwin’s theory of species, life even is the “work” of pure chance, not the result of the conception of any Divine world. In this context, there could be no question of attaching any metaphysical value to creation. It was as though contemporary science had bound the setting up of the universe to a ‘meaninglessness syndrome.’ From this point of view, man even, keeping up with the determinism of environmental conditions in the atlas of time, appeared in the gene pool of nature. Since Europe’s historicity clashed with the Church, it was God who was to be addressed by man’s anger. Like the mythical Prometheus, the man of the scientific revolution thought he could take his revenge on the sacred and win freedom by smashing the chains binding him to his so-called Creator, and tried to make good his losses. He experimented with exiling God from the world in the light of Descarte’s philosophy, and preferred to denigrate the metaphysical, calling it an illusion, or fabrication, or speculative. ‘Reason,’ broken off from God, and from his spirit, which He had breathed into him, was sufficient. And reason became the sole authority in modern rationalism, permitting and proposing a person’s conduct. With the secularization of nature and for the sake of humanity, the person who severed his connection with the Divine source made being human “absolute.” In Nasr’s words, from then on “everything was sacrificed for man, and the first thing to be sacrificed was God.” If one takes a look at the Positivists’ catechism, the purpose of man, “a social creature,” or “rational animal,” was “to survive” in the struggle between the species governed by the laws of nature. Thus, if one returns to the scientific revolution, or to before that, science in the West from the Renaissance to the present has been restricted to dominating nature for the material prosperity of man, a worldly creature possessing mental powers.
With his theory which took biology as the starting point and gave direction to social relations, H. Spencer was to pave the way for social darwinism. Just like people, nations were subject to natural selection in the international system. If one considers the social prescription permitting Hobbes’ “big fishes devour little fishes,” by realizing the final stage of capitalism, it was the inevitable destiny of history that post-industrial revolution Europe did not get carried away by imperialism. In order to be powerful, it began to see the European philosophical tradition on the one hand, which based Darwin’s assertions about the species on racialism in the way of biological materialism, and militarism on the other, as the sole logistic of the objective power of states. Morgenthau believed that despite being subject to severe criticism, the social sciences, which had been constructed on this cultural background, still preserved their relevance in respect to their approach to foreign affairs, and his work ensured this.
The main idea the American professor proposed was this: the sole relevant fact in the international arena is “power.” The one with power gains dominance and his word is law. It is for this reason that there is a continuous struggle for power in the world arena. States continuously strive to gain power themselves and deprive of power their opponents. The writer’s reader will limit this tendency, which goes as far as proposing that “might is right,” by equating imperialism with infringing the status quo. Power is required for self-interest, and the concept of self-interest is free of restrictions such as ethics, aesthetics, and religion. Unlike in individuals, virtue should not be sought in states. Like Lincoln, although he was a president applauded for his moral values, he recorded his political philosophy in this way:
“I know how the best should be, and I do the best I can and I try to do it to the utmost. If in the end I am able to do the best, what has been said about me will have no value at all. If finally I come to a bad end and I haven’t been able to do the best, all the angels will swear that I am right and the result won’t change.”
Morgenthau illustrates Britain’s attitude on the eve of the Second World War with an example related to the application of the golden rules of political expedience. Whitehall declared war on Germany on the pretext that it had infringed Belgium’s neutrality. It was in the interests of Britain’s foreign policy to prevent the occupation of Belgium-Holland by an enemy force, but the diplomats of the time confess in their memoirs that London would not have lifted a finger in the event of the occupying power being any other than Germany. In the same way, the effort the West displayed in saving Kuwait from Saddam’s anger, and its withholding it from Bosnia when it was faced with the Serbians’ genocide, should be accepted as a sign, not of the West’s double standards, but of its sole criterion, within the framework depicted by Morgenthau. According to this philosophy, the use of power, in whatever form, is not condemned. According to Morgenthau, Western civilization’s so-called success lies in this power being restricted from time to time, whether by being balanced, or being divided. For the formation of ethical norms and their being accepted by world public opinion is neither what the system seeks or what it wants. Both in its most savage period, and when domesticated (or reduced to the level of being ‘a worn-out monster’), so long as it could still say: “non-interference,” the system would still produce Camus’ cry at the Nazis, and would go on producing it.
iii) An outline of postmodernism and ‘the global crisis’
At the point finally arrived at in the deification of science, “there is widespread disenchantment, and many misgivings that man can rectify his evils,” as people in the West themselves admit. The following lines of Havel are especially worthy of note:
“... It is my opinion that this crisis is directly related to the spirit of contemporary civilization, that is, the spirit of contemporary civilization which is apparent through the loss of metaphysical certainty and the living of the transcendent, and the disappearance of all suprapersonal moral authority and even of all every sort of sacredness.”
Havel also says that “the turning away from God” experienced in the modern age is, for mankind, “a being dragged towards mass suicide.” In the process of the desecularization of society, which observers have called “God’s revenge,” the need for “the normalization” of science has come into the foreground. In the social sciences in particular, it has been emphasized that democracy is a system based on virtue, which will be preserved by from exploitation by upright citizens. Similarly, in the discipline of international relations, it is being stressed that world peace cannot be perpetuated through education stripped of morality. The project for this civilization has to be the restoration to man’s life of morality and the sacred. Fukuyama’s thesis of “The End of History” is a gross exaggeration, but the view that philosophy’s end has come is gradually coming to be shared by post-modernist thinkers... However, according to Kuhn’s epistemology, there never has been any “objective” science stripped of values. His ideas were taken further by Paul Feyeraband, who asserted that the choice of rival paradigms was tied to the aesthetic taste of the individual. While Popper’s opposing views made widespread the idea that the theory of knowledge, the objectivity of which the West had boasted, was in fact in the service of the dominant ideology.
Modernity’s theory of knowledge, its epistemology, was basically born through defeating the secular paradigm of the discoveries of the ‘positive’ sciences. The works of Niels Bohr (theoretical physicist), James Lovelock (chemist), Rupert Sheldrake (plant biologist), and Ilya Prigogine (physico-chemist and Nobel Prize winner), and of other scientists, blew to pieces the chief concepts of the Newtonian mechanists and the Cartesian world view. I am not going into details, but Capra summarizes as follows the change in the culture of knowledge:
“The sharp changes in the ideas and concepts which constitute physics and our present theories connected with matter, to the profound perceptions of the relations between the nature of matter and man’s thought, brought about a radical change from the mechanistic view to the holistic and environmental world view. The world view foreseen by modern physics does not fit present society. It necessitates a completely different social and economic structure, a cultural revolution in the true meaning of the word.”
As may be seen from this, the new paradigm created by the studies in question offered as part of philosophy of knowledge which includes “intuition and intention.” It should be emphasized that it is also reflected in the social sciences. Since it is related to our subject, the crossroads our teacher Rosenau arrived at in his ideas in the 1990’s is important. He reduced the functioning of international relations to the analysis of a system based on physico-mathematical factors, and stated that the apparent disorganization of international relations resulted from the non-discovery of an underlying factor.
“Although at first it appears nonsense to search for the order underlying the disorder of world events, the contradiction is solved when it is understood that there are two different concepts of order. In one of these, the concept of order indicates the hypothesis of causality, the idea that everything has a cause and that nothing comes into existence by chance. The causes may not be known at present, for the necessary technology, means, or time to observe them may not be existent, but the basic order hypothesis emerges not from empirical, but from theoretical possibilities. That is, when it is supposed that causal factors function rather than chance factors, nothing at all is theoretically incomprehensible. In this meaning, according to a simple and unproveable (but at the same time irrefutable) hypothesis, the world is an orderly place, even if it is bewildering and mysterious because means of observing it are inadequate to explain it. For this reason, in order to disallow the possibility of confusion, this basic order, which is tied to belief and organized to study, will be spoken of as Order 1.”
According to some people, the crisis of the theory of knowledge is the product of the post-modern times we are living in... if one considers the Western and particularly French philosophers, the world is experiencing “a loss of direction bordering on melancholy.” We have lost our innocence and all the certainty of our values, and so the world has lost its all its warmth. At this crossroads, man is experiencing “living in the ruins.” On looking from this angle, “it may be said that post-modernity characterizes passage from the certainties of a triumphant positive science to a generalized vagueness.” However, even if the left choose to interpret the post-modern stop of history as “the mental sport of puffed up liberal intellectuals chasing after something new, a burst of energy of some opportunists taking advantage of the defeat of socialism,” or belittlingly, to say that it “carries out the wishes of late capitalism,” there are not a few intelligent thinkers who say that “the similarities of this movement may be interpreted as the signs that there is an order of social development sufficient to make possible the building of an alternative world.” It is clear that to accept this view faces Western thought with an impasse. It is like this: with the scientific revolution the West sealed up the door on returning to the sacred. However, those who made nostalgic attempts to open the shutters of the doors were confronted by a corrupted religion and were to find the dark register of the Inquisition Church, which closed its eyes to science; and so they did not delay in admitting that it was not possible to repair it, and did not want even to say it was the nightmare of returning to the scholaticism of the dark middle ages. Thus, at this vital turning point is the horizon, the vision, the future, that Islam promises. Only, as Armagan rightly warned, due to the attractiveness of some of its parameters, post-modernity for Muslims should not lead to the facile idea of the media, that all that remains is an Islamic alternative. For the Muslim Turks have a backyard which they are bound to clean up in the light of their own historicity.
iv) The ‘story’ of the ‘Muslim’ Turk intellectuals catching up with the times
It was impossible that these developments in the West should not have been reflected in the Islamic world, and particularly in Turkey. On the road leading from the Ottomans to the Republic, especially at the time opposition to Abdulhamid II’s rule was increasing in Europe, it was in science that the Young Turks found the answer to the vital question “How can this state be saved?”, and they thought that, duplicating exactly the European experience, they could achieve the utopia promised by Positivist thought. This was by replacing religion, which it saw as an obstacle to progress in society, with Positivist thought. At the time the ‘Old Said’s’ efforts in Dersaadet (Istanbul) to have the Medresetü’z-Zehra opened in the backward East were sufficient reason to have him sent to the Toptasi lunatic asylum, a Young Turk was saying: “Life consists of chemical and physical symbols qualified by reproduction and development (or becoming an organism).” According to Hanioglu, the fact that Positivism and biological materialism produced a discourse which was highly critical of the imperialist expansionism of Western Europe at the end of the 19th century, was very attractive to our intellectuals. “Also, the idea may have been influential that if Positivism, a non-Christian philosophy, came to be our official ideology, we could be tacked on to the Western world more easily.” However, at the first stages the Westernizing Young Turks did not want to attack Islam, probably because they were afraid they would be unable to cope with the social reaction! For this reason, Young Turks like Abdullah Cevdet tried to claim that early Islamic thinkers had been biological materialists. In fact they went even further and tried to prove that Islam itself was biological materialism. It is interesting; the Young Turks also did not hold back from ‘using’ Islam as a means of opposing Sultan Abdulhamid’s absolutist rule. They must have seen that the messages saying his rule clashed with Islam’s political attitudes were shared by Islamic thinkers, among whom, at that time, was Said-i Nursi. He considered the entry of the Committee of Union and Progress into active politics in the 1908 revolution to be a natural and necessary result of their insistence of setting up science with religion, for the CUP had made it their policy to pursue the “levity” of this tactic, that is, their seeking allies among the Islamic ‘ulama.
During the Second Constitutional Period, when if under the umbrella of Islamic Unity freedom could have saved the Islamic world from imperialism, and Said-i Nursi himself travelled among the tribes and nomads, offering them guidance, taking advantage of the liberty in the country, some Westernizing Young Turks, and foremost Abdullah Cevdet, started to try to prove openly that religion was no longer necessary and was unscientific. It is clear from their own statements that being accused of irreligion did not worry our apostles of science unduly. Akil Muhtar Bey said: “Thank goodness (not God!) my exams finished yesterday.” While Ahmed Riza Bey wrote as follows to his sister:
My Dear Sister Fahire,
“One of the fine sayings of Hazret-i Muhammad are the wise words: ‘Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.’ But since our damnable, ignorant imams and bigots have changed that important injunction into ‘what is meant by knowledge is reading the Qur’an catechism,’ although numerous famous scholars were produced at one time, that is, in Hazret Muhammad’s time and afterwards, among the Arabs who were knowledgeable in sciences like geometry, algebra, astronomy, geography, and medicine, a thousand years later Muhammad’s Community has declined to the extent it has to get the [Greek] grocer Yorgi’s apprentice to tot up the shopping bill of a few pence. For no one picked up the many books the Western scholars had written about science. Knowledge was the mizrakli catechism, as I said above. Damn the catechisms’ mizrak,. .... ! If I had been a woman, I would have chosen irreligion and not wanted to be a Muslim. I would have said I had better keep away from a religion that permits my husband to put three wives over me and as many concubines as he wishes, readies houris for him in Paradise, besides veiling my head and face like a mill pony bars me from having any fun, and always draws up laws favouring men and detrimental to women like my not being able to divorce my husband, and if he beats me, my not being able to say anything. How strange! This must be some sort of nervous disorder; once religion is made the subject, I can’t control myself... It won’t carry on like that; we were born too soon, or in the wrong country!”
Having completed the repertoire of Positivist ideas with elitism, and social darwinism, and a sort of ‘racialism’, it is not be surprising that the Young Turks should have shown interest in an enquiry carried out by Gustave Le Bon among the customers of a famous Paris hatter. In his investigation, Le Bon learnt the size of the brains of one thousand two hundred of the hatter’s customers from the numbers of the hats they wore. According to the classification he later did, it emerged that Parisian housemaids had the lowest average in regard to size, followed by other categories; it was understood finally that the size of the brains of scholars and writers were far larger than theirs!
Although the Young Turks’ Positivism, and especially Abdullah Cevdet’s publications in the journal Ictihad, were the pretext of the Sharif of Mecca’s revolt against the Ottomans in the First World War, that Westernizing writer brought the question of Kurdism to the forefront in the Armistice years, and considered the modernization of the Islamic world to be tied to applying reforms similar to Luther’s, or in Ali Bulaç’s words, “the Protestantization” of Islam. Hanioglu says this:
“The idea of a Turkish society in which religion remained in the background was an important part of Abdullah Cevdet’s ‘utopia.’ And this utopia, which we see together with his thesis of Westernization, strongly resembles the official ideology of the Turkish Republic after 1923.”
It is understood that like Dr. Faust, who thought he could progress by selling his soul, the further it advanced down the road opened up by the Young Turks and their Westernizing imitators, contrary to what was hoped, the greater Turkey’s failure to capture ‘the renaissance’ in science. Having gone off course, it is clear that so long as the Turks seek the social prescriptions for the problems that others have inflicted on them, and been imposed on them by those others, they will not be able to avoid meeting the unhappy fate which mankind prescribed for the Ottomans:
“The Ottoman authorities realized that the technological potential of the Empire had gradually lagged far behind the scientific advances and successes of Europe and North America, and saw Western technology to be an important means of realizing their goals... Throughout their history, the Ottomans had known the use of the weapons and finally the aeroplanes created by the West, and carried the final defence of the Empire they had founded and expanded on horseback in the cabin of the aircraft. Only, it collapsed while they were getting astride of the times.”
To collapse as one lays hands on the age having expended all one’s blood and energy seizing what has been impressed on one, that is, to be able to call oneself ‘modern’ ... it seems that this is the trap for those who cannot specify their own agenda... While the expansionist industrial society has another trap for those who set about applying their own prescriptions. As Abdulhamid II complained, not allowing “time to take breath enough to carry out reforms.” Causing difficulty after difficulty in foreign policy and preoccupying the government, which is need of attention... We may come now to the present, and the “contemporary dimension” of the crisis. Hopefully, the frequent quotations will not bore the reader. Parviz Mansur depicted the present crisis of Islamic thought:
“The Muslim’s manner of existence today is not authentic. Outside the moments of happiness and Divine mercy while performing the sacred acts of his belief, the Muslim feels himself a stranger in the world. He is not a child of this age in respect of culture and civilization; he lives in either a nostalgic past or a utopian future; that he does not live in the present is certain. He has a view about reshaping the world, but he has no plan; he has a vision, but no reality; he has belief, but no power. The treacherous shadow of history has fallen between his final mission and his present situation. There is the abyss of impotence and brutality between his universal moral order and his temporary disorder.”
The Muslim intellectual’s stance in the face of the coercive challenge of modernity’s theory of knowledge is interesting: modern Western science is an extension of the science developed by Muslims between the 8th and 19th centuries, which for the most part passed into Europe via Spain, is it not? In which case, the overcoming of the backwardness of the 19th and 20th centuries should see the return of science, which is anyway the “lost property” of Muslims, to its homeland. Only, we should not let its culture slip through the door into “our inviolable sanctuary” with it. Meanwhile, the symptoms will be experienced of some peoples’ concern at having religion constantly approving science. As Fethullah Gülen Hocaefendi said: “It is to go to one extreme to consider the sciences to be apart from and independent of the Qur’an and religion; and it is to go to the other to make the Qur’an chase after the physical sciences and to look on it as a book of physics, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, or astronomy.” Moreover, when Western science began to be known in the Islamic world, those who looked coldly on it and kept their distance from it, were not few in number, as they are today. Almost as though they accept the duality foreseen by Cartesian philosophy, in order to flee from the consequences of the modernization of Islam or its Protestantization, some Muslim scholars put its historicity in the forefront even if it does not conform to the harmony of its essence, and clinging onto what they consider to be ‘tradition,’ concentrate on theology, and believe the sole licit means of defence is to cut themselves off entirely from the life of this world. Due to the educational philosophy of the Republic, which may be summarized as “single type education,” the social sciences were ignored, and how striking it is that only on the threshold of the 21st century efforts to make single type education dominant have come on the agenda of Muslim scholars. This is a reflection of the epistemological crisis in the West, which we described above. Muslim intellectuals finally began to believe that they cannot hold science, a human activity, separate from man’s other modes of thought, and that knowledge is a ‘means of communication’ reflecting and transmitting the philosophy and religious point of view of the culture that gave birth to it and spread it. Above all while the record of the West’s scientificism is know, which has snowballed through its foreign policy and economic ambitions, for Muslims, the Islamization of knowledge has begun to be seen as a project the aim of which is to reinvest science with its universal dimensions.
v) The unstoppable rise of the Islamic paradigm
The story of Islamic science begins with the Palestinian Prof. Isma‘il Faruqi’s development of a detailed work-plan. The plan had five main aims: a) to become conversant with today’s social science disciplines; b) to have thorough knowledge of the Islamic legacy in this field; c) to establish relations between Islam and all the disciplines; d) to synthesize creatively Islamic values and the Islamic legacy with the modern social science disciplines; and e) to provoke a reawakening in Islamic thought. Faruqi explains step by step how these aims should be put into practice. From the first, the approach to the project could not save itself from criticism. Islamizing disciplines grafted with a materialist metaphysic and secular morality appears the same as epistemological plastic surgery carried out to beautify the face. Moreover, would breathing the Islamic spirit into academic disciplines formed through “Western intellectual imperialism” Islamize science? Or just the opposite, would it, contrary to its aim, achieve the Westernization of Islam? These reservations were taken into consideration in the creation of the Islamic paradigm. The contributions of writers like Nasr, Attas, Serdar, and Açikgenç in the laying of the foundations of a sociology of Islamic knowledge in conformity with the understanding of the age, set out the difference in the methods and aims of Islamic science.
Islamic science does not reject research methods such as observation and experiment, but it does not limit itself with these means. It does not reject causality; it calls attention to the verticle cause, which in the final analysis is God’s will in “the world of causes” (‘alam al-asbab). This says to a person: “So long as the prolific seeds spilling from your spirit are not scattered in your mind, the womb of our intellectual activities, no phenomenon frozen in the universe of man’s five senses will produce the mysterious music of the harmony.” Man’s spirit possesses an ability known by various names such as soul, heart, and intellect. When he is occupied with thought and comprehension it is called intellect, when he is doing something physical, soul, and when he accepts intuitive illumination, it is called heart. In the tradition of Islamic science, the heart is the centre of the intellect and the basic means of the original knowledge which is a relative external reflection of intellectual activity. And “in reading” the universe, this takes us to the Divine source, that is, to revelation. “The knowledge is with God.” Revelational knowledge, the Qur’an, is a reminder (dhikr). Looking at the signs (ayat) and concepts (asma’) in nature, man grasps what is written. According to the Islamic point of view, the aim of sound or authentic science is nothing other than raising the veil from knowledge, which is in any case existent with God. Man’s reflective thought is the reflection of the knowledge which is in the heart in the field of the mind. That is to say, in the Qur’anic categorization, there is an order of knowledge (‘ilm) in the form of revelation or its perfectly determined absolute part (haqq al-yaqin); empiricism and intuition, that is, its part based on observation and experiment (‘ayn al-yaqin); and rationalism, or results obtained through reasoning (‘ilm al-yaqin). So long as the hierarchy is heeded, differences between scholars have been a mercy for the Umma, preventing the deviation of Islamic science’s perspective, which is based on the affirmation of Divine unity.
Man is the place of manifestation of knowledge and religion, and due to his being the Divine vicegerent on earth, is quite simply an axis bringing together the heavens and earth, and physical world and world of meaning. So long as he acquires his identity of being God’s servant, he is the choicest being in the world and the most noble of creatures. He discovers knowledge and God’s purpose in creation and he dedicates himself to that service. God’s purpose is to bring man to spiritual maturity and perfection. This perfection is God’s perfection, which becomes manifest in man, spreading its light in his heart and mind, and showing itself in his good works. The earth will in this way will be developed and set to rights, and with this spirit men will find the opportunity to live as brothers, and evils will cease and good will prevail. That is to say, in Islamic sociology there is no evolution there is being perfected (tekâmül), and the Qur’an sees the progression of man and history as verticle, and foresees change and motion “from the lowly to the exalted.”
It is clear what will be done in this context: if the Islamic world remains on its feet, it must become thoroughly acquainted with modern science, criticize it in the light of Islamic teachings, and creating a paradigm drawn from Islamic sources, open a new page in the history of Islamic science, the foundations of which are the traditions of Islamic science with its history and philosophy revivified. In other words, it has not to pursue its reactionary obduracy with the peevishness of the West, but surpass the suffocating dominance and spellbinding effect of modernity’s secular paradigm. This is for the salvation of mankind, as well as for that of the Umma. Thus, this moral aspect present in the nature of Islamic science is attracting attention and applause in the West as well. For they have been plunged into disaster by their scientific model, have they not, which is amoral and devoid of values? Muslim scholars have covered considerable distance in forming an alternative to the Western scientific model, despite the varying tones when they started. But it is still too soon to say that this Islamic paradigm has won complete acceptance.
vi) Grafting Bediuzzaman’s methodology onto the ethical epistemology
If advances in science do not batter the assumptions of mechanical evolution, and if on the one hand the criticisms of the post-modernists in the West, and on the other the vast changes brought about in mankind by the information age, the door of which was opened by the communications revolution, do not force mankind which is coming together like a river in flood to the consciousness of global change — I don’t know, perhaps we would still have thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi as an heroic defender of Islam, as the mujtahid of the age, living at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century when Positivism had resolved to take Turkish society into mental captivity. We would not have known the reason he expounded the Qur’an as a whole rather than verse by verse. It really seems to me that if the Risale-i Nur is considered within the process of passing beyond —through the theory of knowledge— modernity, which has ceased being a crisis for Muslims only and become the shared crisis of mankind, as is now accepted by the West, Bediuzzaman’s ijtihad concerning the future will become apparent, or rather that he was struggling with the epistemological bases of the information society. It is a question of our deciphering what he wrote and reaching the intellectual and intuitive point where it can be used in the reconstruction of Islamic knowledge.
Did Bediuzzaman not state as though seeing the Age of Information, “At the end of time mankind will pour into science and learning. It will find all its power in science. Rule and power will pass to the hand of science”? Bediuzzaman put forward in the Risale-i Nur solutions for the points which today so many Muslims scholars research or on which they get caught up working to create an Islamic paradigm and framework of this sort in which the social sciences may be reflected. For example, of the above discussions, we might mention the problem of the method involved in the question of ‘the intellect’ and ‘the heart’. Here, Bediuzzaman says that Muslims follow proof; they comprehend the truths of belief (universe) through their intellects, thought, and hearts. For this reason,
“In the future, when reason, science, and learning prevail, that will certainly be the time that the Qur’an will gain ascendancy, which relies on reasoned proofs and makes the intellect confirm its pronouncements.”
Only the science brought from Europe and America, which was ‘discovered’ with the intellect, has to be illuminated with “the light of tawhid (Divine unity).” In his words, they
“...should be regarded in the light of the reflective thought and significative meaning the Qur’an speaks of, that is, in the name of the one who made and fashioned them.”
“Knowledge is that which is established in the heart. If it is purely intellectual, it does not become one with man.”
The harmonious synthesis between them is indicated by this concise measure:
“The light of the conscience are the sciences of religion. The light of the reason are sciences of civilization. The truth is manifested through the combining of the two. The students’ endeavour takes flight on those two wings. When they are separated, it gives rise to bigotry in the former, and trickery and scepticism in the latter.”
Concerning the questions of God’s purpose in creation, man’s aim, our theory of ‘being perfected,’ and in this context the basic problems of Islamic science, I reckon the quotes below are clear enough not to require any further explanation:
“The creation of the world is subject to the law of being perfected. As for man, since he is the one of the parts and fruits of the world, there is in him too an inclination to be perfected and a desire for progress. This inclination grows and fflourishes through the assistance of the meeting of minds and conjunction of ideas. The conjunction of ideas expands through the sources of perfectedness. And the sources of perfectedness fertilize the seeds of the physical sciences from the loins of creation in the ground of the nursery of the times. The seeds grow and develop through gradual experience.”
“Man came into this world to be perfected through knowledge and supplication. In respect of nature and potentiality, everything is tied to knowledge. And the basis, source, light, and spirit of all true sciences are knowledge of God, and their uttermost essence, belief in God.”
“The lofty aim of the universe is man’s universal worship in the face of the manifestation of dominicality. And man’s ultimate aim is to attain to that worship by means of his sciences and perfections.”
Up to here have been noted, with examples, the contributions of Bediuzzaman’s methodology to the epistemology of Islamic science. I want to suffice with a single quote in connection with its application to the social disciplines, for it holds up a light to international relations, my own field. I ask that you recall Camus’ anger at the beginning of my paper. The philosophy of modernity is summarized as follows on page 119 of Sözler [The Words, page 146]:
“Philosophy accepts ‘force’ as its point of support in the life of society. It considers its aim to be ‘benefits.’ The principle of its life it recognizes to be ‘conflict.’ It holds the bond between communities to be ‘racialism and negative nationalism.’ And its fruits are ‘gratifying the appetites of the soul and increasing human needs.’ However, the mark of force is ‘aggression.’ The mark of benefit —since they are insufficient for every desire— is ‘jostling and tussling.’ While the mark of conflict is ‘strife.’ And the mark of racialism —since it is to be nourished by devouring others— is ‘aggression.’ It is for these reasons that it has negated the happiness of mankind.”
Morgenthau’s realism, the international rivalry that has continued up to the present, could have been described only in that way. So what should it be like, the web of the branches of science of the international community, which are bound to be “normalized”? The answer is in the paragraph following the quote:
“As for the Qur’anic wisdom, its point of support is ‘truth’ instead of force. It takes ‘virtue and God’s pleasure’ as its aims in place of benefits. It takes the principle of ‘mutual assistance’ as the principle of life in place of the principle of conflict. And it takes ‘the ties of religion, class, and country’ to be the ties bonding communities. Its aim is to form a barrier against the lusts of the soul, urge the spirit to sublime matters, satisfy the high emotions, and urging man to the human perfections, make him a true human being. Then the mark of ‘truth’ is accord. The mark of virtue is ‘solidarity.’ The mark of mutual assistance is ‘hastening to assist one another.’ The mark of religion is ‘brotherhood’ and ‘attraction.’ And the mark of reining in and tethering the soul and leaving the spirit free and urging it towards perfection is ‘happiness in this world and the next.’”
When the lines of the problematic are put like that, the aim of science, and in international relations, is understood to be a sort of ‘tawhid engineering.’ When it is realized, neither the Serbs, nor Serbification, will be possible. For sure, it is tied to peace at home and abroad. Although the above quote is of a universal nature, harmony in the exercise of freedom and peace in internal politics are gathered together in the light of Bediuzzaman’s words, analyzed by my friend Ibrahim Ethem Deveci, in the book: Ben Dindar Bir Cumhuriyetçiyim (I am a religiously-minded republican).
- Me too, sir, me too!
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