A tour of the horizon with Al-Shanqeeti.. The problem of thought, renewal, and the constitution in the Islamic world

Can we say that the state and level of thought in the Islamic world is very different from the state and level of politics?

A more complicated question than it seems.

Based on the bad situation that the political situation has reached today, we find that some bear responsibility for this level of deterioration that dominates Islamic thought, and those can comfort themselves with this justification, but I do not see that this may fix anything or change the results, let alone producing a discourse of oppression And additional pain in the name of Muslims.

Islamic thought is certainly not a thought formed in the air or in a vacuum in isolation from the social, political and historical environments, but what can be certain is that there has been no real political representation of Islamic thought for at least a century.

This is the most important result that the First World War brought to the history of the world, and neither the world nor the Muslims have been able to confront this result in the full sense;

By this I mean that until this moment the world deals with some deteriorating political performances as representing Islamic thought, and on the other hand some Muslims imagine that these performances actually express Islamic thought, which is not true at all.

The efforts exerted in the name of Islamic thought today ignore this fact, and try to talk about recalling our civilization, which has fallen apart for many years, leaving behind a strange and tragic scene.

This scene consists in trying to recall examples that occurred in a certain period of history that are thought to be ideal and suggest them as the goal of our present and future.

I do not think that a real civilization can be built without relying on a coherent Islamic thought that understands reality well.

It results in political practices that change this reality, and accordingly builds a civilization that rises above this deteriorating reality and puts Arabs and Muslims at the forefront of the world, whether this new construction agrees with the form of that historical other on whose glories we live or differs from it, as long as this difference does not affect the principles and foundations. The civilization on which the Muslim civilization was based before that.

Progress will be made in that path towards this coherent construction by confronting those who object and obstruct attempts to intelligent political practice based on an understanding of reality without fantasies that have nothing to do with reality.

It should also be said that this building or that civilization will become a pipe dream for those who have lost themselves and their principles on the way.

Every human society that joined Islam did not abandon its culture, history, and characteristics to dissolve and perish among the folds of Islamic civilization.

The practice of Islamic thought

The Mauritanian Professor Mukhtar Al-Shanqeeti - who has recently emerged as one of the most important Islamic thinkers, from my point of view, and has gained great value through his promising studies in the field of Islamic thought - presented his valuable ideas at the conference that took place at the Institute of Islamic Thought in Ankara headed by Professor Mehmet Gürmez, under the title "Artificial Islamic Renewal Thinkers in the Modern Era".

Al-Shanqeeti is aware of the lack of political representation that the Islamic world suffered from after the end of World War I until now, and he is sufficiently aware of the current production of Islamic thought.

There are nearly two billion Muslims in the world in which we live, but they do not have a real political presence, and this makes Muslims mere civilians or a handful of opponents or owners of minority movements.

With the absence of political representation for Muslims;

Their efforts in the name of Islamic thought are indiscriminate and often irrelevant to the modern world.

With the impact of the noise generated by today's social media or other different media;

We have a completely different picture than in the past, there is a constant presentation of ideas and continuous discussions with all shades of thought, and it is much easier for people to meet and discuss their ideas and perceptions than before, and there are some valuable ideas that I actually see from time to time.

Can this situation create real opportunities for the brightness of a new Islamic thought?

I say that the status quo allows and helps this based on the fact that Muslims have had such encounters and dialogues with others throughout history.

Al-Shanqeeti emphasized the Islamic Sunnah that Muslims followed in those meetings, explaining that the origin of something from the point of view of Islam is permissibility, and that Islam did not demand the different societies and cultures that it reached to abandon their cultural characteristics unless there was a conflict between them and the basic principles of Islam, but rather Islam made those features that do not contradict the essence of religion a part of Islamic civilization.

Thus, the Islamic civilization was characterized by practical expansion throughout history.

Every human society that joined Islam did not abandon its culture, history, and characteristics to dissolve and perish among the folds of Islamic civilization.

But as a result, it was necessary to worry about the possibility of distortion in Islamic civilization, as the inclusion of those cultural characteristics that existed before Islam without verifying them and if they do not actually contradict religion;

It led to a deviation in the course of Islamic civilization.

So;

Renewal had to appear again and again throughout history in order to point out these excesses, and to remind Muslims who had lost their enthusiasm as a result of their sense of monotony of the euphoria of faith and Islam again.

The special thing here is that Muslims can take from others without losing themselves or forgetting their constants.

Since the performance of Muslims throughout history in maintaining this balance has not been seen in any other civilization, Muslims have preserved these principles when they took many things from China, India, Africa and ancient Greece.

Although they did not hesitate to take scientific thought from ancient Greece, the admiration of some Muslim philosophers in this field led to the illusion that they could also take what the Greek philosophers said about theology or the creation of the world.

In fact;

This is the well-known form of deviation. They fail to see the fact that their good knowledge in a particular field does not make them authoritative in all fields. An example of this is what we see in the request of some personalities - who claim their authority in the field of history or physics, for example - to impose their authority on the areas of politics. And parents too.

The path that we must take today to restore Islamic civilization to the forefront of the scene is completely different from that which we undertook in the past.

As we mentioned at the beginning;

Muslims lack the mechanisms of political representation in the world, and this is a major priority that Muslims must take into account.

Consequently;

Al-Shanqeeti stressed that the most important problem for the Islamic world today is the problem of the constitutional crisis in Islamic civilization, and he gave us the best and most comprehensive study ever in this field

What is meant by the constitutional crisis in Islamic civilization is the paradox between the Islamic political principle and the historical reality in which Muslims lived politically, and they still suffer from its consequences until today, and then what resulted from that paradox of struggle over political legitimacy in the history of Islamic civilization since the middle of the first century AH until today.

Al-Shanqeeti believes that the discussion that took place in the Islamic world since the generation of the first revivalists and the school of Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Rashid Rida and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, i.e. the discussion of originality and modernity and related issues, whether in relation to the West or in interaction with its theses in terms of determining the position of divided Muslims From the inherited or in reading religion, specifically in the political field;

It still requires a lot of effort from us.

Al-Shanqeeti believes that because of the Islamic feeling of lack of confidence;

There is a rupture between the school of reform in the era of Abduh and al-Afghani, whose concern was renaissance, and Islamic thought in the second half of the twentieth century that focuses on identity and tries to restore this relationship by restoring references that have a permanent place in it, with a focus on restoring some references whose ideas have not yet been exhausted. - especially in the Arab region - or it did not take its place as much as the ideas that spread it, such as the poet Muhammad Iqbal, Malik bin Nabi and others, in addition to restoring the Western references and visions that they adopted in their reform approaches.

In the context of this required modernity, Al-Shanqeeti searches for more comprehensive perceptions that allow the text to regain its place in reality, through:

Al-Shanqeeti believes that there are 3 models for countries in terms of their proximity or distance from the Islamic standard:

Then he ends by clarifying that the Islamic state equivalent to what Ibn Khaldun called the "legal caliphate" in its normative, not historical sense, is the democratic state with an Islamic reference, and this is in line with his vision based on that there is "a broad convergence between the major political values ​​brought by Islam and democratic values." achieved by the Western mind during the past three centuries.

And in light of what we mentioned;

The first question that comes to mind is how to impose this constitutional policy and behavior on authoritarian societies?

But today let's just stop with the question.

Continued…