The cultural origins of tyranny and the way to overcome it.. We continue to think with Al-Shanqeeti

It is inevitable that every encounter between Muslims and other societies affects them in one way or another.

When we talk about Muslims, we are not talking about robots that act according to a predetermined mechanism. Rather, they are human beings who are subject to what all people undergo in terms of rapid societal changes.

There is a great overlap between cultures taking place in our world in recent years, in which Muslims are subject to all forms of influences that would lead to change and produce new versions of our minds, tendencies, attitudes, and behaviors towards our societies and towards the world.

The continuous talk about Muslims changing from the version they were in in the past, and that this has a great impact on their civilizational backwardness, is very simple and superficial talk - from my point of view - because there is nothing wrong with change as long as it does not affect the principles, foundations and beliefs of Muslims.

And those who rant about these sayings, I see them as asking Muslims to recede into a single version of themselves, and to remain bound to a historical culture that they did not live with, so that they become prisoners of the past who do not know how to return to it, with the inability to engage in the real reality in which they live and which they may be able to understand and change for the better.

Al-Shanqeeti stated that there is good in the essence of all civilizations, but the Islamic essence can be revealed by wiping away the dust and rust accumulated on it over time, so when ideas are discussed in the name of Islam with the other in cultural meetings, it should not be interpreted as a kind of prostration before the other or dissolution in it.

Here I do not call for unconditional interaction or complete dissolution in the culture of the other and submitting to what those other cultures dictate to us and the ideas and principles they issue.

The way a Muslim interacts is to keep his eyes and ears open completely, and to sift through everything that is presented to him, so he takes what may develop from it and contributes to building his civilization, and discards everything that may affect him negatively.

The Mauritanian Muslim thinker Mukhtar al-Shanqeeti - with whom we continued his tour of the horizon in his conference at the Institute of Islamic Thought in Ankara - tried to emphasize that Muslims who interact strongly with other societies adhere to their own constants.

He stated that the natural position of Muslims towards Western civilization must be through a complete clarification that distinguishes the beneficial from the harmful, the good from the ugly, and the truth from falsehood.

The complete and definitive extrapolation indicates that the aforementioned Western civilization includes both beneficial and harmful. As for the benefit from it, it is from the material point of view and its progress in all material fields - which is clearer than I try to highlight - and what it contained of benefits to man are greater than what used to be imagined. Huge.

As for what is harmful from it, it is its total neglect of the aspect that is the head of all good, and there is absolutely no good in this world without it, which is the spiritual education of man and the refinement of his morals, and that can only be with the light of the heavenly revelation that shows man the way to happiness, and draws for him wise plans in all fields of this life and the hereafter. "and make him connected to his Lord at all times."

Al-Shanqeeti mentions that there is goodness in the essence of all civilizations, but the Islamic essence can be revealed by wiping away the dust and rust accumulated on it over time.

Therefore, when ideas are discussed in the name of Islam with the other in cultural meetings, it should not be interpreted as a kind of prostration in front of the other or dissolution in it. On the contrary, this can be considered the beginning of the path of thinking about our reality, which in turn leads to change and comprehensiveness in thinking and broadening of the view. that help build the building blocks of a strong cohesive civilization.

This idea is one of the most prominent writings of Marshall Hodgson in his book "The Adventure of Islam... Conscience and History in a Global Civilization," which critics said was the most important thing written in Islamic history in the twentieth century, in which he rejected the idea of ​​Western centralism in the study and understanding of history and the marginalization of other civilizations and cultures. , and undermined many of the orientalist theories and narratives about the world and the history of the Islamists, and the book was considered a revolution against the orientalist writings that enshrined the idea of ​​Eurocentrism.

Tyranny reduced the collective mind of Muslims to a single mind within the mind of political power, so minds are consumed, whether by deception or by attempts to resist this tyranny, so there is no room for dialogue and cultural and intellectual discussions, and the idea of ​​renaissance becomes a mere fantasy

Marshall's Islamic Civilization

Marshall indicates in his book that the Islamic civilization was able to integrate the Syriac, Persian and Greek cultural elements within its structure. The area that he put under study in the book "The Adventure of Islam" was the area extending from the Nile River to the Jihon River, given that the Islamic civilization was a cultural mixture of this region as a whole.

He also believes that the Islamic civilization is global, and that the Islamic agricultural era is no less prosperous than the European Renaissance, as he amazes us by saying: “The Muslim community participated in the modern mutational transformation, in his study (in the third volume) of how to confront Bengal, India, Egypt and the Tatars in the Volga basin for the technical age. He also dubbed the Islamic civilization as an intermediate authenticity.

Marshall also monitored in his book the modern transformations that Western Europe witnessed (the generation of 1789) and the Islamic response to these transformations at the level of gunpowder empires. In the Renaissance era (gunpowder - the printing press - the compass) were not authentically European, but were imported from the East.

With these two facts, Hodgson deviates from the framework of Eurocentrism. Rather, he presents a shocking idea that contradicts common narratives when he says that Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance was politically behind even the Ottomans.

Westerners never wanted democracy for Muslims.

They wrote a lot and made their own books about the incompatibility between Islam and democracy.

They saw real democracy for Muslims as a nightmare that they would not be able to deal with, so they always tried to stifle it in cooperation with tyrants in the Islamic world.

Cultural integration and authoritarianism

Since the 19th century, debates have raged about how to separate the culture and technology of the West from our own.

From my reading of history, I see that the Muslims who conveyed the message of Islam to all parts of the world were more comfortable in this regard.

There are voices calling not to take their technology because it carries with it their culture, and I say that this voice is completely naive and absurd.

They can claim that Western science and technology entered our lives loaded with that culture as evidence for their previous claims, but what they forget is that Western culture - especially that which cannot be accepted from an Islamic point of view - in fact entered us through a door opened by politics and not by a door opened by science and technology.

And in our country, the Western alphabet, Western dress, culture, historical consciousness, and way of life were imposed under the name of "revolution" on society and its backward traditions, not through science and technology, but in a way from the top of power to the bottom, not the other way around.

Returning to Al-Shanqeeti, we find that he believes that the main problem in the Islamic world is, of course, much greater than that which began in the last century, namely, the problem of tyranny that has plagued the nation since the caliphate turned into a sultanate.

And since the "great sedition" that began with the Umayyads, not even faith could escape from being a tool in politics that could be used from time to time.

Tyranny reduces the collective mind to a single mind within the mind of political power, so minds are consumed, whether by deception or attempts to resist this tyranny, so there is no room for dialogue and cultural and intellectual discussions, and the idea of ​​renaissance becomes pure fantasy.

Tyranny does not leave an opportunity to evaluate minds and ideas, take from them and respond. All kinds of thinking in the school of tyranny are pure deviation and betrayal that must be resisted, and this produces generations characterized by complete intellectual sterility.

While this mechanism works in this way in politics, religious groups and formations also produce the same tyranny by imitating

it - perhaps sometimes involuntarily - instead of objecting to the tyranny of political power and producing alternatives that help it resist this intellectual sterility.

It is a real tragedy that the followers of a religion whose motto is consultation, dialogue, and openness to the other have to transform the tyranny that hinders the free mind into a culture that is spread among them in this way.

The way to overcome this tragedy is to run a kind of constitutional council from the top down or from the bottom up to fight against tyranny.

Before and after the Arab Spring, it appeared that the real actors who are candidates to overcome this tyranny in the Islamic world are still, in one way or another, Islamists.

Westerners never wanted democracy for Muslims.

They wrote a lot and made their own books about the incompatibility between Islam and democracy.

They saw real democracy for Muslims as a nightmare that they would not be able to deal with, so they always tried to stifle it in cooperation with tyrants in the Islamic world.

The best example of this is their position and the position of the intellectuals who exported them in our countries during the counter-revolutionary operations of the Arab Spring.

The same circles that question democracy in Turkey are another clear example of these contradictions.

Many questions remain:

I believe that Shanqeeti's "The Constitutional Crisis in Islamic Civilization" is a powerful text that can stimulate fruitful discussions that may necessarily lead to our mission towards our afflicted civilization.