[Originally published in Hurriyet Daily News]
Among the hundreds of comments these pages receive everyday, categorically anti-religious comments are quite abundant. Religion, for those commentators, is the source almost all evil in the world.
Faith in God, they say, led to religious wars and inquisitions in the Middle Ages and it leads to terrorism, male-domination or communal bigotry today. Accordingly, unless humanity trashes out all religions – first Islam, but ultimately all of them – we will not be able find peace of mind.
The funny thing is that these ultra-secularists speak as if theirs is a road that has never been taken. But, in fact, humanity has tried their post-religious world – and it hardly turned out to be any better.
The great experiment
I am speaking about the giant social experience called the 20th century. The one before that, the 19th, was actually a time when the views of our ultra-secularists peaked in Western thought. Thinkers such as Marx, Durkheim and Freud heralded the death of religion and the rise of a thoroughly secular world. And this world, they thought, would save humans from bigotry and misery by turning them into rational and scientifically-minded individuals.
This faith in “science and reason” as the ultimate guide for mankind created a widespread optimism in the first decade of the 20th century, as European intellectuals praised the “new man” and his steady march toward an enlightened future. But soon, their dreams were shattered by the worst man-made tragedy mankind had ever seen: The Great War of 1914-18, in which nearly ten million European men killed each other – not for God nor the Church, but for the nation. The latter had simply replaced religion as the object of veneration and loyalty. And apparently it made the world no less safe, secure or happy.
The cult of the nation, and its lesser forms such as the cult of ethnicity, continued to haunt the past century, leading to terrible conflicts, wars, and genocides in almost every part of the world. The old battle cry, “God wills it,” was just replaced with, “the nation wills it.”
But more evil was to come. In the aftermath of the Great War, the disillusioned Europeans started to look for a new source of inspiration. Soon, they found it in a new alternative to religion: Ideology. Fascism swept many countries, the worst case being the Nazi Germany.
As thinkers such as Leo Strauss stressed, the way to Nazism was paved by the secularization of the German society before and during the Weimar Republic. No wonder the evils the Nazis committed, at least seemingly, were justified under the secular tools of the modern age: their racism, which led to the Holocaust, was inspired not by the Bible, but Social Darwinism.
A rivaling secular ideology, which also found its basis in “science,” was communism. And its crimes eclipsed anything the world had seen before. More than 100 million people were killed under the tyrannies of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. The latter had 2.5 million people executed in a country of 9 million.
Even in Turkey, the secular age has not been much of a blessing. Most Westerners are pre-programmed to think the other way – that the great secularization drive in Kemalist Turkey was a great leap forward, and any retreat from that paradigm is a risky step, if not a total descent into darkness. Little they realize that it was that very ultra-secular Turkey which denied and banned the Kurdish identity, sent Jews and other non-Muslim to labor camps (in the early 40’s), or systematically tortured thousands of political dissidents.
In fact, historically speaking, it is very plausible to argue that Kurds and non-Muslims were freer in pre-Kemalist (i.e., Ottoman) Turkey. (It is also reasonable to think that they will do better in a post-Kemalist one, in which the excessive secularism and nationalism of the past century will be replaced by a religion-friendly secularity and a pluralist concept of the nation.)
The brighter side
I am not trying to say the secular age brought only such evils to the word. No, not all. The 20th century was also the stage for the advancement of human rights, democracy and liberalism. Modern science enriched our lives, widened our knowledge, and cured our diseases. In Kemalist Turkey, women’s rights were advanced, along with mass education. These are among the bright spots of the secular age, along with the very dark ones I noted.
But the same spectrum exits within religions as well: they may have very good and very bad outcomes. They have caused wars and persecution in history, but they also inspired civilizations, and upheld justice and compassion among their peoples. Today, they cause not only bigotry and militancy, but also charity and other contributions to civil society.
The question, then, should not be how we can create a more secularized world. It should be how we can find the sources for tolerance and open-mindedness in every tradition, whether they be religious or secular.
That is what I often try to do regarding Islam – and I believe that it is a more promising endeavor than the Islam skeptics assume.
Mr. Akyol,
I personally agree with most of your points. However, your comments do/should not prevent one criticizing the misteachings and malpractices of Islam. One should be free to criticize Islam as much as Nazism, Stalinism, and Kemalism if justifiable reasons warrant such criticism. In short, I am missing your point. Should we stop criticizing Islam for its malpractices simply because there are other things to criticize? Should we turn a blind eye to the suppression of women in the name of Islam simply because Muslims do charity and service to civil society?
If your mission is to “find the sources for tolerance and open-mindedness in every tradition” then are we not helping you by spotting in Islam the troubled areas to be improved? For that reason, I think we deserve gratitude, and not criticism.
The problem with ideologies and theologies is that they become doctrinaire and are used for partisan purposes… irrespective of how ideal or utopian the original vision happened to be. Thus we have the high idealism of communism being debased by the excesses of Stalin or Pol Pot. We have the message of Jesus being perverted by massive doctrinal distortions that led for example to the Catholic Inquisition and the witch hunts. We have the teachings of the Prophet being distorted by Wahhabist fanatics with their obsession with control and twisted conceptions of Jihad. The truth is “…ologies” are for the masses.
When it comes to religion the only kind of change that really matters happens on an individual level. Of course a people can convert en masse to Christianity or Islam, but ‘a people’ cannot evolve in a spiritual and actual sense… they can only become more doctrinaire, more observant, more ethical etc. Transformation can only happen through intense individual effort.
Religion like secular ideology keeps the masses asleep and dreaming… of a better society… of heaven… paradise… of this and that… while essentially the human condition remains unchanged – no less mechanical.
Only the individual can release his or her self from the sleep that prevents people from seeing “the terror of the situation” i.e. the condition of mechanical slavery in which they exist, in the grip of many complexes and delusions. Without self-observation and the struggle to remember oneself, it isn’t possible to see our lies, self-deceptions and fantasies for what they are. It isn’t possible to awaken.
Great religious teachers understood that for a man or woman “to do” anything above and beyond mechanical actions, they first need to awaken. The inner meaning of religious texts, its symbolic meaning… points to this need for personal transformation, but this message has been distorted and made doctrinaire… directed toward society at large.
The “good” in religion, is also in a sense a trap. Religion does not make us more evolved, more awake… but it may make us better hypocrites, more self-satisfied with our charities and good acts… it may re-enforce the fantastical notion that we have a soul by default and that paradise is waiting and such nonsense.
In fact humans only possess the potential for a soul. Our capacity to survive the death shock depends upon “work” we do while alive and the creation in us of a certain type of inner force that is the mortar for the so-called “inner bodies” referred to in Sufism, Christian mysticism, Jewish Kabbalism and elsewhere.
In this sense religion has value – in that it points to the necessity of “working” on oneself and awakening… but this is very different from mere goodness, justice, charitable acts etc. Secularists can do such things equally well.
No the kernel of religious teaching that is of supreme value has to do with personal transformation… and it can only happen on an individual/small group basis… not in a broad societal context. While of course it is true that the more people struggle to awaken, the more the society will be influenced by this inner work taking place in its midst… almost in a symbiotic sense. In this manner it affects conscience in particular and heightens awareness of the need for a qualitatively different kind of awakening.
Cingoz, you’re 100% correct, criticism of Islam, in practice or theology, should be allowed. But I would venture to say that the point of Mr. Akyol’s post is to criticize those such as Sam harris or Richard Dawkins – who state that religion should be removed – that the removal of religion is no guarantee of greater progress for humankind. Shouldn’t he be allowed to criticize that notion equally as anyone else would of Islam, Kemalism, etc?
Hadji, you really blew my mind away with that post, thank you so much.
To further back up Mr. Akyol, in case none of you has come upon it yet, try reading a book called Death by Government. Here’s a link to the book’s website: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM