ALİJA

We can only keep recalling a person’s remembrance to strengthen our fight, not to sanctify him.

All realists might laugh at Aliya’s dreams. But just as he said, “Apparently, there are two types of realism that exist: Two realism that one to us and the other one belongs to weak and soulless people.” Once a person hopes to be a Muslim with the most sincere prayers, he will start thinking about what type of battlefield to create with his faith. This cannot be a wasteful job, it must be waiting gracefully to be understood and deserved to be understood. And whenever a person considers an embodied Muslimism and seeks to express himself unconditionally, then he turns to examples. For example, for us, the Sunnah is an object, in here we look for forms and essences, and this is something essential, on the other hand, we are in another life that has taken on new forms, and being able to recognize it makes one rush to a thought, a thought about thought.

Aliya sets an example with the declaration of an embodied Muslim during difficult times. This is not a ceremony. We have to live. That’s why it was necessary to remember the kinship of these thoughts once, in order to continue fighting.

Indifference Of The Muslim Masses*

The about-turn effected by modernists in a series of Muslim countries was, almost as a rule, anti-religious and led by slogans on the de-clericalization of political and social life. From this aspect, it is reminiscent of the struggle between the awakening national states and the church in Europe on the threshold of the Modern Age. But what meant progress and constitutionality for the West, represented an unnatural process in the Islamic world, one which was incapable of effecting constructive change. Declericalization and nationalism had no positive aspects here and were in fact merely a negation. Foreign in origin and matter, they were the reflection of a pervasive spiritual sterility. With them, the curtain rose on the last act in the drama of the Muslim world. From the situation which ensued, this act could be called: “double nonsense”.

Every renaissance occurs as the result of creative contact, affinity, or internal concord between the thinking and leading elements in a society on the one hand, and the populace at large on the other. The leading group represents will and thought, the people the heart and blood of any great undertaking. Without the cooperation or at least consent of the ordinary man, all action remains superficial, lacking in strike force. The sluggishness of the masses can be overcome if it is merely the consequence of a natural resistance to hard work, danger, and struggle. It is impossible to overcome if it represents a rejection of the very ideals of the struggle because it perceives that ideal as opposed to the most intimate wishes and feelings of the masses.

It is the latter case that may be observed, to a greater or lesser extent, in all Muslim countries where modernists attempt to implement their programs. They flatter and threaten, plead and goad, organize and reorganize, change names and personalities, but run up against the stubborn rejection and indifference of ordinary people, who make up the majority of the nation. Habib Bourgiba mentioned here simply as being representative of a widespread tendency – wears European clothes, speaks French at home, isolates Tunisia not only from the Islamic but also from the Arab world, restricts religious training, calls for the abolition of the Ramadan fast “as fasting reduces productivity”, while he himself drinks orange juice in public in order to set a suitable example. After all this, he wonders at the passivity and lack of support on the part of the Tunisian masses for his “learned” reforms. Modernists would not be what they are if they did not demonstrate this type of blindness.
The Muslim people will never accept anything which is expressly opposed to Islam, because Islam is not just a collection of ideas and laws but has transcended into love and feeling. He who rises up against Islam will reap nothing but hatred and resistance.

By their acts, modernists have created a state of internal conflict and confusion in which any program – Islamic or foreign – becomes impracticable. The masses want Islamic action, but cannot carry it through without the intelligentsia. An alienated intelligentsia imposes a program, but cannot find enough people prepared to contribute blood, sweat, and enthusiasm to this paper’s ideal. The opposing forces cancel each other out and a stage of powerlessness and paralysis sets in.

There is an order, a dynamic, prosperity, a progress that could be brought about on this ground and in this part of the world, but this is not the order, progress, or prosperity of Europe or America. The indifference of the Muslim masses is not different at all. It is the way in which folk Islam defends itself against outside, alien assault. Wherever there was the least prospect of an Islamic struggle, the ordinary man proved his readiness to fight, suffer, and die. This was the example given by Turkey in the liberation struggle against Greece, following defeat in World War I, the heroic resistance in Libya against Italian occupation, and the recent examples of struggle against the British in Suez, the war for the liberation of Algeria, for the retention of Indonesia and for Islamic influence in Pakistan. Wherever the masses had to be aroused, Islamic slogans were used, however temporarily and insincerely. Where there is Islam, there is no indifference.
The manifest feelings of the Muslim masses need an idea that would move and direct them, but this cannot be just any idea. It must be one which corresponds to their deepest feelings. It can only, therefore, be an Islamic idea.

There is no chance that the Muslim masses and their present intellectual and political leadership could agree on someone among them renouncing his ideal, regardless of how long this state of expectation and indecision may last. There is only one possible way out: The formation and grouping of a new intelligentsia that thinks and feels Islam. This intelligentsia would then fly the flag of the Islamic order and, together with the Muslim masses, take action to bring it about.

*Aliya İzzetbegoviç, İslam Deklarasyonu, İstanbul, Ketebe Yayınları, 2019, sf 35.