I will never forget it was 1994. We are saying goodbye to Erbakan Hodja from Antalya Airport. He made the following assessment to us, who bid him farewell in the waiting room:
"For the Islamic world, the first quarter of the 20th century passed with invasions and wars. The second quarter continued with liberation from occupations and the establishment of a new state. During this period, culturally Western-type regimes were established. The third quarter passed in search, religious people discussed and thought about what to do. At the end of the last quarter On the other hand, those who adopted Islam as a universal system of life took action and started struggles in line with their own ideals."
After the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, and the Jamaat-e-Islami in India in 1941, "second generation leaders and movements of the revival and reconstruction processes" emerged in many countries in almost the same years.
After these revival and construction movements that emerged in the first and second quarters of the 20th century, new names and movements emerged in the third quarter, which can be called the "Second Generation of Post-World War I Islamism". Gregorian Muslim in Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded in the younger years of Aliya Izetbegovic. Aliya and her friends were imprisoned for three years for being a member of this organization.
Izzebegovic wrote his very famous work, the Declaration of Islam, in 1970. In Tunisia, the date was 1968 when Rashid al-Gannouchi and the lawyer Abdulfettah Moro created the first core of Ennahda.
The meeting of Prof. Dr. Necmettin Erbakan from Turkey and his political movement, institutionalized under the name of "Milli Görüş", with the Parliament was with the "Independent Movement". Erbakan Hodja was elected as an Independent Member of Parliament from Konya on October 14, 1969.
Yes, spring didn't come with a flower, but every spring started with a flower. This saying is true. However, one more word should be said here: Spring also gives birth to its own flowers of different colors and scents.
The walk will never stop
Now, when we look back from the 21st century and do a century of reflection, we see an ancient theme. This road continues. The walk will never stop. One of the main problems of us Muslims is to always look back. Trying to read life in the rear view mirror. However, we have a duty to enlarge the legacy of previous generations and pass it on to new generations.
Our duty is not to repeat the words of previous generations and talk about their memories; it is to build a new world by feeding on words and memories. I recently learned that the 11th verse of Surah Ra'd hangs on the wall of the General Assembly Hall in the headquarters of the Arab League in Cairo.
The verse is as follows: "Verily, Allah will not change the situation of a people until they change their situation."
May Allah give him long life, Syrian thinker Cevdet Said defines this verse as "the general law of humanity".
According to him, unless we change what is in our selves and make an effort, our future will not change in accordance with the "sociological sunnah".
Algerian intellectual Malik bin Nabî developed the definition of "being exploitable".
According to Bin Nabi, what keeps the Islamic world behind is internal factors. This is due to the fact that our societies are susceptible to colonization. So basically the source of the problem is us, our inertia. To sum up, we are talking about a journey that continues for generations and will continue for generations until the end of the world.
Erbakan Hodja's movement was an action movement. He accomplished very important things in Türkiye. Even the fact that the Islamic world has changed the way of thinking is a great achievement in itself. Izetbegovic left an indelible mark, crowned with the Bosnian War of Independence and Presidency.
The story of Rashid al-Gannouchi continues. He continues a process that protects his country from the civil wars of the Arab Spring that has turned into a hurricane, keeps the differences together under the umbrella of a common state, and produces a new socialization based on encompassing Islamic values, not ideological, with his new interpretation of Islamism.
We live in our own story
We should know that history is running out. The universal truth that needs to be told to the understanding of the century is waiting for those who will take it on for all generations. We live in our own story. Now is the time to write better and more beautiful ones with the historical experience of the old generations in your saddlebag.
To embody our goals, to make project-based productions, to benefit from the accumulation of the age, to read the point of our societies well, to explain our values and the main idea through understandable and basic problems, to rank our priorities, to institutionalize our politics, to reinterpret the tradition at all times, to produce law, to address O people. We have great duties to shoulder, such as being enveloping evangelists of faith.
This is what falls to the Milli Görüş followers in Turkey. We have to be an educated and conscious generation that will prevent the exploitative state of the Islamic world from being exploited by "colonial-type development models" and their labor and accumulation by paper tower political leaders and their transnational partners.
Generations before us did their duty, I hope we will meet them in heaven. In addition to the accumulation of previous generations, our duty is to realize new accumulations and breakthroughs through the understanding of this age.
Repetition will not build any future. Each era creates its own status quo. The religious-conservative power of the last period also established its own status quo with a language from within its own sociology. It is the duty of all of us to try to "tell the understanding of the century" that will break this and encompass the society.