Akıl ve El

 

History of Racism

As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their fulfillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land.

Within a week of the Great Hurricane, Richard Mather was installed as pastor of Dorchester’s North Church near the renowned North Church of the new Boston, which was pastored by John Cotton. Mather and Cotton then embarked on a sacred mission to create, articulate, and defend the New England Way. They used their pens as much as their pulpits, and they used their power as much as their pens and pulpits. They penned the colonies’ first adult and children’s books as part of this endeavor. Mather, in all likelihood, steered the selection of Henry Dunster to lead colonial America’s first college, Harvard’s forerunner, in 1640. And Cotton did not mind when Dunster fashioned Harvard’s curriculum after their alma mater, Cambridge, setting off an ideological trend. Like the founders of Cambridge and Harvard before them, the founders of William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769)—the other eight colonial colleges—regarded ancient Greek and Latin literature as universal truths worthy of memorization and unworthy of critique. At the center of the Old and New England Greek library hailed the resurrected Aristotle, who had come under suspicion as a threat to doctrine among some factions in Christianity during the medieval period.

**

AFTER ARAB MUSLIMS conquered parts of North Africa, Portugal, and Spain during the seventh century, Christians and Muslims battled for centuries over the prize of Mediterranean supremacy. Meanwhile, below the Sahara Desert, the West African empires of Ghana (700–1200), Mali (1200–1500), and Songhay (1350–1600) were situated at the crossroads of the lucrative trade routes for gold and salt. A robust trans-Saharan trade emerged, allowing Europeans to obtain West African goods through Muslim intermediaries.

Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectuals at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s greatest globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for himself in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.”

Ibn Battuta was an oddity—an abhorred oddity—among the Islamic intelligentsia in Fez, Morocco. Hardly any scholars had traveled far from home, and Battuta’s travel accounts threatened their own armchair credibility in depicting foreigners. None of Battuta’s antagonists was more influential than the intellectual tower of the Muslim world at that time, Tunisian Ibn Khaldun, who arrived in Fez just as Battuta returned from Mali. “People in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar,” Khaldun reported in 1377 in The Muqaddimah, the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world. Khaldun then painted a very different picture of sub-Sahara Africa in The Muqaddimah: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,” Khaldun surmised, “because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” And the “same applies to the Slavs,” argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups sharing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. “All their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals,” Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.

Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete.

There was one enslavement theory focused on Black people already circulating, a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,” as Khaldun explained. The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had permanently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained. As strictly a climate theorist, Khaldun discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.

Although it clearly supposed Black inferiority, the curse theory was like an unelected politician during the medieval period. Muslim and Christian enslavers hardly gave credence to the curse theory: they enslaved too many non-Black descendants of Shem and Japheth, Ham’s supposed non-cursed brothers, for that. But the medieval curse theorists laid the foundation for segregationist ideas and for racist notions of Black genetic inferiority. The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.

**

The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara’s Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved Africans back to Europe, as Zurara shared in his book. The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal, on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people. For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain had been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders. Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions. Prince Henry’s competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans.

But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.

Tarihin Sonu

Tarihin sonuna vardığını sanan ilk kişi Büyük İskender oldu. Doğu'yu ve Batı'yı fethederek ebedi ve nihai bir medeniyet yaratacaktı. pic.twitter.com/GnN53ezGyY

— Zinde Kültür (@zindekultur) September 17, 2018

Tarihin sonuna vardığını sanan ilk kişi Büyük İskender oldu. Doğu'yu ve Batı'yı fethederek ebedi ve nihai bir medeniyet yaratacaktı.

Ardından Cicero'nun tek dünya devleti fikriyle Roma İmparatorluğu çıka geldi.

Tüm dünyaya hükmeden, gücü sonsuz görünen Roma kendine "Civitas Eterna" dedi yani sonsuz devlet. Roma ve onun düzeni sonsuza dek sürecekti...

Sonra tarih sahnesine Osmanlı İmparatorluğu çıktı. Üç kıtaya hükmederken, rakipleri karşısında titrerken tıpkı o da Roma gibi kendine sonsuz dedi; "Devlet-i Ebed Müddet". Tanrının ve tarihin insanlığa sunduğu son Osmanlı'nın getireceği "nizam-ı âlem" idi.

Hegel'e göre tarih özgür toplumların oluşumuyla sona erecekti. Fransız Devrimi ise bu sonun başlangıcıydı. Ona göre bu "harika bir güneş doğuşu" idi.

Napolyon Bonapart 1806'da Jena Zaferi'ni kazanınca Hegel, Fransız Devrimi ilkelerinin dünyaya hakim olduğunu artık toplumsal ve politik başka bir alternatifin söz konusu olamayacağını ilan etti.

Tarih ilerlemeye devam ediyordu. Marx ve Engels bu ilerlemenin komünizm ile son bulacağını ileri sürdüler. Tarihsel materyalizme göre insanlık çeşitli dönemlerden geçtikten sonra komünizm ile çelişkisiz ve nihai bir düzene varacaktı.

Son olarak Amerikalı yeni-muhafazakarların gözdesi Fukuyama liberalizmi tarihin sonu ilan etti. Sosyalizm çökmüştü, liberalizm ve kapitalizm tüm rakiplerini alt etmişti. İnsan doğasına ve arzularına en uygun olduğunu iddia ettiği bu düzenin sonsuza kadar süreceğini ileri sürdü.

Oysa İbn-i Haldun çöküşün varolan düzenin sonsuza dek süreceği sanrısı ve kibirle başladığını söyler. Her “yegane ve nihai” olma iddiası aslında iddia sahibi gücün yükselişinin sonuna vardığının, artık çöküşün başladığının işaretidir.

İbn-i Haldun’a göre devletler ve toplumlar da bir insan gibi doğar, gelişir ve ölür. O akılcı, metodolojik ve bilimsel bir tarih anlayışı ortaya koyar. Tarih, bir süre için onun tarafından bilim olarak icra edilmiştir ancak bunun dünya çapında gerçekleşmesine daha vakit vardır.


Kaynak
@zindekultur

The Persians

The Arabs and, as we will see, Turks owe their prominence on the world stage to Islam. The Persians do not. Persians have a proud and long history of statehood that dates back to the Achaemenid period (559–330 BCE); when Arab conquerors defeated the Sasanid empire (224–651), they were putting an end to some 12 centuries of almost uninterrupted Persian self-rule and political autonomy. Thus, whereas the rise of Islam was an unmitigated success for the Arabs and Turks, it was something of a mixed blessing for the Persians, who gained monotheism and the True Religion, but lost their empire and independence. And although the early Muslims created their state in formerly Byzantine and Sasanid lands, the Sasanids paid the higher price of the two: conquered Byzantine subjects could fl ee to parts of the empire that had not been conquered and any Christian, Greek culture that had been uprooted by the conquests could be replanted in surviving Byzantine lands. The whole of the Sasanid empire, however, was conquered by Muslims, and although some Zoroastrians did flee to India (where they have been known as ‘Parsees’ ever since), Persian culture had nowhere to go but underground. All of this had shortterm, medium-term, and long-term consequences.

In the short term, the Persian people (and landscape) resisted the Arab armies fi ercely, which meant that in some provinces caliphal rule, conversion to Islam, Arab settlement, and Arabization were superficial. In most regions, Persian notables were allowed to retain a measure of power and Persian administrative traditions endured accordingly. Curiously, many Persians viewed the Muslim conquests as a temporary, reversible blip, and for the next two centuries an array of ‘redeemers’ appeared with the declared aim of restoring the pre-Islamic political, social, and religious status quo. Some modern historians and even some observers at the time have (wrongly) viewed various events in Islamic history as examples of Persian-redemption movements, including the Abbasid Revolution, the creation of Baghdad, the rise of the Buyids, Samanids, and Safavids, and the adoption by the Safavid rulers and their subjects of Shiism. Such an interpretation of events is incorrect in each case, but it is accurate in its general awareness of the traumatic impact that the rise of Islam had on many Persians.

In the medium term, rather than attempting to reverse the effects of Islam’s arrival, Persians and Persian culture were Islamicized. This happened most obviously under the Abbasids who, by moving to Iraq, constructed their power-base from the rubble of Sasanid institutions. Not only was political and governmental organization inherited from Persian traditions (as Byzantine ones had been inherited by the Umayyads in Syria), but much of Abbasid civilization – including literature, history, theology, religious sciences, Quranic studies, and even Arabic poetry and linguistics – was created and dominated by people who composed books in Arabic but told bedtime stories in Persian. Persians were very much aware of their cultural dominance and a literary movement arose promoting Persian culture and reminding the Arabs of their indebtedness to it. Even the great Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), writing in the far west of the Islamic world, included in his Muqaddima (on which, see below p. 105) a section entitled ‘Most of the scholars of Islam have been Persians (‘ajam)’.

In the long term, Islamic culture itself was Persianized, even in the face of viable alternatives. This process began with the rise of semi-independent Persian dynasties in the Abbasid east, where rulers adopted Sasanid titles, traced for their dynasties Sasanid genealogies, and, most importantly, patronized literature in the Persian language. Perhaps the most famous literary work in Persian, the Shahnama (‘Book of Kings’), was composed in Samanid times and dedicated to a Ghaznavid ruler. It recounts in epic form all of Iranian history that is thought to have really mattered, beginning with the creation of the world and, tellingly, ending abruptly with the Muslim defeat of the Sasanid forces at the Battle of al-Qadisiyya (637).

Above all, the spread of Turks, Mongols, and Turco-Mongols to and within Islamic lands led to an effl orescence of Persian literature, even – or especially – outside of Iran. Persian-speaking missionaries played a pivotal role in the spread of Islam to the east, and it is no coincidence that the religious terminology used by Chinese Muslims prefers Persian words such as namaz (‘prayer’) over Arabic synonyms (in this case, salat). Before entering the Islamic world in the late 10th century, the Turkish tribes from whom the Saljuqs and Ottomans are descended were converted to Islam by Persians; religion was thus filtered to them through a Persian sieve. When the Saljuqs created a dynasty in Iran/Iraq, its administrative and literary forms were Persian, and when their relatives moved westwards to conquer Anatolia and create the Ottoman empire, here too Persian was adopted as the language of culture.

The Mongol and Timurid conquests, destructive though they were, also contributed to the success of the Persian language: on the one hand, having no attachment to Arabic as a religious language, the Mongols in Iran (who employed local, Iranian administrators) patronized Persian scholarship even in those fields that hitherto had been reserved for Arabic. On the other hand, the havoc wrought by the conquests forced leading Iranian scholars to seek safety (and patronage) elsewhere, mostly in Muslim India. Under the Delhi and, especially, the Mughal sultans Indo-Islamic literature, the arts (painting, in particular), and imperial administration were Persian in language and form, and some of the fi nest specimens of Persian culture were produced in Mughal lands. Thus, from the 11th to 19th centuries (even later, in some regions) Persian was the leading language of high culture throughout the Islamic world. Even when it was eventually eclipsed, by English and then Urdu and Hindi in India, and by Turkish and Arabic in the post-Ottoman provinces, its impact was still felt on many levels: Urdu literature still follows Persian models, while trendy Westerners read the mystical writings of Rumi (d. 1273), about whom it was said, ‘He has brought a [Holy] Book, though he is not a prophet’. Persian literature also found fans in Goethe (West-Eastern Divan) and Puccini (Turandot), amongst numerous other Western authors.

İslamcılığın İkinci Momenti

İslamcıların dünyevileşmedeki şaşırtıcı rahatlık ve hızlarının sebebi İslamcılığın baştan beridünyevi bir ideoloji olmasıdır.

Evet, aslında İslamcılık daha doğru ismiyle Müslümancılık seküler bir ideolojidir. Mesela, İslamcılığın Müslümanlık tekebbürü Kemalizm’in Müslümanlık utancından ne kadar daha üstün ve ne kadar daha İslami’dir, bu tartışılmalıdır. Şahsen başından beri İslamcılığı hep bir Müslüman milliyetçiliği olarak ele aldım. Bu yüzden nazarımda İslamcılık, Türk milliyetçiliğinden daha İslami değil. İkisi arasındaki geçişlilik, bu yapısal paralelliği sadece daha pürüzsüz hâle getirmiştir. Etnik milliyetçiliğe karşı top ve tüfekle ideolojik taarruza geçen kimi insanlar, dinsel milliyetçiliğin içinde çok rahat yüzüp misk u amber sanabiliyor.

Her ideoloji gibi İslamcılık da değişiyor. Peki, laik cumhuriyet İslamcılığından dindar cumhuriyet İslamcılığına geçişte neler değişti veya değişiyor?

Evvela, İslamcılığı modern bir ideoloji yapan faktörlerin başında iktidar-merkezli ve iktidar-amaçlı olması geliyor. Modern kulaklara “ee bundan daha doğal ne var, herkes iktidarı ister” dedirten, bu durum aslında dinî açıdan problemli bir durumdur. Zaten İslamcılığı modern yapan şey, iktidar arzusuna Müslüman kimlik adına dâhil olmasıdır. Müslümanlar bu cazibeye niye kapıldılar? Çünkü Müslümanlar sahip olmadıkları iktidar araçlarıyla sömürgeleştirilip, itilip kakılıyordu. Müslümanlar, misilleme araçlarına pürdikkat kesildi ve İslamcılık, Müslüman’ın menfaatinin neredeyse İslam’ın kendisiymişçesine merkeze alındığı bir rövanşa dönüştü.

Laik cumhuriyette ideolojik bir hareket olarak İslamcılığın hedefi devlet idi. Amaç Batı’yla yüzleşmek için ulusal sınırlar içindeki Batı’nın uzantısı despot rejimlerden kurtulmaktı. Bu İslamcılığın eşitlik aradığı moment’ti. İslamcı dağarcık bir İslami hareketten, İslami devlet’ten bahsediyordu. İslamcılık bütün zaaflarına rağmen bir dava idi.

Bugün itibariyle İslamcılık kendisinin de aktörü olduğu bir dönüşümle laik cumhuriyet hapishanesinden çıktı. Artık bir dindar cumhuriyet dönemindeyiz. Hareket’ten yerleşik’liğe geçişi yaşıyoruz. Dindar cumhuriyetin İslamcılığı devlet yerine medeniyet kavramını merkeze alıyor. Ulusal kalkınmacılık, dinî ve medeniyetsel bir kalkınmacılık olarak benimseniyor. Ve içerideki despot yerine dış düşmanlara karşı mücadele iddiası ön plana çıkıyor. İslamcılık eskiden tercüme fikir ithal eder ve kaybedecek bir şeyi olmayan bir mahrum kitleye hitap ederdi. Bugün ise dışarıdan tehdit ithal edip kaybedecek çok şeyi olan bir kitleye hitap ediyor.

İbni Haldun’un tabirleriyle hareket hâlindeki “bedevi” İslamcılık, kentin imkân ve rantı etrafında “yerleşik”leşiyor. Eskiden devletsiz İslamcılık bütün hatalarına rağmen,Müslümancıydı ama menfaatçi değildi. Bugün ise devletli İslamcılık hem Müslümancı hem de menfaatçi hâle gelmiş bulunuyor. Menfaati için Müslümancı kesilenler de işin cabası. Evet, İslam bu dünyaya sığmaz ama İslamcılık bu dünyayı bulsa, biter. Her milliyetçilik gibi bir Müslüman milliyetçiliği olan İslamcılığın da kof olduğu ortaya çıkınca İslamcılıktan Müslümanlığa, milliyetçilikten adalete geçeceğiz. Şu anda devletle ve devletin imkânlarıyla belki de ilk kez bu kadar yakından tanışan çoğu dindarların ve İslamcı elitlerin kendilerinden geçtikleri bir geçiş dönemindeyiz.

Mücahit Bilici

Taraf 16 Nisan 2014