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Guvelioglu: Fundamentalism By Recep Guvelioglu - rguvelioglu@thenewanatolian.com - 09 October 2006 For almost of a week now, the Turkish media has been debating just what the real meaning of "Islamic fundamentalism" is. As usual, this has not resulted in a common definition. That situation has given me the opportunity to say some words about the matter. Islam has many rules. To give a simplified explanation in this limited space, it has three kinds of orders, just like other religions. Islam tells about certain historical events, dictates the rules of faith, and governs lifestyles or social relations. In some cases, the three kinds of rules overlap each other. I don't want to give a sermon about Islam. All I want to say is that religion touches daily life and that Islamic principles in some cases contradict the rules of civil law. Without solving these contradictions, we cannot reach any solution. For instance, interest (faiz) is illicit, unlawful, according to the Koran. Money should not produce money or material that is worth money. But the whole financial life of our world is based upon interest. Then what are we going to do? We have to disregard either religion or the law. This is true even though our new breed of religious people invented a new concept of "profit sharing" (kar payi), which is an example of sheer spin. In layman's words, they are trying to fool God. Another example; According to canonic law (fikh), the punishment for theft is to cut off the thief's right hand. But not even the Ottomans carried out this order most of the time. Otherwise the whole empire would have been full of one-handed people. I think what we call people who are in favor of carrying out religious principles even in the case of contradictions is "fundamentalist." Now let's talk about our fundamentalists. - I deliberately gave the two examples above. Even though it is forbidden, no one wants to talk about "interest." They don't want to touch that problem. Many of them -- with the exception of the really fanatical ones – don't defend punishments such as hand-cutting or stoning to death (recm). They mostly focus on the headscarf problem. - Even "fundamentalism" is a funny concept in this country. Then what are we going to define? |
