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The reprimand given me by the grand-daughter of Ebu Bekr Efendi

by Hakan Albayrak

Originally published in Turkish on June 28, 2009.

Having arrived on the coast of Cape of Good Hope around the middle of the 17th century and having begun colonizing the South African lands, the Dutch brought there Muslim slaves and political convicts from the Malay archipelago.

The overwhelming majority of today’s Cape Town Muslims, who are said to number around 1 million, are the descendants of those “Malayics”.

I have been in Cape Town for three days.

The Muslim scene that I have seen here is a distinguished one compared to a great many parts of the Islamic world (or even compared to most parts of it).

A choice community that crowds the approximately 250 mosques, large and small, that cares about providing their children with a book-based religious education and that closely follows the intellectual currents and political developments in the Islamic world…

They have reached this point having gone through a long and challenging road.

As the ancestors of Geert Wilders could not tolerate even the “I” of Islam, they had to hide their Islamic faith at the beginning of the road.

In time, they forgot Islam to a great extent.

Because there was hardly anyone among them who knew enough Arabic to understand and explain the Quran and because they had become unable to understand the available books in Malay, the “book-based knowledge” was replaced by hearsay information.

Leaders such as Sheikh Yusuf, Said Alawi, Imam Abdullah ibn Qadi Abdussalaam had blocked the way of corruption with the winds of revival that they generated between the years of 1694 and 1794, but starting from the 1810s the Cape Town version of Islam was filled once more with groundless beliefs by a bizarre “oligarchy of imams”.

Groundless beliefs such as:

You must give your zakaat (the required, yearly Islamic alms) and sacrificial animals to the imams, and they will use these however they wish.

You must hold a banquet for the imam and his friends for 40 days when a relative of yours dies…

If you please the imams, then they will intercede in your favor in the Hereafter…

Later, those Muslims who had just been able to go on pilgrimage (i.e. the Hajj to Mecca) owing to the permission that the British, who had taken Cape Town from the Dutch, gave them began to describe the kind of Islam that they saw there and, moreover, even started to practice it. Then trouble broke out.

A great controversy arose.

The controversy was about to turn into violence.

A group of prudent Muslims then came up with the idea of demanding help from the Caliph of Islam in order to find the right solution.

This idea found general acceptance.

They appealed to the Queen through the British colonial governor and requested that a demand to the Ottoman State for assistance for the purpose of religious guidance be communicated to Istanbul.

The Queen did as requested; Sultan Abdulaziz of the Ottoman State found the demand reasonable and gave Ahmed Jevdet Pasha the instruction to send a scholar to Cape Town.

Ahmed Jevdet Pasha thought that Ebu Bekr Efendi was the fittest for this duty.

Ebu Bekr Efendi arrived in Cape Town on January 13th 1863.

He started out by setting up a madrasa and embarked on works in order to bring up a Muslim generation equipped with book-based knowledge.

The Muslim masses joyfully welcomed his arrival and his quickness to take action without delay, but when some imams who wanted to preserve their power based on groundless beliefs sided against him and started making the propaganda that he was “a deviant, an atheist”, things became intolerable.

Ebu Bekr Efendi and his students were exposed to various kinds of abuse and aggression.

The Cape Town press, which was under British control, also took part in the smear campaign.

Nevertheless Ebu Bekr Efendi did not lose heart.

He set up a mosque in addition to the madrasa.

Everywhere he went and to all the people with whom he spoke, he preached an understanding of Islam that was free from groundless beliefs.

In the meantime, he established a strong love bond between the South African Muslims and the Ottoman State.

On account of that bond, the South African Muslims would later contribute to the construction of the Hijaz Railway around the beginning of the 20th century, they would send help to the Ottoman army which fought at Tripoli in northern Africa in 1912 and would support the “National Struggle” of Turkey at the beginning of the 1920s…

Ebu Bekr Efendi passed away in Cape Town in the year of 1880.

He left a tremendous moral legacy behind him.

Above all, he was a milestone on the way to the revival of Islam at Cape Town.

God have abundant mercy on him.

* * *

On Thursday, I visited Karima Sinclair, who is a grand-daughter of Alaaddin Bey, one of the sons of Ebu Bekr Efendi.

I drank her bitter coffee.

Afterwards, I received her bitter reprimand.

She said:

“You people always come here from Turkey and go back; you keep asking about Ebu Bekr Efendi; you recount his story in your newspapers and TV channels enthusiastically; but you do nothing to protect his memory duly. I have talked to so many of your diplomats and politicians. I told them that either a foundation (waqf) or institute must be established in order to take his moral legacy under protection, and promises have been made to me in this regard. But there has been no action. You are only as great as your actions, my dear brother. If you are not going to do anything, if you will not go beyond talking with me here, let us not bother ourselves in vain. I can no longer endure how you keep failing the first Ottoman who set foot in Cape Town, that great scholar who filled Cape Town with the light of wisdom!”

I told her that I could do nothing apart from writing exactly all that she had just told me… and now I have written.

I hope that somehow it proves useful, God willing.

. . .

I think that it’s an easily observable phenomenon that in the modern age people get divorced or end friendships more easily than most of the known history.

This is mainly because, in modernity, people’s own “individual rights” rather than their traditional responsibilities of having sympathy for their spouses and their friends are emphasized.

Therefore, people are systematically made more and more intolerant of each other, of their spouses and of their friends.

In this way ego-centrism, however it is disguised, embellished and presented, becomes the respectable, urged way of approaching human relationships.

Unfortunately, a rather great number of Muslims in the modern world often tend to adopt this systematic encouragement for selfishness by developing warped interpretations of their sacred teachings.

True, the authentic parts of the hadith corpus tells us to avoid distressing our brothers and sisters in faith or in humanity, to the best of our abilities.

But many Muslims in the modern world want to misinterpret this as meaning that they can reprimand and even reject and humiliate their spouses or their friends who cause them any amount of bother or “distress”.

What they miss or deliberately want to miss here is the other part of that hadith-based authentic teaching.

In that quite well-known report and the ones similar to it, after advising us to avoid distressing people to the best of our abilities, the Prophet (peaceful security be on him and God bless him) continues to warn us that one of the rights of other believers (and other humans, who are all “potential believers”) over us is that we tolerate the difficulties and bother that they cause us to experience.  It’s right here that the last Messenger of God shatters all of the modern, individualistic mentality and exposes its untenable moral pretensions!

He teaches that people’s rights over us, and our rights on them, include the right of being tolerated for the difficulties that we cause each other, of course unless we try to distress or harm each other intentionally and with ill will.

. . .

As always, the last Messenger of God, Muhammad the Trustworthy of Mecca, spoke the truth and the best wisdom. He has guided us, with the revealed inspiration of God to him, once more in our daily lives in the modern world, through the authentic and “rigorously verified” reports of some of our virtuous Muslim predecessors from his teachings. God bless him and give him peaceful security. God have mercy on all our predecessors in our tradition of sincere faith and critical, wise, reasonable thinking. God guide(s) all those who want to attain the correct guidance in life. Surely God is always with those who avoid evil and the just punishment of God following such deeds and with those who work good deeds.

A literalist Biblical faith is not the only faith possible. Even not all fundamentalist Christians believe such numbers to be literal. Thus when you make fun of such people, you are making fun of that particular individual and those who think like him. You are just entertaining yourselves and pampering yourselves concerning the way you approach monotheism. The religion that we believe is authentic God-revealed religion thus remains untouched by the things you say. In other words, you deceive yourselves.

As for me, I am a Muslim who believes in the Qur’an and the rigorously authenticated sayings (sing. hadith, pl. ahadith) of the Prophet Muhammad (May God bless him and give him blissful security). Neither the Qur’an nor the authentic sayings of the blessed Prophet include a passage which tells us that humanity is only around six thousand years old. Only some inauthentic reports of hadith include such a claim. These are almost beyond doubt forgeries introduced to a few Muslim circles in the first and second centuries after the Prophet, by some ex-Christians and ex-Jews who could not help incorporating their old tradition of story-telling into their new religion too. These are terminologically ”weak hadith reports” attributed to the Prophet but not belonging to him, not only in the view of the present-day Muslims who know some science but according to the masters of the study of the methodology of hadith who lived over a millenium plus two hundred years ago, at some period quite close to the Prophet’s lifetime. Hence, Islam doesn’t endorse the unambiguously unscientific and false view that humanity is only around six thousand years old now. On the contrary, quite an authentic hadith states that around 224, 000 prophets (124, 000 in another report) have lived since the first prophet and first human being called Adam. This implies a huge time span for human history indeed, thereby agreeing roughly with the latest scientific findings that humans (including the so-called homo erectus people and various later human types) have been around for 2 million years.

As for the universe’s having been created in six days by God,  the Qur’an does mention that He created the universe, including the earth and the heavens, in six days: However, it is clear from various verses of the Qur’an that the six days are not necessarily six earth days as we know them at all. Please continue to read here my mention and then quotation of the magnificent verses which prove that the concept of a “day” in the Quran is quite a relative one, which may point to a time span covering thousands or more of years.  

In one verse, the Qur’an mentions a day which lasts 1000 years¹ by our (humans’) way of calculating time and in another verse it mentions a day that lasts 50 000 years². Therefore, we infer from such verses of the Qur’an itself that the six days of the creation of the universe need not be literally six days the way we count time. Each of them are thus very likely to be thousands, millions, billions of years.

Dear deniers of religion, you may find a lot of holes rightly or wrongly in almost every person’s religious beliefs. But at the basis of everything, there is the question whether all this meaning, life and love that we perceive in the universe around us can stem from a meaningless, lifeless and loveless nonsense, i.e. the unconscious material universe. The answer is a definite no.

Then the second fundamental question is whether all this meaning, love and life will just cease to exist one day without returning ever again and will cause all the past lives which we used to experience so vividly to seem in the end like a meaningless hoax, a strange hoax that was played by nobody…

Reality is a serious thing. It doesn’t play hoaxes. Nothing will just cease to exist for eternity and our lives are not a meaningless hoax. Think and you will realize it. The lifeless, purposeless, unconscious material universe didn’t create meaning, life and love. Material universe itself and we living beings were therefore created by a conscious, powerful and good creator, who necessarily cares about His creatures dearly enough to sent messengers into them in order to guide them and prevent them from despairing of the life after death.

We believers have always called Him God or Yahweh or Allah etc. Not only His direct messages to humankind through His messengers but the very logic and reason that He bestowed on us from birth tells us this: God or Allah, i.e. the Ultimate Reality, will prove us that He played no hoax on us in this life of ours and therefore He will re-create us on the Judgement Day for a better universe. He has already proven that to us theoretically as I’ve been trying to make clear in this post. The proof on the Judgment Day will be the practical one.  This is indeed the truth and only those who listen in order to really understand can receive the message of the truth correctly.

Footnotes:

¹Qur’an 32:5 – He rules (all) affairs from the heavens to the earth: in the end will (all affairs) go up to Him, on a Day, the space whereof will be (as) a thousand years of your reckoning.

²Qur’an 70:4 – The angels and the spirit ascend unto him in a Day the measure whereof is (as) fifty thousand years.

Both translations are from the famous translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali.

Certain prejudices, misconceptions and urban myths abound in the U.S. as well as the entire “West” regarding Turkey and the conception and practice of Islam within it. Unfortunately and rather strangely, some Muslims in the West, especially those educated in Western educational institutions, believe in many of these as well. We really need to remove some of them as soon as possible. Let us examine this issue in the context provided by a specific objection to the activities of a Turkish Muslim group.

A Bosnian Muslim woman wrote on the internet: “If they [the Islamic movement of Turkish origin led by Fethullah Gülen] were concerned about reaching out and bettering the Ummah in the real meaning of Islam, then why not start with Turkey itself! Start up grass roots organizations there, squeeze the secularist oppression and then talk about reaching out to the privileged phD converts!” I just want to answer this objection of hers and below yet another one, so that she and others who think as she does can understand why this movement behaves in some ways they find objectionable and that they appreciate the problems of these people that force them not to act otherwise. The other answer will pertain to the alleged adoption of secularism “by the Turks”.

In reality, “reaching out to the PhD converts” as well as many other sorts of people around the world is a thousand times easier and more efficient than focusing entirely on ”setting up grass roots organizations” in Turkey, let alone “squeezing the secularist oppression”. Even the supposedly liberal and libertarian powers of the West give only lip service to the legitimate rights of the religious Muslims of Turkey. They are mostly good friends with the secularist oppressors that have been mentioned above, in actual practice. When they have to take real action regarding Islam in Turkey or, in general, the Muslim world as in the case of the hijab ban in Turkey, they side with the secularist establishment. For example, the European Court of Human Rights has decided twice, and hence without a further chance of legal objection, that the hijab ban in Turkey is not a breach of human rights at all. That’s why the sisters and brothers in that Islamic group are trying to reach out to the West firstly. We cannot end the secularist oppression in Turkey without gaining the hearts and the support of the people in the West first  and foremost. Therefore, these people are using the avenue that is natural and potentially more efficient for change within Turkey. It’d be unwise and unjust to blame them for that.

Actually, the most oppressive side of secularism in Turkey is not the brutal force kind of oppression as in many other, much less democratic Middle-Eastern countries. It’s rather disinformation and defamation against Islam and Islamic figures in the country.

The same Bosnian Muslim woman also wrote: “Yes, Turks are more educated than the norm, only because they have not been colonized and exploited to the extent Middle Eastern and South Asian countries have been for years and years. They are fortunate enough to have survived this trivial period in history and paid for it by accepting Secularism! The other countries didn’t want to leave Islam, and our price was defeat, humiliation, exploitation and war!”

Turks never left Islam. Besides, Turks also paid the price of “defeat, humiliation, exploitation and war” as well as a terrible series of genocides that took place against them in the Balkans, approximately during the last one hundred years of the Ottoman State.

Turks did not secularize themselves. The rulers who seized the government of Turkey through many sorts of intrigues after the victory of the Anatolian War of Independence in 1922 (a truly religion based movement for the Turkish masses if not for some of the elites who had already been secularized and westernized and who had already become nationalists) were western-educated and acted as homegrown western imperialists. Most of these ruling bureaucratic elites did leave Islam and imposed secularism on the Turkish masses. They misinformed the Turks about their religion too. That is why most Turks today have liberal or nationalistic rather than ummah-embracing opinions. They have been brainwashed by the secularist, westernist regime into believing that Islam forbids polygyny and that the shariah is traditional and pre-Islamic Arab law, not Islamic law. Turks are at least as Muslim as the rest of the Muslim world, but they have been deceived. They were conquered politically and militarily from within, by outwardly Turkish and Muslim agents of western colonialism, without being allowed to realize it, except some intellectually and religiously luckier Turks who are few in number nowadays, though possibly and hopefully increasing in number.

Turks were at least as poor and underdeveloped as the rest of the Muslim world when the Ottoman Empire was finally ended completely by the Western “Great Powers” around 1920. From what my 1915-born maternal grandfather, who is now bed-ridden, told us, they did not have the material means to remove their hunger sufficiently let alone organize an effective Islamic resistance against the imposition of secularism.

But they did try to resist every way they could. For example, when the Kemalist regime banned the recitation of the Qur’an in the original Arabic, they hid their Qurans everwhere they could find and continued to recite the Quran in secret until the end of the ban. The propaganda of the Kemalists was that they were encouraging the reading of the Quran in Turkish in this way. However, that was utter nonsense because few people in Turkey could read Turkish in the newly promulgated Latin-based script. Besides, actually they would not trust the official translations of the Kemalist despots either… So my grandfather and his elders were sometimes caught when reciting or teaching the Qur’an and thus were punished but they never stopped. Even this shows how much the Turkish masses loved Islam and clung to it as far as they were able to.

I am among the minority who is luckier in terms of faith and intellectual awareness if not lucky in terms of socio-economic conditions. I know much more than the average Turk about the true characteristics of Islam and the shariah as well as the history of how we’ve been brainwashed by the secularist elites. That’s because I have always been interested in religion and history more than any average person in the world could be. My education in a liberal English-speaking Turkish university (a history education) also helped me to think beyond the borders of the Turkish official history. Also, forgive my sounding as if boasting, I was intellectually braver than most ordinary people who were deceived by the state-imposed propaganda that depicted religious people and even local imams as corrupt, narrow-minded, backward and outright evil people. Fethullah Gulen, as a former imam and preacher, is still depicted like that today by the so-called “mainstream” media. But not everyone in the world as well as in Turkey is supposed to be as intellectually lucky and intellectually aware as I am, and that is why I cannot blame most of my Turkish brothers and sisters who cannot question the official dogmas of the secular state imposed on them let alone struggle against what you quite aptly call the secularist oppression. They are forced to believe that the shariah is separate from Islam and to believe in many other deliberately false items of propaganda.

I hope this explanation will help foster some understanding for the Turks and the Fethullah Gulen movement among the Muslim brothers and sisters who read this. And I hope that it will show to all readers, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, how ridiculous are the arguments of the secularist elites regarding the dominant religious and secularism-related situation in Turkey as well as what the supposedly pro-Islamist, elected AK Party government is trying to do.

Then I wrote an answer to it, which I want to share on my own brand-new blog in English –i.e. this very one. So, returning to the direly problematic above statement, let me continue with my answer to it…

To be direct, this statement is ridiculous. Neither the Qur’an says such a thing, nor anything like that can be inferred from the Qur’an or from the literature of the sayings of the Prophet (blessings and peace be on him). All who believe such statements concerning Islam, you all must certainly check your sources about Islam which are misleading and (excuse me for having to say this) even deluding you.

Well, then let me elaborate on where suicide attacks and indiscriminate violence are situated in the religion of Islam…

Most Muslim scholars point out that killing a non-combatant or a child or a woman, etc. even in a state of war is forbidden. Moreover, suicide is also strictly forbidden. Actually many scholars think, based on the Qur’an and the authentic sayings of the Prophet, that not only is suicide one of the most cardinal sins but it is also a statement of unbelief. For these reasons, most Muslim scholars condemn the suicide bombings altogether.

Only some Muslim scholars justify the suicide bombings by the Palestinian operatives in Israel and not anywhere else in the world. And most importantly, their justification is not based on the Qur’an and the sunnah (sunnah: the field of study examining the exemplary lifestyle and extra-Quranic teaching of the Prophet), but on the general human principles of necessity and self-defence.

The reasoning of these few scholars goes like this: “The Palestinians don’t have even one thousandth of the armed power of the Israelis. Because other pseudo-Muslim regimes in the world are sell-outs to the Western European- and North American-dominated oppressive world system, Palestinians cannot hope outside Muslim help either. Under these severe conditions, it is impossible for them to confront the Israeli army and defend Palestine and get back the occupied territories by conventional Islamic methods of military resistance. Therefore, out of the general principle of extreme necessity, it is permissible for them to use unconventional, asymmetrical methods of warfare and carry out suicide attacks.”

This is those scholars’ justification for their opinion of the permissibility of the suicide attacks against Israel. But to rehearse what I have already stated above, most Muslim scholars do not agree with them and do not find this justification legitimate in Islamic terms.

For your information, the American political science professor Robert Pape made a research about the suicide attacks a few years ago and found out that in contrast to what the western media coverage strongly suggests, most suicide attacks in the world are carried out by secular and especially socialist-atheist groups like the Tamil guerrillas in South Asia. 95 per cent of the attacks were made by secular groups and only a few per cent by Muslims or nominal Muslims. Since then, the occupation of Iraq by the American army caused an increase in the percentage of the suicide attacks by Muslim groups. However, secular terrorist groups are still the major ones in using this method. Unfortunately, the North-America- and West-Europe-dominated world media are bent on hiding the true situation and demonizing the Muslim world and the religion of Islam for ideological and political vested interests.

Professor Pape’s conclusion from this research of his is that suicide bombing has nothing to do with religion or a particular religion at all. All it has to do is with excessive frustration and lack of any alternative methods of warfare.

P.S. Following is a hyper-link to a newspaper column about a conference in which Professor Robert Pape took part. The article makes references to his study, elaborating the subject further with more information from Pape’s study and argumentation. Click here please for that article.