Kritik Bakış
The word usûl in Arabic is the plural of asl: foundations, roots, ancestors, principles… Therefore, the usûl of something means to examine its roots. The relationship between usûl (methodology) and asâs (essence) does not merely denote a legal hierarchy. It provides a framework suggesting that one cannot delve directly into the heart of a matter without first addressing its foundation. The principle “procedure precedes substance”, succinctly expressed in the Majallah and still one of the fundamental principles of contemporary law, necessitates an inquiry into the form and manner in which a legal issue is raised before examining the issue itself. You might have a just cause, but if you file your case in the Ankara courts instead of Istanbul, it can be dismissed on procedural grounds. The court in Ankara will not say, “Let’s see if this person is right,” but instead will ask first, “Was the case properly filed? Was the procedure correct?” If not, it will dismiss the case without even looking at the merits. This is essential to preserve public order and avoid chaos. It is also necessary for the establishment of standards in justice and for approaching objective fairness.
Modern science, in distinguishing itself from the past, places its greatest emphasis on its methodology—its usûl. Long before modern law or modern science, Islamic sciences had already emphasized usûl in remarkable detail. For over a thousand years, Islamic universities (madrasahs) have taught usûl al-fiqh (methodology of fiqh) alongside jurisprudence (fiqh), usûl al-tafsir (methodology of tafsir) with Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), and usûl al-hadith (methodology of hadith) with the thoughts of the Prophet Muhammad –pbuh (hadith). As far as we know, no earlier example in human history demonstrates such a detailed and disciplined engagement with methodology. Even after this, it took centuries for the West to develop a comparable emphasis on methodology.
Although in this article I’ve used the terms methodology and usûl interchangeably, their historical connotations contain important nuances. Methodology, of Latin origin, is a concept largely elaborated within the context of modern science and tends to imply empirical methods, even if unintentionally. Usûl, on the other hand, is of Arabic origin and developed within the framework of Islamic sciences, where logic and language hold a more central role. For pragmatic reasons, however, I will continue to use these terms as near-synonyms, embracing all these layers.
Usûl pertains to principles, whereas focusing on substance without usûl concerns itself only with outcomes. From here, one can project onto moral philosophies: Can we violate procedure to eliminate a terrorist organization? Is it acceptable to bypass proper procedures (a lesser evil) to eliminate a greater evil (terror)? Will we construct a hierarchy among evils and attempt to optimize, or will we seek to avoid all evil regardless of consequences? If a corruption investigation is conducted properly but yields an unfavorable result—or if we believe those enforcing the procedures are applying double standards—can we then reject the entire process? Even exceptions must follow a methodology.
Today, whenever popular debates erupt around law, religion, medicine, or similar topics, a common problem underlying the unproductive bickering is a lack of usûl. We observe that those who cannot agree on usûl continue to argue endlessly over specific details without first acknowledging this deeper disagreement. If someone claims, for example, “Drinking water does not break the fast; this is a common misconception,” the ensuing debate becomes frustrating and fruitless unless the claimant’s methodology of reaching this conclusion is also examined. Usûl is needed in everyday life as well.
One striking feature of wealthy Western societies is how thoroughly social life, business, and education are regulated by detailed rules, protocols, and conventions. So extensive are these rules that following them can sometimes distance people from reasonable outcomes, mechanize behavior, deter initiative in emergencies, and reduce individuals to passive, robotic agents. Isn’t there a middle ground?
In truth, what we encounter here is quite different from what was discussed at the beginning of this essay. The necessity of methodology in knowledge production—whether logic-based, narrative-based, empirical, or Foucauldian—derives from different dynamics than the need for method in social life (law/bureaucracy). The necessity to establish legal order arises from the very condition of social coexistence, but bureaucracy in the Western sense becomes necessary only from a Weberian perspective. In alignment with the needs of capitalist production, societies have become vast machines run by overly bureaucratized individuals who are alienated from their work, fragmented by reductive specialization, and disconnected from the essence of what they do. In such societies, civic duties pertain more to substance than to methodology. What is systematically overlooked—morality—aligns more closely with the concept of usûl as presented in the title of this article.
Our failure to reach the destination is a result of lacking usûl. For at least two centuries, a significant portion of our intellectuals have seen the positivist scientific methodology of the West and its Weberian bureaucratic structures (even though the latter emerged later as a formal theory) as the only viable path forward. During this time, Western thinkers such as Marx, Kuhn, and Foucault were deconstructing and critiquing the very model we were imitating. Meanwhile, we neither kept pace with these developments nor followed our own intellectuals’ aspirations in a meaningful way. Instead, we condemned our classical methodologies as if they alone were to blame—and in doing so, and in the end, we found ourselves deprived of any coherent methodology.
