Ahmet Özcan
First Publication: www.haber10.com – 2007
Source: Teolojinin Jeopolitiği, Yarın Yayınları, 2010
Western Theses Regarding to the Civilization
Social sciences such as history, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology are products of the colonial experience of the West. France’s process of colonizing Africa gave rise to Egypt-centered theories of civilization, while Britain’s colonization of India produced India-centered theories.
Europe’s internal wars, which peaked in the 16th century, the birth of Protestantism, the weakening of Church authority, and the colonial bourgeoisie’s search for political alternatives outside the Church also led to a search for non-Christian origins of civilization.
French freemasonry, in its struggle against the Church, developed the scientific tradition of the Andalusian Enlightenment through Egypt-centered civilization theses. Especially during the wars between the Andalusian states and the Church for dominance over the Mediterranean from the 11th to the 15th centuries, many merchant-pirate lodges such as the Templars (Knights Templar), who are today portrayed as mysterious organizations in conspiracy theories, controlled Mediterranean trade against the Vatican with Andalusian support. Members of such groups, later declared heretical by the Church and tried in the Inquisitions, found support in France, which challenged the Pope and declared its political autonomy. This cooperation, developing in parallel with Protestantism, led to the masonicization of the theo-political identity of the emerging bourgeoisie in France. (The formula called secularism is a political technique developed by this masonic effort against Vatican domination, and in essence aims to protect Protestant-Jewish religiosity against Catholicism.)
The Egypt-based civilization theses that facilitated France’s attempt to establish a root connection with Africa, which it chose for colonization, are products of this economic and political process.
Until the mid-18th century, Egypt was the special field of interest for the European intelligentsia, and the source of theoretical knowledge was the accumulated Islamic scholarship of Andalusia. Works by figures such as Averroes, Avicenna, and Alpharabius were translated into Latin languages and published under different names. This intellectual leap continued, also under the influence of political necessities, with the thesis of Greek civilization. The Greek-Roman civilization theses claimed that all knowledge, philosophy, and cultural roots of humanity originated from Greece. The desire to support the Greeks’ revolts for independence against the Ottoman Empire also played a role in this. As a result, the views based on the Greek-Roman-Christian synthesis developed by German thinkers remained influential until the 1820s.
While this internal struggle continued in continental Europe, the British ‘discovery’ of India was underway. Göttingen University, established with the support of the East India Company and the German-origin English king and the German king, put forward the Indo-European civilization thesis, rooted in India, against both the Egyptian and Greek civilization theses. Based on the idea of Aryan racial superiority, this thesis traced the origins of Europeans to Indo-Caucasian communities and fabricated the myth of cultural continuity through the invented Indo-European language group.
This view, dominant throughout the 19th century, gained a different dimension with the ‘discovery’ of Mesopotamia alongside the discovery and growing importance of oil in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This time, the first roots of civilization were ‘found’ in Mesopotamia. But India still remained important. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, British archaeologists discovered the Sumerians, while Germans discovered Troy and the Hittites. These discoveries, carried out on the basis of Aryan race theory, were further developed in parallel with imperialist aims. Thus the Sumerians, Hittites, Hyksos, Trojans (Ionians), Lydians, Urartians (Armenians), and other peoples who supposedly came later to the region through migrations became Aryan peoples who had established civilization. In other words, all ancient civilizations such as India, Sumer, Babylon, Phoenicia, Egypt, the Hittites, and Greece were portrayed as the works of Aryans, the ancestors of Europeans. And Europe was continuing its mission of enlightenment and civilization, namely bringing civilization to the remaining primitive-barbaric peoples. The source of these historical myths, which today we teach even to our own children without question, is precisely this effort to legitimize the partition of our lands between European colonialists.
The Jews, in opposition to these theses, embraced the Egyptian theory. Greece’s source was Egypt, and Egypt’s source was Phoenicia. Implicitly, they appropriated the idea that Phoenicia was a continuation or component of the Jerusalem-centered Jewish states and that it had undertaken the mission of transmitting all the region’s civilizational accumulations to one another. Yes, it was true that Egypt was also the source of Greece, but it had nothing to do with Judaism. One reason why Jews are so occupied with the Egyptian pyramids today is to find material that would validate this thesis; another is the effort to prevent others from discovering possible information such as that Joseph and Moses were not Jewish and that Jews had nothing to do with the ‘Exodus from Egypt.’ ‘Discovery’ belongs only to them!
The main motive underlying the Europeans’ effort not only to colonize but also to find roots they never had is the impulse to claim superiority. This excessive emphasis on what they lacked and the urge to compensate for the fact that they did not exist in history with an intense claim that they did exist… This is where Judaism comes in. The Jews themselves first appeared on the stage of history in the early periods, in the 6th century BCE, thanks to the Persian invasion, as stewards of Persian imperialism, and later fabricated a history for themselves. The Europeans, who had always viewed the followers of the Old Testament (Torah) as theological rivals but felt inferior to them because it predated the New Testament, confronted them with a claim they had learned from them: the Chosen People…
While serving as stewards for the Persians, the Jews imitated the arrogance of nobility and superiority that the Persian Empire had developed by learning from the Assyrian-Babylonian-Egyptian civilizations, constructed their internal tribalism with the claim of being the ‘chosen people’, and clung to history with this motive. Europeans, 2,500 years later, inherited the claim of being ‘chosen, privileged, superior’ by imitating the Jews.
The ‘white, Western, civilized man’ and the ‘superior nation chosen by God’ are in competition with one another, insulting, exploiting, humiliating, and attempting to enslave all people outside themselves.
And they present this competition to humanity as the science of history.
The truth lies outside all of this. The ‘Jewish’ communities, the collective name of Indo-Iranian-Middle Eastern usurer-merchants who clung to history by turning what they learned from the Persians into dynamics of internal solidarity, and the Celtic-Germanic-Anglo-Saxon tribes, who lived as primitive tribes outside the basins of civilization since ancient times, are spiritually akin, even if not racially related. For throughout thousands of years of human history, hundreds of civilizations have risen and fallen, many peoples have appeared and disappeared from the stage of history. But there has been no other example of communities as hostile to humanity, arrogant, self-satisfied, and aggressive as the ‘Jews’ and the Western barbarians.
Of course, all the theses related to the history that they tell are lies. They carried material findings obtained from archaeological excavations conducted like banditry across all civilization basins to their capitals, twisting and bending them as they wished and turning them into material suitable for their theses. One should also doubt both the translations of these findings and the theses built upon them. Historical materials correspond to reality only if they are interpreted within theoretical frameworks based on a consciousness of belonging to the family of humanity.
Western Theses Regarding to the History
Like the modern social sciences, history became a scientific discipline together with the age of capitalism. Modern science of history begins ‘history’ with the transition to settled life. The earlier period is called ‘prehistory.’ Anthropology was invented for prehistory. Anthropology, which is classified into two main branches, physical and cultural anthropology, and sub-branches such as paleontology, primatology, ethnology, philology, and social anthropology, draws its data from the analysis of fossils and remains of life obtained from archaeological excavations, myths (legends, myths, and epics), and the adaptation of information obtained from observing currently living indigenous tribes to the past. Anthropology begins human history with tool-making and the use of fire. Before this, it searches for a semi-animal (ape-like) species.
Western anthropological disciplines dominated by an evolutionary perspective invented a view of humanity and history progressing in a straight line from a primitive beginning. The classifications of the Ice Age and afterward, Ancient Age, Classical Age, Middle Ages, Modern Age; the distinctions of Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; the periodization into Paleolithic (pre-agricultural) and Neolithic (agricultural); the schemas of primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, and capitalist societies; and similar categorizations at different levels of specialization are all products of anthropology. This field, which developed from the 19th century onward, like the other social sciences, is ultimately the product of a Eurocentric bourgeois perspective that on the one hand sought a history of humanity and society outside the religious narratives of the Church, and on the other hand sought the historical validation of Western-white-superior human racism.
Undoubtedly, extensive research, field studies, and meticulous and detailed cultural examinations have produced a considerable accumulation of data. However, because of the exaggerated outcome of opposition to the Church resulting in the rejection of all religious knowledge (or rather, the rejection of all religious knowledge except for the worship of so-called science as a new religiosity) and because of the determining influence of racist perspectives, anthropological theses must be evaluated through critical scrutiny.
The science of history beginning with writing, however, developed on the basis of more concrete data. Western historians, who classified the period from the invention of writing to the birth of Jesus as Before Christ and the period after Jesus as Anno Domini, developed written historical science itself from the very beginning through an approach centered on the Western white man. Eurocentric historiography, like anthropology, is a bourgeois science. The meticulousness in collecting and compiling written documents, combined with unscientific biases and motives regarding their interpretation and analysis, has shaped the framework of dominant historical scholarship.
In short, as with all sciences originating in the West, the doubts arising from the reasons mentioned above in the science of history are greater than the truths that have been uncovered. Moreover, many efforts to correct distortions and errors that emerged when colonial intellectuals in recent times stopped merely repeating what they had learned from the West and turned toward alternative and indigenous searches for history have not yet been transformed into historiography or entered academic literature. This is because, just as in the field of the positive sciences, Western universities continue to maintain a patent (approval) monopoly in the social sciences as well, and every new piece of information or analysis that refutes the dogmas of these temples of science is either ignored or condemned to severe attacks and excluded. In fact, many scholars and theses excluded in this way were later appropriated as if they were Western discoveries, inevitably filtered through their framework and with their meanings altered. (1)
Despite all this doubt and manipulation, science is, of course, one of the sources that guide humanity and reveal the secrets of human beings, society, and nature. However, as with everything else, in science, and in this case, in the science of history, having a perspective, that is, an idea, is more important than having knowledge. Sometimes having information without having ideas can mislead a person. Moreover, information alone means nothing to someone who does not know how to use or interpret it. This is even more true today, when every kind of information can easily be obtained through the internet. In this context, the science of history gains meaning only within a worldview and philosophy. It should not be forgotten that dominant historical science and knowledge also rest upon a philosophy and worldview (the capitalist Western system). Therefore, it can be said that humanity is still at the very beginning of the path toward developing a truly universal and objective science of history.
A perspective on history is essentially a perspective on humanity, time, and the future. In this sense, perceptions of humanity, the purpose of human existence, the source of good and evil, the meaning of life, and ideas about the beginning and end of the world are subjects of religious belief or philosophical thought. Religious or philosophical views inevitably shape one’s perspective on history. In this sense, history is an extremely ideological science.
Ruling classes, the ruled, people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds, states, nations, and ideological groups all have separate views of history. In other words, knowledge of the same events can be narrated by different people or groups in ways that lead to different conclusions. This also shows how closely history is related to the present day. Any eye looking at a previous time-history-is looking from within its own current condition, time, and place, interpreting information through a filter of selective perception shaped by religious, philosophical, or professional identity. Therefore, the contributions Westerners have made to human history through their own ideological purposes and perspectives correspond only to a reality that concerns and expresses themselves.
That is, neither the schemes described about the first humans nor their economic, political, social, or theological characteristics are as the Westerners describe them. In fact, it is impossible to know the truth about this matter. Starting from fossil bones, ruins of graves, temples or dwellings, fragments of inscriptions, or findings such as paintings and sculptures, it is extremely difficult to obtain objective knowledge about a period beyond mere speculation. Genuine scientific thinking accepts this impossibility. For science is fundamentally experiment, observation, and experience. It is the concrete analysis of concrete facts. In history, especially in pre-literate and ancient times, no scientific measure or method can arrive at absolute truths. Therefore, all branches of historiography developed in the West-anthropology, archaeology, ethnology- are merely material for mental exercises necessary to understand the present and shape the future. In other words, our minds create a kind of simulation by imagining actions supposedly carried out by our ancestors in the past, thereby developing forms of explanation about people and events or testing their own explanations through the past.
The Effect of the Understanding of God and Time on History
On the other hand, one’s perspective on time also determines one’s understanding of history. For example, for people who do not believe in a life after death (the afterlife), history is a past consisting only of events that happened and ended, observed like natural phenomena and having nothing beyond them. Instead of a holistic consciousness of humanity, there is only the display of material human actions. According to this perspective, the advanced thinking animal-human, as a product of nature, has both a beginning and a history of progress. This history will also have an end. Just as there is no before the beginning, no reason or how, there is likewise nothing after the end. Supposedly, speculating about what existed before the beginning and after death, as matters that cannot be measured or verified, has been left outside science to religion and philosophy. Yet the stories of the first beginning and the long historical adventure itself are equally unmeasurable and unverifiable; in other words, in reality nothing more than a collection of unscientific claims. This materialist perspective is in fact an animist perspective, and it studies the human being, seen as the child of Mother Nature, entirely within the measures of material development. According to this approach, the first beginning period is humanity’s childhood period, and the anthropologist-historian, attributing ‘childish actions’ to the first humans, raises humanity through progressing history (time) in a kind of parental role. In other words, the evolutionary-materialist schema of humanity, which claims that early humans were creatures who, because they were not yet capable of reasoning, believed in totems and taboos, feared everything, invented parental spirits and gods to overcome their fears, found solace by offering sacrifices to them, socialized through collective rituals, and evolved (grew) from a primate (ape-like) state to a more developed species, essentially expresses the imagination of those who fabricated this schema, driven by the necessity of explaining life without God.
Likewise, Jewish-Christian and Muslim believers, who believe that everything was suddenly and perfectly created by God, that the first human (Adam) was a single man, that Eve was then created from him (from his rib), and that humanity later multiplied from them, display through such an explanatory style the feeling of proving the power and sovereignty of the God they believe in, or else outwardly express the expectation that through faith in this magical hand and power of God, their own problems will somehow also be resolved. Religious beliefs do not claim scientific certainty or correctness. On the contrary, beliefs consist of metaphysical ‘meanings’ that prefer miracles over facts. One either believes or does not believe. But what is more lamentable are the inconsistencies and weaknesses in the condescending attitude of Western scientism, which claims to be able to discover absolute knowledge and truth, often with the intention of opposing and refuting religious beliefs.
For example, it is perhaps one of the most tragic aspects of Western scholarship that historians, who still cannot offer a consistent explanation for the purpose of the famous Egyptian pyramids-which stand intact in all their glory, with their inscriptions and even mummies-write history with an air of almost absolute certainty about the first humans and the beginning of life.
Yet there is no need for such explanations of the first humans and the beginning either to reject God or to believe in Him. Faith is a state, and people believe according to their own states. The faith of atheists or agnostics is likewise suited to their own condition. Humanity’s use of both God and godlessness as instruments for its own condition must be an old habit.
In fact, the truest historical knowledge is the analysis of the present day, the people and events of today. From the present, it is possible to reach more accurate conclusions because it rests on concrete experience and observation, and because the imagination and interpretation of one’s condition projected onto history are still being lived vividly, making it easier to arrive at desired conclusions through concrete confrontations and critiques rather than unnecessary additions and interpretations.
The human mind necessarily operates through an external phenomenon. The human brain functions through a mathematical rhythm and the faculty of counting-ordering. The faculty of ordering organizes, connects, selects, and encodes phenomena through a kind of mental movement by arranging everything perceived in parallel with the rhythm of nature and matter. Language, thought, music, behavior, and even emotions function through this mathematical mechanism. More precisely, it is thanks to this mechanism that these human abilities and forms of expression have developed. This functioning of the human brain occurs in relation to external facts and phenomena. The mode of relationship established with all the phenomena of the lived moment can be analyzed by adapting it to history through a similar ordering mechanism.
Progressivist History and Its Theses Regarding to the Civilization
The present state of the human species contains sufficient information to understand the past. The rhythm of ordering requires looking at history not as an old residue left at the bottom, but as different manifestations of a vitality that still continues to live. The rhythm of today’s life also belongs to yesterday. In other words, the past is not a completed graveyard. Nothing has yet fully ended. Life continues. Likewise, humanity today actually lives, with all its diversity, possibilities, forms of development, modes of thought and belief, almost as if in a time tunnel or a living museum. In this sense, modern anthropology’s reaching interpretations about the past by observing tribes still living today appears more scientific than a historiographical method that comes from the past to the present through a straight line. It is also possible to adapt this method to modern societies and recent history. For example, minimalist historiography and cultural historiography, that is, the kind of historiography that seeks to understand societies through tales, epics, plays, idioms, food, clothing, modes of production, beliefs, and language, has a more scientific character than the kind of historiography that seeks to validate itself based on positivist and/or religious dogmas. In a sense, instead of schematic and event-based historiography, a historiography based on details, attentive to all concrete conditions, and allowing for multiple possibilities is a more suitable method for understanding humanity and the past. Likewise, the fears, joys, conflicts, beliefs, and habits of modern humans should be understood as phenomena that also existed among the earliest humans and arose from the same causes. Domination, ambition, submission, obedience, rebellion, love, hatred… All these emotions have manifested themselves in the same way among all humans and have existed throughout history in the same manner. The history of humanity can even be analyzed through the examination of a single person.
Classical Western historical schemes examine humanity by dividing it into separate units and categorizing it according to particular and local factors. Moreover, they assign separate and arbitrary values to all human phenomena: “Today is more advanced than yesterday. What is old has been surpassed. The settled is superior to the nomad. The nomad is superior to the hunter-gatherer. The first humans were primitive. As fire, writing, tool-making, the wheel, and money were invented, humanity passed from primitiveness to civilization. Every stage developed humanity and contributed to its rise above animality.”
As we stated above, this perspective should be understood as the projection and imagination of analyses and purposes concerning the present and future onto the past. By glorifying their own past three hundred years, Western societies have constructed a world out of their own psychology. This construction, hiding behind the taboo of scientificity, has been presented to humanity as unquestionable and immutable absolute knowledge and truth. Moreover, Western constructions do not see humanity as a single essence. The primitive, the developed, the civilized, the barbarian, the settled, the nomadic, the Asian, the European; all are separate beings. History is a Tower of Babel in which these separate beings are interpreted, valued, and advanced according to the level reached by Western societies. And at the very top stand the Westerners.
The medieval period in particular created an extremely complicated and complex collective subconscious among Westerners. Analyzing this subconscious would make it easier to understand Western thought and behavior. At the very least, what is being argued here is that despite all their claims to scientificity and prestige, Western historical disciplines are no different from the ancestral tales of an ordinary peasant.
As a result, a rich body of historical material has emerged that did not exist in the past and is a product of the modern age. Past societies did not value their own histories as much as modern societies do. Apart from narratives recorded by states, the written and unwritten materials they left behind show a kind of indifference toward the past that modern historiography cannot explain. If we look at it through the lens of the historical methodology we value, in reality, the vast majority of people today, that is, ordinary people, are not very interested in the past. A few secondhand pieces of information and many legends… Crude glorifications and vilifications. Summarized interpretations. In nearly all societies, this is the extent of the relationship ordinary people, educated or not, have with history. The science and interest in history in modern times are actually important not for ordinary people but for states. Modern nation-states became so interested in history in order to invent pasts and roots for themselves. The bourgeoisie in particular, during the 18th and 19th centuries, invented the science of history by dismantling the myths of the feudal era derived from kingship and the Church, in order to shape the nations of the new states it sought to detach from both. Thus, the fictional nature of modern Western historiography, its exaggerated claims to certainty despite this fiction, and its efforts to know everything, solve everything, and uncover all ancient truths took shape during the West’s transition out of the Middle Ages and its establishment of a new order. The subsequent application of this effort to the entirety of human history is a product of the colonial and imperialist eras. Now there were no longer kings and churches, but societies to be exploited and ‘civilized.’ The roots of Western historiography can be found in this extremely bloody and dirty past.
In reality, in ontological, physiological, and metaphysical terms, there is neither progress nor regression at the level of humanity. Morally speaking, we might argue that history experiences a kind of cyclical ebb and flow. Material civilization, however, as in today’s world, emerged in the past simultaneously with humanity’s first awareness of being human, depending on the degree and manner in which people used their brains, abilities, and conscience, and produced similar manifestations. Hunter-gatherer people, nomadic communities, villages, towns, cities, systems of governance, property, and technologies of war all produced forms of material civilization and lifestyles in the past, in accordance with the reality that the same human essence and abilities produce the same results under the same conditions. What matters is not this common human ability to produce, which we all know very well, but rather for what purpose people ultimately used what they produced.
For example, along the entire global axis between the 25th and 35th parallels, that is, in the temperate climate zone, the nomadic and settled beliefs, worship practices, lifestyles, trade methods, and forms of governance have remained almost the same from the earliest archaeological findings to the present day. Likewise, similar material lifestyles developed throughout the tropical climate zones. Material civilization arises from the inverse relationship between needs and limited means. Since the climate and abundance of tropical regions do not create the need to invent new things, technology as the measure of material civilization, develops slowly in these regions. Yet Western anthropologists look at these naturally self-sufficient communities and define them as primitive societies. In fact, the communities living in these regions have developed, in their own way, a more human mode of life by cultivating sensory and refined pleasures, and by developing knowledge of how to use nature through more refined and simple methods. An African native possesses a deeper and more practical consciousness of humanity and nature than a person from New York, Paris, or Istanbul.
In this sense, civilization is neither a superior stage to be glorified, especially in the context of being human, nor are non-civilized forms of society backward or primitive levels of humanity. These are merely different life practices based on differences in material technologies and on meeting the same human needs through different methods. For example, an Australian native may not know or use television, the internet, mobile phones, automobiles, or airplanes. But a native of New York or London also does not know the language of birds, how to speak with the spirits of trees, how to use fire and smoke for communication and security, how to make more practical use of the healing properties of herbs and fruits, how to engage in mental-telepathic communication, or the short and rapid routes through mountains and forests. Neither one is superior to the other, nor is one behind the other. Neither represents the old order, nor is the other new and original. They are simply different from one another. However, if one judges these different life practices according to a criterion such as for what purpose material tools, knowledge, and technology are used, what meaning they carry for humanity, and whether they serve humanity’s essential existential cause, then they may indeed be evaluated. By this criterion, those who argue that so-called primitive, backward, barbaric hunter-nomadic and agricultural lifestyles were more humane than today’s modern forms of savagery may perhaps be more justified.
What is essential is to read human history as a whole, almost as the history-or even the inner struggle-of a single human being. This mode of reading is based on the use of the faculty of reason to understand the emergence of the human essence, the manifestation or extinguishing of the human condition, and the determination of the purpose of human existence. Therefore, this holistic way of reading history is also a method we choose in order to understand the present. The process of material civilization has become our primary material because it reveals humanity’s abilities and internal conflicts in different forms. The most direct arena of conflict between the capitalist order dominating humanity and the human essence that will destroy it (the consciousness of Tawhid and Adam) is the level of civilization. For this reason, by borrowing the categorized schema of history as stages of civilization, we can grasp the essential conflict at its core, that is, the meaning and content of the struggle for humanization and liberation.
Nationalist Histories
Another widespread deviation in perspectives on history is nationalist-ethnic historiography. Another imperialist deviation that developed in the 19th century, nationalist readings of history, that is, historiography focusing on the histories of Germans, French, Iranians, Chinese, Turks, Arabs, and Kurds, are just as flawed and ideological as positivist-evolutionary historiography. Because, just as today, there have never been homogeneous human communities, that is, ethnoses, and neither have these peoples remained the same throughout history. The linguistic and cultural commonalities created by people living together for long periods in different conditions and geographies, and becoming closer through intermarriage, are meaningful only insofar as they become acquainted with the experiences of other communities and participate in a new human experience by merging with them.
Apart from these natural phenomena, none of the shared language and cultural groups (tribes, ethnic communities, or nations) that exist today existed ten generations ago in their current form, as nationalism claims. The languages that have preserved themselves with the least change over the longest periods, for example Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew are at most two thousand years old. Before them there were other languages, and these languages changed and mixed to take their present forms. Tomorrow they too will change again into something else. Therefore, languages are not the registered property of the peoples who speak them. For neither peoples nor languages are fixed entities. Just as states, like human beings, are born, grow, and die, so too languages, peoples, and cultures are born, grow, and die. Yet just as humanity has remained the same humanity since Adam and continually reproducing itself and thus not dying as a species, but doing so through birth, mixture, and synthesis, states and nations also continue to live on after their “death” (collapse) through the traditions, habits, and rules they created, surviving within the states and nations that replace them, mixing and synthesizing with what comes after them. Likewise, languages and cultures change, mix, synthesize, and continue to live by taking on new forms. In this sense, the blending, synthesis, composition, and fusion of tribes, peoples, and ethnoses is nationhood-formation, and this is a development in the name of becoming more human. But their separation, conflict, and fragmentation are forms of degeneration and a regression in terms of humanization. The nationhood is a historical and natural entity; peoples are the components of this historical synthesis. Most modern nationalities (nations) are invented and artificial identities. In this sense, nations and national identities are the antithesis of nationhood-formation and are divisive and fragmenting elements of discord against humanity.
Those who look at history through the eyes of their tribes or nations are in fact looking cross-eyed both at history and at their own peoples.
Imperialism establishes hegemony through a politics that fragments nations and states. To this end, they establish institutions and spend substantial funds to try to separate and re-ethnic groups and nations that are essentially syntheses, based on language, religion, sect, and culture, and to invent a different national history for each of them.
In our recent history, it is known that the peoples who separated from the Ottoman Empire developed their first distinguishing characteristics through this kind of nationalist reading of history. It is well known how the Serbs and Armenians, the first and longest-lasting allies of the Ottoman principality that enabled it to maintain its presence in Anatolia and the Balkans, were transformed into the most irreconcilable enemies as a result of a nationalist indoctrination starting in the 19th century. Likewise, the first separatist tendencies among the Arabs began to be provoked through Arabist interpretations of history. The definition of “Turk” and the reading of history developed by the Turkist movement in reaction to these trends are almost word-for-word the same as the others. Today, a similar fabrication of history and culture is also being applied to the Kurds. All these fabricated histories, invented in institutes of Aryanology, Slavology, Semitology, Turkology, and Kurdology established in Western countries, follow a single template and are like copies reproduced from it: History begins with the Turks. No, it begins with the Semitic peoples or the Kurds. The person mentioned in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh was actually a Turk. No, he was the first Kurdish prince. No, he was the first Arab sheikh. The Turks first used writing. No, the Arabs built the first dam. No, the Kurds discovered iron first. Sumerian was actually proto-Turkish. No, proto-Kurdish. No, Arabic or ancient Persian. No, it belongs to the Indo-Aryan language group and so on. These kinds of schemes, based on claims of being the oldest, the first, the most important, the greatest, fabricating linguistic theories based on ancient, similar word roots, and necessarily emphasizing an ethnic group, were invented by Western imperialists and are a uniform historical reading template memorized by enthusiastic but naive semi-intellectuals of peoples who are to be separated according to the situation and time, with the names of the tribes in between being changed. In other words, Aryanist, German nationalist, French nationalist, Arabist, Iranian nationalist, Turkist, Serbian nationalist, Hellenist, Kurdish nationalist, Jewish nationalist, and all similar nationalist readings of history consist of a single template and are copies of one another. Of course, they are all fabrications. Historically, and even before the last century, none of the tribes and languages that exist today existed in their present forms, and a nation does not need such fabrications and lies to establish its unique identity within the human family, based on its shared characteristics. Just as a person of unknown ancestry, for example, an orphan or a foundling, is not in the slightest different or inferior to any other human being in terms of the right and dignity of being human and living a humane life because of a situation they did not choose, no community can be superior or inferior to another for any reason, least of all historical ones.
Those who attempt to reproduce the ideological use of history by copying imperialists do not realize that they are first and foremost insulting their own peoples. Just as inventing noble ancestry for a person of uncertain lineage would be unnecessary and degrading, inventing histories for peoples is nothing more than an unnecessary and humiliating falsehood. The history of humanity is shared, and this history is essentially shaped through syntheses, mixtures, and fusions. All spoken languages, like the languages before them, will one day completely change, and after a few generations their present forms will be entirely forgotten. But the essential language, the language of Adam, the common language of humanity’s mind and heart, is eternal. The important thing is to guide nations in a way that contributes to this common and enduring language. Yet those who forget the consciousness of nationhood and direct peoples and national identities not toward the language that leads them to merge into this enduring human commonality, but toward the language that will one day inevitably die and that separates them from other nations, are doing injustice both to humanity and to their own peoples. For no tribe, nationality, or community has been able to sustain itself for long by isolating itself from its brother communities. Peoples have only been able to exist in history by joining and moving within great human syntheses. This is the transition from nationality to nationhood.
For example, the Turkic tribes that came to these lands and mixed and synthesized here were able to take part in the civilizational process and, by synthesizing with other peoples, that is, by integrating their nationality into the nationhood, became an essential component of the higher-level national unity that emerged in these lands. Many Turkic tribes that could not find this ability and opportunity, however, still live at the level of tribal identity.
Today, unfortunately, the intellectual climate is dominated not by the wise intellectuals and scholars of humanity and nations, but by chauvinistic intellectual circles under the control of ‘nationalities’, states, intelligence organizations, and capital.
Production of History Compatible with Global Fascism
The Westerners, who harnessed historiography in this way to serve the ideological aims of imperialism, developed a crippled mode of thinking that conceals the whole truth and fragments it into disconnected pieces. For example, religion, philosophy, and art are both the cause and the result of scientific discoveries and inventions. Truth can be discovered separately or together through all of these paths. The Western positivist perspective, which sees science as an alternative or opposite to other paths of discovery, has caused the sciences to develop in a crippled way. This defection has reached its peak today in the age of nihilism called postmodernism. There is no longer any standard or prestige left for what is true, good, and beautiful. Nihilistic relativism renders everything uncertain, unlimited, and without measure. This process has replaced fixed principles, foundations, and values with relative interpretations, perceptions, and faithless actions. The postmodern attitude, which separates science from religion, philosophy, and art and reduces it to mere technical knowledge, is just as arbitrary and fictional as modern Eurocentric scientism.
Nevertheless, neoliberalism, the religion of the globalization phase of capitalism, and postmodernism, its philosophy, have begun to attack even the scientism of classical capitalism, that is, the Enlightenment era, because they perceive it as containing too much truth or reflecting too much of the search for truth. The globalist ideology, which declares everything relative except for the marketing of numbers, images, and brands, has now become the enemy even of Enlightenment itself. The neo-liberal culture, which sees human beings as consumers and interprets everything through this lens, has declared war even on classical reason.
While the non-Western world has not yet fully encountered or settled accounts with the Enlightenment, it falls into the trap of its irrational neo-liberal critique and, unable to escape the swamp of anti-rational dogmatic traditionalism, sinks further into irrationality under the illusion that it is merely using material from the West.
In this situation, maintaining scientific skepticism, curiosity, and the pursuit of scientific rigor through critical scrutiny should be considered a duty for humanity. Embracing and developing science together with religion, philosophy, and art in a complementary manner within a worldview oriented toward serving human beings has now become the responsibility of the non-Western world, especially Muslim minds. For capitalism will ultimately be overthrown by reason, common sense, and conscience.
In this sense, historical science, its philosophy, historical theories, and historical perspective should be regarded as tools we use to uncover and bring forth reason, common sense, and conscience, and to present them to humanity.
References:
- Teolojinin Jeopolitiği-Allah-Vatan-Özgürlük, Ahmet Özcan, Yarın Yayınları, 2010