Let’s Overthrow All the Idols!

In his novel ‘Julian’, American novelist Gore Vidal recounts the life of Emperor Julian, a pagan who came to power in the 360s AD as a belated reaction to the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity as its official religion in 313 AD.

Julian, who found the belief in the oneness of Jesus absurd and advocated a return to the old gods, launched a struggle against the churches and elites of the new theopolitical order on one hand, and began reviving the old temples and beliefs on the other. The capital, Constantinople, witnessed different dimensions of this intriguing conflict. Christianity was facing its first political test. This emperor, who emerged amidst ongoing sectarian and doctrinal disputes, undermines the political victory that had been achieved, and therefore all the churches engage in intense propaganda campaigns against the pagan and reactionary emperor. Julian is also not sit idle by; he supports former pagan circles, appointing them to critical positions, and tries to convert pagan priests who have become Christians back to their old beliefs. He interferes in the church, meddling in its internal disputes, having a priest he finds close to him elected as patriarch, and so on.

The novel Julian feels as if it takes place in today’s Istanbul, and as you read the gripping struggle between religion and politics, between different religious understandings and the state, nothing feels unfamiliar.

Everything is so familiar and so boring that you find yourself thinking, it’s a good thing human lifespan is not 2,000 years, but on average 60-70 years. Otherwise, living through the same things for 2,000 years would truly be unbearable.

The story that began with Christianity becoming the official religion of Rome is, of course, a long one. But to put it briefly, we can say that Pagan Rome, which was dying, found new life thanks to Christianity, and Christianity, which was just one of the ordinary and frequently seen movements of that era, was transformed into a world religion thanks to Rome. This mutual ‘great merge’ had a clear counterpart in the geopolitical and economic-political conditions of the time.

In the wars between Iran and Rome, Iran (the Sasanids) was in a superior position, while in Western Europe, the barbarians (modern-day Germanic tribes, Franks) were constantly harassing Rome, and every commander sent west tried to seize power by enlisting the support of these barbarians. In the pagan world of the era, Rome would either make a leap and experience a historical rupture or collapse under the political structure unable to withstand pressures from both east and west.

Constantine’s 313 edict that initiated the Christian preference symbolized the great foresight of Roman political reason in making this choice. But the pagan Julian was a polytheist who took his beliefs too seriously and failed to read the theopolitical dialectic of the Middle East and the direction of history. As a result, Julian naturally lost. With Emperor Theodosius’s declaration of Christianity as the official religion in 380 AD, the Church turned Rome even more strongly toward its historical direction. From then on, Roman history would unfold as Christianity’s internal civil war. (Interestingly, the iconoclast movement of the 8th–9th centuries AD, considering icons of Jesus, Mary, and the saints as idolatrous and destroying them, resurfaced within Orthodox Christianity under the influence of Islam. The icon cult survived only through the Catholic Church.)

Who resembles Julian today? All ideological groups with a traditional understanding of religion, those who cannot read the world, who turn their backs on the direction of history,  especially certain religious groups, nationalists of every ethnicity, and secularists… All of them together represent the resurrected mission of Julian 1,700 years later.

The traditional understanding of religion is essentially the ‘official religion’ inherited from the Ottoman period, an agrarian-military empire. It is a set of institutionalized beliefs stripped of all claims, living as an anonymous culture that complements the state symmetrically in social life, lacking any progressive role, conservative yet transformable in parallel with the state… This form of religiosity, represented today by many Islamic communities and orders, owes all its vitality to the state and, through the state, to the existing status quo. In this context, the state is an internal security apparatus whose political action is built upon forcing its subjects into absolute obedience. Traditional religion is precisely the name of the theological charisma that habituates social mobility to obedience.

What about secularists, modernists…? Their understanding of religion is also traditional. For them, religion evokes the social culture and political role inherited from the Ottoman period. The only difference is that what one side calls good, the other calls bad; what the religious side tries to preserve, the secular side looks at with hatred. This is only a difference of discourse and in essence, both stand in the same place, believe in the same religious perception, and fight to preserve the same things. The only thing that creates the illusion of a conflict between them is the difference in the objects of dependence at the symbolic level. The magical, unquestionable, untouchable, and unchangeable meanings that secularists attribute to certain concepts, names, institutions, and words are essentially the same as the meanings religious people attribute to their own concepts, institutions, habits, and symbols. Both groups are essentially nothing more than two versions of a deviant culture of dependence, obedience, fetishization, and enslavement, a kind of veiled idolatry that Islam refers to as such. Reason, individuality, justice, and freedom are equally distant from both sides. Both groups are far from affirming the oneness of God and Adam, and rejecting Satan and sub-human. Both are branches of the state, and all their concerns amount to ensuring that their own tribe has more influence in social and political dominance.

Nationalisms are already archaic, tribal–animist worship of the ethnos, and in the modern era they serve as tools for shrinking or fragmenting military–agrarian empires and later some nation-states. They grow stronger so long as this mission continues; when the mission weakens, so do they. For states, they are always kept in reserve as paramilitary soldiers of the status quo. Ethnos-worship is the most primitive form of idolatry. It requires no comprehending efforts, no thought, no ideological coherence. It exists through the instinctive reflexes of the primitive self.

I hope his ears are burning, Julian has resurrected with three different faces and is trying, at a major breaking point in history, to grab these lands by the feet and drag them back toward a decayed past, toward that ancient status quo where human beings could survive only through obedience and habit. To understand this political dejavu scene and to escape it, one must know at least a little about what a human being is, what religion is, what tawhid (monotheism) is, what shirk (polytheism) is, what reason, science, justice, and freedom are.

Those who deal with ideas know that thought can sometimes deceive people by playing little tricks with itself. You describe a world with words; you create good and evil with words; you describe beauty and ugliness with words. Then someone else shows you that the reality you’ve constructed with your words, through a little trick of thought, has led you down a path you never intended to take, and that’s the exact opposite of what you were trying to do. You may fall into shirk (polytheism) while making an intensely religious description, or conversely, you may find yourself defending the fanatical construct of the most primitive belief system with a highly rational, scientific rhetoric. Reason plays these tricks mostly on faithless but absolutely convinced people.

All three wings of our contemporary Julians are highly familiar with these traps of reason. Moreover, not only rhetorically but also through their lifestyles and their very existence, they do the exact opposite of what they claim to defend.

Often without realizing it; when they realize it, without feeling disturbed; and when they feel disturbed, they again resort to their own rhetoric and justify their contradictions.

For example, one such game is to turn the leader they claim played a historically significant role in iconoclasm into an idol at his grave, along with his name and everything attributed to him, and hold worship ceremonies there. It is also a game to turn the Qur’an, a book that is iconoclastic from beginning to end, into an idol, or to perform shamanic rituals around religious symbols, concepts, or values. Forgetting that religion and the state are essentially two different manifestations of the same thing (society), and presenting their separation as the country’s most fundamental engine of progress, is another game. Not realizing that progress, development, innovation, reason, and emancipation lie essentially not in separating religion from the state, but in integrating both on the basis of reason and transforming them into social dynamism, while continually singing praises to idols made up of francophone words such as secularism, contemporaneity, and modernity, is itself a game. It is also a game to fail to understand that claiming to believe only in Allah, after overthrowing all false gods, means challenging all kinds of people, sheikhs, communities, sects, powers, money, positions, and ranks, and then, after becoming polytheists by attaching oneself to many people, sheikhs, sects, powers, money, and positions, still pretend to be a Muslim and fight with others. In Byzantium, in the Ottoman Empire, in Türkiye, there are many such games, and most of the time these little mental games amount to nothing but the revival of idolatry.

The same applies to our leftists, nationalists, Alevis, Kurdish activists, pro-EU liberals. Each has dozens of idols, hundreds of fetishes and taboos. It is impossible to speak and agree with them on the basis of reason. You can only declare your side and speak by twisting and turning your words without touching their taboos too much. Or discussions take place through fights, insults, and curses. Dialogue, conversation, tolerance, empathy; these only make you appear weak. You have to appear tough, rigid, and uncompromising.

If you speak with reason and common sense, above everything, in the language of those ancient meanings and values, they cannot place you anywhere; they cannot fit you into a tribe. Therefore, your words carry no value.

As in Mecca during the age of ignorance, it is as if we are living in an elongated medieval era of dozens of tribes, just as many idols, and the ordinary fascisms of their little worlds. The only difference is that tribes are no longer called tribes, and idols are no longer called idols.

Yes, we are in a period dominated by an extremely religious form of idolatry. Secularist, religious, nationalist, ethnicist, sectarian, factional Julians have surrounded us from all sides with different words and slogans, trying to abduct our country, our society, our children. The absurd rituals of Masonic orders have intermingled with the chants of traditional religious orders. In the name of Atatürk, in the name of the Qur’an, in the name of the Republic, in the name of Islam, in the name of modernity, in the name of religiosity, we have been drawn into a trap of idolatry that appears as if opposing sides are fighting each other. All of these are idolatry, paganism, primitive forms of belief and dependance. All of them, without exception, are religions of shirk (polytheism) that force humans into servitude, obedience, irrationality, and a life lived through fetishes and taboos.

The resurgence of animism and paganism is not unique to our country. In the last 20 years, with the disappearance of a concrete anti-capitalist discourse like socialism, global capitalism has begun to impose these primitive beliefs on humanity. Today, the fields of economy, media, and entertainment are entirely under the domination of animist–pagan religions. Even those who speak in the language of Christianity or Judaism are, in reality, imposing paganism. All economic relations based on labor, work, and money are modernized versions of the master–slave order of ancient times, reproduced and decorated with contemporary vocabulary. Likewise, on a theological level, consumer-oriented brands and fashions, advertising objects, the deification and fetishization of items and celebrities, the idealization of certain behaviors and ways of daily life, and the popularization of Shamanistic rituals under the guise of entertainment culture are nothing but a resurgence of animist–pagan habits. The divine religions, both in the past and today, rebelled against slave-owning orders and attempted to liberate humanity from this economic–political system; at the level of belief, by destroying all irrational dependency objects (idols) that expressed the theology of that order, they sought to give human beings individuality and dignity.

The positivist West, which convinced the world of the fairy tale that history only progresses in a straight line, has also failed in this regard. As the eruption of primitivism before our very eyes shows, history flows by stumbling, regressing, and moving forward again. Now, enchanted by a spell of progress, we find ourselves right in the midst of regression, a return to the primitiveness of ancient times. We can finally tear apart the positivist lie that portrays history as a past in which people more foolish than us lived under primitive conditions.

Humanity, in its very essence, has not changed a single pace from the moment of its first existence to the present day. A human being is either in a mere sub-human state, meaning they possess an animalistic quality devoid of reason, or they are in a state of Adam, using their intellect and creating their own existence.

This human paradox has never changed throughout history. What has changed is technology and the way humans relate to what they produce.

Yes, on the technical level humanity has made progress compared to the past. But we must not forget that at every moment in history, technology was progressing. So, even for someone living in Egypt five thousand years ago, ‘let’s say in 2121 BC’, many technological innovations would have been invented and much would have changed compared to 30 years prior. In other words, the sense of “modernity” that humanity feels today is actually a feeling that has always existed throughout history…

In the past and today, human reason produces technology; but it is those with the sub-human character who turn this product into a tool of enslavement. A human being is someone who masters what they produce, not someone enslaved by it. Today, scientific technological discoveries are continuously progressing through human reason. Yet there exists a capitalist apparatus that uses these discoveries to enslave, control, herd, and degrade humankind. In this sense, the imposition of animist–pagan religions through scientific–technological change is the work of this capitalist class of sub-human.

Against the attempt to return the world to paganism, it is necessary to resist by renewing the liberating message of the divine religion. Challenging all forms of idolatry, all enslaving political and economic systems, all objects, fetishes, and symbols posing as false gods, rejecting all forms of dependence and subservience, Islam, as a religion based on reason and conscience, must continue to play the revolutionary role it played at its inception.

The iconoclastic revolution of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), which also included the messages of Prophets Abraham, Moses, and Jesus (pbut), changed the course of all history and should be updated today to guide history once again.

There is no other alternative that will free humanity from being reduced to servitude and put justice, as the disciplinary whip of states and the wealthy, into the hands of the oppressed.

In our country, a wise Muslim revolution that challenges every kind of irrational sacredness, that appears to be fighting with different symbols yet is actually the two faces of the same pagan coin, and that will reformat the state and nation with the motto of justice and freedom, is essential. What we mean has nothing to do with reforming Islam or changing the regime, the false agenda of paganists. What we mean is a theopolitical transformation that stands above both sides and focuses the entire agenda on a completely new page, a historical and universal revolution. Perhaps then, instead of discussing Atatürkism, secularism, Islamism, etc., we will begin to speak of reason, freedom, individuality, and morality themselves, and from there, a purification will begin on the basis of correctly understanding the ancient message of true religion that will spread to all of humanity…

Only then will Julian truly die.

 

Source: Davası Olmayan Adam Değildir, Ahmet Özcan, Yarın Yayınları.