Today, the concept of freedom is being used as a legitimizing slogan for the global imperialist program. Throughout history, imperialism has never refrained from using many of humanity’s values and symbols for the purposes of occupation, invasion, exploitation, and domination. Considering that history is filled with master-slave conflicts, struggles for freedom of belief against institutional religions, and individual and social struggles for freedom against states, it is essential to restore this concept to its original meaning on behalf of humanity against its imperialist use.
From the time when the Young Ottoman intellectual generation, during the Westernization process, fought against the tyranny of Abdulhamid II by emphasizing the concept of freedom, to the present day, the way this concept is used has changed considerably. Different social and ideological groups have tried to advance their own specific agendas through this concept, and people from different professions and temperaments have defined the concept of freedom/liberty according to their own notions. For example, from a legal perspective, the freedom struggle of a politically banned leader naturally carried different meanings.
In our ancient tradition, freedom was a legally-focused concept signifying the state of not being a slave, but it is known that in the modern era it has acquired a more individual and existential meaning. It is also well known that political opposition groups have championed the concept of liberty, including this modern meaning, as an indispensable element of their goals. Furthermore, the capitalist system attempts to appropriate the concept of freedom by hollowing out liberal discourse. Capitalist classes, which interpret the spread of a consumerist conformist culture as liberation, propagate the idea that freedom can only be achieved within the market-oriented nature of capitalism.
The concept of freedom, with its political content, has come to be used against the state, while on a moral basis it has come to be used against religion. Various circles questioning the boundaries of religious morality evaluate religion and freedom as if they were opposites. The tendency to interpret freedom in this context as the liberty to do whatever one desires is more characteristic of anti-religious circles. With all these different meanings and forms of usage, the concept of freedom will continue to remain at the top of humanity’s agenda. Although there is no universally agreed definition of freedom, freedom in the broad sense shaped within modern history has the widest usage. This usage became widespread together with the concept of democracy and in the context of expanding democratic rights. Although the expansion of democratic rights and freedoms for individuals and groups essentially expressed the expansion of the bourgeois class’s own sphere of movement more than that of ordinary people, it also brought about the development of the freedoms of the masses parallel to the interests of this class.
As can be seen, although freedom has been a common concern of humanity since the French Revolution, it does not possess a common meaning or content. Nevertheless, humanity’s movement toward liberation and its turning, even at the level of discourse, toward freedom rather than closed, conservative, and rigidifying values is an important stage.
Above all, the concept of freedom must be accepted as a common demand and value of humanity and interpreted with a human-centered content. Especially within the context of Eastern-Islamic culture, the concept of freedom must be reconsidered and made into a lever for social and individual development. This is because the fundamental problems of the social framework we live in intersect with freedom in one way or another; more precisely, freedom emerges as a central issue standing at the heart of many essential problems.
The issue of freedom must be discussed under several headings and ultimately transformed into a more suitable, practical, and meaningful concept-value for solving the problems expressed by these headings.
The Concept of God and Freedom
As an organic whole, every society has a reciprocal relationship of determination and interaction between its socio-cultural structure and its political order. In every situation where politics takes shape as a process of concentration and distribution of power, the nature of this relationship provides clues about the entire social structure.
Although interconnected, different factors such as the mode of production, geographical conditions, cultural traditions, and belief systems influence the political sphere in separate and varying degrees. In this sense, every statement made about politics and, in connection with it, governance, the state, and administrative structure will have implications extending directly to each individual. It is natural that the “common” characteristics shared most widely among individuals play the most effective role in this interaction.
In this context, it would not be wrong to say that factors possessing a “social” character, that is, those representing the most widespread features, play a critical role in determining the nature of politics.
Undoubtedly, the most widespread and common factor of the socio-cultural structure is the belief system. People’s mindsets are primarily shaped by the belief system they adopt. What is meant here is not religious belief in the narrow sense, but the very manner of believing in and attaching oneself to something. Religious belief carries a more formal and learned character. However, the belief system is more informal and deeply rooted, to the extent that it even influences religious beliefs. The geographical conditions in which societies live, like all the historical heritage they have inherited, have also shaped the main outlines of their belief systems.
The Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin may be considered “a single geography and history” in terms of belief systems. For in this region, history resembles the endless repetition of “the same events” that nourish and reproduce one another. Geography, both through the unchanging realities of nature such as rivers, mountains, plains, seas, and climate conditions, and through the dynamic character of migration and trade routes, has played a decisive role in shaping the mentality of every ethnic society living in this basin.
The most suitable key for analyzing the characteristics of a belief system as a mode of believing in and attaching oneself to something is the conception of God. Whether people believe or reject, they inevitably possess a conception of God and relations of obedience or rebellion established with it. Analyzing this way of thinking, which is reinforced by religions as the collective conscience of societies, will essentially facilitate the analysis of the concrete, namely the economic and political, realms. The conception of God fundamentally contains elements related to humanity, nature, and indeed everything concerning life itself. In most cases, people believe not in what religions declare as divine, but in a God determined by history and geography and manifested as a distorted and abstracted reflection of their own concrete realities This God is, at the same time, a power that belongs to nature to the extent of the limits of human knowledge about nature but transcends it. In fact, God resembles the expression of the knowledge and judgments of the peoples of the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin regarding humanity, society, the state, and nature. Divine religions introduced people to the true knowledge of God in place of these judgments and understandings, yet social practice eventually reestablished its own habits, making socio-cultural metaphysics dominant instead of the truth of divine religion. To speak about the conception of God is, in reality, to speak about the history and social reality of this region.
For example, behind the idea of a God imagined as an ‘absolute and sacred father/master’ lies a male-dominated social culture, an authoritarian state, and a rigid and discriminatory ruler-ruled relationship. Most importantly, this god is merely the god of a society or community; it is not a god corresponding to individuals one by one. Yet Allah, as introduced in the Holy Qur’an, is universal, Most Compassionate and Most Merciful, a friend to humanity, and has even allowed criticism and rebellion. He will perfect His light. That is, He is on the side of an unfinished process, a process of becoming, and of the struggle against darkness and evil. By creating humanity, He made humans His caliphs (representatives). He entrusted nature and other living beings to human responsibility. In order to eliminate Satan (evil), who is the enemy of humanity, He introduces Himself to humanity as standing on humanity’s side and as its helper. The Allah who introduces Himself to us in the Holy Qur’an has very little in common with the conception of god existing in the social subconscious.
Likewise, there is a contradiction between the idea of God produced solely by the human conscience and the ruthless realities of history and society.
Perhaps for this reason, most people either establish a slavish relationship of ‘faith through fear’ instead of a faith based on respect and love grounded in friendship with God, or, because of this very relationship, they rebel against or deny God. In any case, however, the idea of divinity embedded in the mental world programs minds as a mode of thinking, and all social relations are established through the unchanging formats of this program. Behind the inability of people living in this geography to establish non-authoritarian relationships or to become free individuals lies their inability to think beyond the program in their minds and their lack of courage to step outside the frightening and destructive effects of that program. Likewise, the existence of fixed and unchanging philosophies of nature and political-economic systems based on the endless repetition of the same things is tied to a fixed and unchanging conception of God. It is no coincidence that societies possessing a completely tautological, closed, fixed, and absolute way of thinking believe in a God with the same characteristics.
Throughout the known history of the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin, spanning five thousand years, despite the presence of different tribes and imperial systems, the similarity of the gods believed in and the relationship between those gods and people remained unchanged. The pantheon of gods in the region included deities associated with functions such as sky, earth, underworld, fertility, love, war, good and evil, etc. Some of these gods were natural forces (the Sun, Moon, stars) that humans could neither reach nor comprehend. Others are ‘human-gods’ or rulers who intervene in, or are seen to intervene in, the more concrete relationships that guide people’s lives. The latter are necessarily beings who take their references from and are related to the former, meaning they are superior and privileged beings compared to ordinary people.
In the Iranian-Sumerian-Babylonian-Akkadian tradition, there was the God-king; in ancient Egypt, the king as the son of God (the Sun); and in Rome, the deification of the deceased emperor (Augustus).
Under the influence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the understanding of the God-king gradually became subject to a “theoretical limitation,” and the conception of the “sacred state-sacred ruler” developed. Until the modern era, the last two thousand years of history, both in Christian and Muslim societies, were the history of sacred states and symbolically divine leaders. Although not as strongly as before, this understanding still continues to exert influence today.
Sacred hierarchy, ancient custom, and limitless forms of hegemony continue to exist by reproducing themselves both within the state and throughout all social relations. The problem of freedom emerges precisely within this ancient tradition and can only be understood in relation to the characteristics of this tradition.
God is a being and a becoming. He is dynamic, renewing Himself every moment, and constantly creating Himself. He is both inside and outside the universe and humanity. Everything that exists is born from Him and returns to Him. He is transcendent beyond all things. He has dominion over all things. He is beyond everything. He is within everything. Humanity is His partial willpower. Human beings are the only created beings endowed with responsibility and competence. Allah has made humanity the noblest of creation. This superiority of humanity comes with a responsibility. It is a responsibility towards nature, towards other creatures, and towards humanity itself. The purpose of human existence is to realize oneself within the awareness of this responsibility and, by using the possibilities of temporary worldly life, secure one’s enduring existence. Allah has offered humanity the opportunity for eternal existence and for being for himself. Worldly life is precisely the space of this opportunity and possibility. Death is merely a change of dimension, and consciousness of Allah, together with consciousness of the hereafter, teaches humanity the meaning of existence.
Liberation, therefore, means being able to comprehend the beyond within the boundaries of this world and doing so through the consciousness of Allah and of being Adam. For this reason, the conception of Allah is the conception of humanity, and the struggle of humanity to understand itself, give meaning to life, and realize its existence is the foundation of all struggles. In this context, liberation is humanization, that is, gaining the ability to choose and act with one’s own will by transcending nature, history, society, and one’s own sub-human aspect. The struggle for liberation begins with objecting to everything that diminishes, oppresses, and enslaves humanity. It is the effort to live by measuring all events and phenomena against this standard: becoming human… Of course, there is also the possibility of regression, loss, and failure to reach the goal. But what matters is walking on this path and in this direction, living for this cause. The hereafter is the true Day of Judgment, and it is there that the true winners and losers will become known.
For this reason, the conception of Allah is an indispensable level of consciousness for understanding the conception of humanity and the fundamental meaning of freedom. Allah presented by Islam should be understood in its true Quranic sense, emphasizing His merciful, compassionate, and one God, stripped of historical baggage and the authoritarian father figure of the agricultural age. Only this consciousness of Allah can liberate Adam (humanity) and make freedom, as the effort of becoming human, the common cause of all people.
How is Liberation Realized?
Freedom is a principle of praxis. It can only be discussed within practical conditions and realities. Therefore, the issue of freedom must first be addressed through the analysis of historical practice and social conditions.
In the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin, history unfolds in the form of religion and state, and the human being cannot emerge as a subject. It speaks in terms of philosophy and politics, mythology and theology, and in theological language. Human beings can exist only as objects of the great and sacred wholes produced by history. Outside of this, the possibility of existence and self-expression is weak. In this sense, liberation is a completely practical issue in our geography and is a political act that enables human beings to exist as themselves, express themselves, and realize their own autonomous existence by breaking free from dependencies. However, a new channel for existence can emerge through new conditions that can be established within praxis. For this reason, freedom in our country is neither a metaphysical fantasy in the Stoic sense nor merely a human rights issue in the Western sense, but entirely an ontological and political principle of development. In the society we live in, the scale of vital needs demanded respectively as bread, security, and justice will continue to be fundamental problems that remain at the level of constant demand, unless they include the principle of freedom that will constitute humanity. For, in any situation where there is no struggle for liberation and no free individual, the demands for bread, security, and justice alone serve to perpetuate the ancient order of larger entities that objectify humanity, becoming tools in a tautological impasse.
Thus, people will continue to submit to authorities that distribute sustenance and promise stability and justice, while rulers will enslave people on the basis of these needs. This vicious circle is the fundamental contradiction of our history, and it can only be overcome through freedom. Freedom, fundamentally, is the liberation from all factors that enslave and dehumanize a person; in other words, it is becoming truly human.
The key to freedom is “ownership.” Becoming the owner of property, religion, and the state is the most radical step of liberation capable of transforming the historical structure of the people of Türkiye. Reversing the relationship of enslavement established through these three fundamental phenomena and developing a new form of relationship as a subject, as an owner/master, is the essence of practical liberation. In this sense, the problem of liberation in our country is less an individual issue than a social one and can only be realized through comprehensive collective transformation.
Our socio-economic structure is a continuation of a long historical process in which the state, organized as a war organization since the Ottoman era, was the absolute owner of property, and religion was institutionalized as an organ of the state. Particularly in the late Ottoman economic order, when the Timar system and the Ahi Guild tradition deteriorated, the tax-farming system based on leasing public property to certain families led to the emergence of privileged groups. This process allowed state ownership of property, instead of creating a public order compatible with social equality and justice, to generate a new form of injustice that opened the door to exploitation by the groups controlling the state. Those who were not on good terms with the ruling elite, who did not remain close to power, regions distant from the palace and the capital, and the ordinary masses of people were excluded from the economic order functioning solely through the state and, over time, politically marginalized as well. In other words, the social infrastructure whose effects we still experience today is the product of the distorted form of the Ottoman order. State ownership of property lost its public-oriented and populist character of the early Seljuk-Ottoman era, and a fully oligarchic order based on the exploitation of privileged elites under the appearance of pseudo-statism came to dominate.
The Westernization process of the last two hundred years also focused more on changing appearances than transforming this infrastructure, and even the Republican period, despite steps aimed at creating a bourgeoisie and autonomizing religion from the state through secularism, produced the opposite results. Both the new bourgeoisie and religion have undertaken missions that reinforce and consolidate the ‘state,’ which has become the property of these elites, not only through their institutional presence but also through the ideological, political, and cultural consequences they have developed. Since the modernization choice made two hundred years ago was itself designed more as a security policy aimed at renewing and strengthening the state than at developing the individual and society, Turkish modernization, despite all its contrary rhetoric, became a model of change that also reproduced the old order.
Two hundred years later, today we have an oligarchic regime, a monopolistic economic system, an authoritarian state, and state-affiliated entities such as parties, associations, unions, foundations, communities, organizations, chambers, bar associations, universities… none of which have any autonomous sphere. The only thing that has changed is the sharp and absolute differentiation of appearances.
The liberation of a human being, in the sense of revealing all their material and spiritual qualities, acquiring a personality, and realizing themselves at the level of production, craft, art, and morality, is primarily synonymous with solving the problem of transforming the state, religion, and property, which have become the property of certain hands, into the property of the entire society.
Liberation Through Becoming an Owner
Becoming the Owner of Property
Despite all efforts toward capitalist development, the economy in Türkiye is still fundamentally institutionalized around the state distributing sustenance and society living off the state. Instead of capital accumulation, which is the golden rule of capitalism, the medieval understanding of the “accumulation of property” prevails. For this reason, even “money,” which in capitalist trade is a medium of circulation and exchange, is accumulated as a “commodity” in itself and mostly “preserved” as a form of “property.” Society becomes captive to the property it acquires and accumulates, often through coercion and sometimes through force, and people fall into the position of objects ruled by the very property they possess.
The process that transformed a propertyless past into a lust for accumulating property has also produced new forms of the objectification, instrumentalization, devaluation, and enslavement of the human being. With the exception of a few sectors necessarily based on production and labor, almost the entire economy consists of relationships resembling Ponzi schemes, dependent on this modern-looking “property.” As a result, in this country, becoming a property owner at any level, small or large, means becoming a captive of property. Yet truly “possessing property” is a feeling that gives a person confidence, increases creativity, expands horizons and abilities, helps overcome fears, and fosters a spirit of partnership and entrepreneurship.
There are two ways to become the owner of property: first, to earn it through labor and ability; second, to possess a worldview based on tawhid (divine unity) that sees all of life, including the process of earning, as an opportunity to become Adam (truly human). Effortless and skill-less, that is, unlawful gain, inevitably enslaves a person. A human being lacking the consciousness of Tawhid (Oneness of God) and Adam (truly human) will certainly show a tendency toward servitude, boasting of their earnings, transgressing their limits, and harming others. Therefore, owning property is a form of insurance for property ownership. However, property acquired under these two conditions is lawful (halal). Property that does not meet these conditions, because it was obtained by usurping the rights of others and because it is to be worshipped, is considered theft and is forbidden (haram).
Today, the capitalist understanding of property and the model of accumulation are built upon theft and constitute a system based on society collectively stealing one another’s rights. For this reason, only the cunning, immoral, and selfish opportunists are able to become property owners. All such property is stolen property and must in some way be returned to society—to the public.
A new economic and political paradigm is needed where every individual can own property and be its master by fulfilling the conditions of equal effort, skill, and contribution. This paradigm, which would make human beings masters, is freedom. Becoming the owner of property is a means of liberating the individual. Not being dependent on others, being able to meet one’s own needs, owing gratitude to no one, and not fearing the future liberates the person who owns property. It gives self-confidence and provides the time and opportunity to develop other actions and abilities that will benefit society. In this sense, property is nothing more than a tool for meeting human needs. Wealth earned through labor and skill, that is, by having a profession and putting in effort, should be distributed to those in need in case of accumulation of excess of what is needed.
The accumulation of wealth leads to selfishness, greed, and domination over others. A person truly becoming the owner of their property is made possible by faith that they can earn again through the same labor and ability, and that if they cannot, they will receive support from their fellow human beings and help from Allah. Seeing excess wealth as a burden that should be distributed, understanding that sharing and solidarity are more pleasurable than the greed of accumulation is the foundation of everything. Such morality can only emerge through the consciousness of becoming Adam (truly human), which understands liberation as the meaning of life and establishes a relationship with property within the context of liberation. Otherwise, as in the past, humanity today will not escape the vortex of futile struggle and self-destruction for the sake of wealth and property.
Becoming the Owner of Religion
Likewise, having a religion in this country has also turned into becoming an object of religion. The style of relationship established with religion as a guiding and saving tool for human beings has become society’s new mechanism of commitment and servitude. Islam, which in essence rejects servitude of human beings to human beings, has been forced into serving a spiritual function that reinforces society’s habit of attaching itself to authority at every level. In this sense, institutional Islam, which contradicts the essence and purpose of Islam, has, in some aspects, especially in its conservative forms, come to serve the objectification of ‘human beings.’
The paradox of ownership also applies to the religion. Certain religious formations that claim to be based on a libertarian religion such as Islam, yet produce servile institutional relations such as submission, devotion to individuals, fatalism, obedience, and dependency, possess a character that reproduces the ancient pagan priestly tradition through religion. Because of this characteristic, most religious formations function less as means of human liberation than as instruments of control and discipline for the state and power holders. In many cases, especially in Anatolia, filling the voids created by the state, politicians, and property owners, and keeping people as subjects/sunordinateds/servants by habituating them to obedience toward these centers of power, becomes possible through this distorted relationship with religion.
This social role attributed to religion is the product of passive relationships based on self-negation and disappearance rather than ownership in people’s religious belonging. Instead of the mission and personality of being the ‘noblest of creation’ (the Ashraf al-Makhluqat) that Islam bestows upon humanity, these erroneous religious understandings have led to the spread of subservient communities that keep our people as a mere crowd. It is an irony of history that a religion which preaches reasoning, hard work, honesty, honor, and good manners as forms of faith, produces ignorance, fanaticism, laziness, hypocrisy, power worship, and dogmatism among its followers. Reversing this relationship will both facilitate the failure of policies that reduce Westernization to the elimination of religion, and enable a genuine and indigenous modernity to take root and become universal, with the contribution of the values and dynamics of Islam, which is the nation’s essential essence.
The true owner of religion is, of course, Allah. In this sense, ‘He’ is the true owner of everything. And in human life, everything, including religion, has been given to man’s command and responsibility by God. In other words, nature, objects, and phenomena, as well as body and soul, mind and conscience, and the standards, limits, advice, and counsel revealed to humanity through prophets, that is, religion, are all means for humankind. Divine messages were sent so that human beings might attain consciousness of being truly humanbeing, comprehend Allah and its own existence through consciousness of Allah, and understand that life and death are temporary sets of opportunities given for the essential purpose of becoming truly human (Âdem).
However, throughout history, people have confused these messages with their old animist-pagan habits, distorting the concept of God into the gods-worshipping that they know from the past and religion into an institutional system of clergymen, and this distortion has been corrected each time by sending prophets again and again. Islam is the final correction and completion of divine religion in this sense. Although Islam essentially contains a message of absolute rejection of servitude to humans and every form of paganism, it has been transformed in the hands of clergy and states into a heap of dogmas serving other purposes. Thus, taking ownership of the revelation sent for all humanity means taking it away from clergy, states, and ruling classes and making it a means of liberation and well-being for all humanity.
For this to happen, it is necessary for every individual to engage with God, to read and interpret the Qur’an, for all forms of religious knowledge monopolies to be eliminated, for the clergy class, whose profession is to speak in the name of religion, to be dismantled, and for every person to be able to interpret God’s messages and make them a guide in their lives, according to their intellect, effort, and sincerity. Religion is life itself, and within the natural flow of life it should live as the deep and innate spirit and safeguard of societies.
To truly understand religion means to take the illuminating messages of the Qur’an, described as a guide, advisor, and healer for humanity, as humanbeing’s compass. Yet those who claim religious affiliation, like animist-pagans, appear to exalt religion theatrically through forms, rituals, and ceremonies, while giving religion no place in any moment of their actual lives. When viewed through the lens of the essence of religion like rejecting servitude to others, avoiding forbidden things, not harming people, possessing character, respecting nature, oneself and others, and fighting evil, it is clear that most adherents of formalistic religions will fail the test. The widespread type of religiosity that forgets this essence of religion and clings tightly to appearances, ceremonies, and forms is, in fact, nothing other than the type of personality religion originally sought to eliminate. Religion, like the state and property, can become an institution to which people become servants rather than owners, causing more harm than benefit. To stand for religion is to stand for humanity, freedom, and justice. The outer form of such ownership, that is, true religiosity, would naturally reflect and express this essence. Yet today religion, reduced merely to its meaningless empty shell and surviving only in the form of religious rhetoric, symbols, and rituals, serves as a legitimate instrument of mass hypnosis that opens the door to every form of exploitation and privilege. The reason supposedly religion-based movements can so easily drift over time into directions completely opposite to their declared religious aims lies precisely in this false religiosity detached from its essence.
The morality that keeps humanbeing at the level of Adam, that is, inner ethics, has been reduced, due to this religiosity, to merely controlling the lower body, and has been severed from its meaning of maturing the human brain, soul, personality, and conscience. This rupture has led to a conception of a fearsome, celestial, external god and to perceiving His message as the language of a distant, incomprehensible, mysterious realm of miracles disconnected from real life. A religiosity detached from consciousness of Allah and Adam, from tawhid (monotheism) and freedom, serves only the interests of ruling classes. Because of this, masses can easily fall into all new forms of enslavement, and herd-like behavior can become faster and more widespread than in nomadic eras. Yet religion is the path in which people become individuals (Adam), and societies are directed toward justice and law, that is, toward civilization.
Becoming the Owner of the State
Another crossroads of the problem of freedom is the state. In the geography we live in, the state is more than just an apparatus of governance; it is power, authority, hierarchy, sanctity, status, prestige, the status quo, tradition, hegemony, preservation, killing, provision, war, peace, order, discipline, loyalty, allegiance, obedience… The state is many things.
Between the individual/society and the state, if the state has become an ‘other’ standing apart from society, there is always an inverse relationship; as the state grows stronger, the individual/society becomes diminished. The strength of a state detached from the people indicates the weakness of society. Hegemony arises from obedience, authority from servitude, power from loyalty. Property and religion are, in the final analysis, registered to the state. Therefore, enabling society to become the master of its own state is the most fundamental issue in this country’s political struggle.
The reason for the state’s strengthening against society and its encompassing of everything in this manner is primarily due to its alienation from its original essential purpose, which is to be the organized collective spirit of society. As a result of this alienation, the state, just as religion can become alienated from its true purpose and turn into an end in itself, becoming a superhuman institution, has transformed into an apparatus standing above society. As reflected in expressions now deeply embedded in our language such as the state and society, the state and the nation, and the state and the citizen, it is almost as though the state exists as a separate and distinct living entity that establishes relations with society and its citizens, and the problems within these relations are then discussed.
Yet, in essence, the state is nothing other than the organized form of the people. The birth and existence of the state emerged through the natural development of settled societies, in response to the need to regulate increasingly complex human relations, resolve problems within a created public sphere, and meet social needs through public officials entrusted with delegated authority. The state is fundamentally the possession of settled and productive society. In the truest sense, the state is common property belonging to the whole society.
Over time, as classes that gained exploitation and privilege sought to dominate and subjugate people, the state deviated from its original purpose and mission, transforming into a space and instrument for the powerful to rule the powerless and perpetuate this relationship.
To own the state is to return it to this original purpose. That is, to make it the common and equal property of the entire society, not of a group or a class.
State power is the power of society delegated by individuals and groups through representation. Using this power against society is an invention of the ruling classes, those who view society as herds serving them. An apparatus detached and alienated from society, using its power and functioning against society or through private, closed institutional structures outside society, ceases to be a state and instead becomes a special organization of security and power.
The appropriation of the state by society means the strengthening of society and of individuals one by one, sharing and solidarity through a public partnership. In this context, freedom creates a society that is the master of the state. And a state whose master is society undertakes the mission not of dominating individuals but of developing and empowering them. It redistributes collective power and resources back to society through an organization of reason. Such a state now truly means the nation. Becoming the owner of the state is the foundation of political liberation.
For this reason, freedom is a fundamental principle that must stand before the needs of bread, security, and justice and at the center of the struggle to meet those needs.
The struggle to become the owner of property, religion, and the state is both an effort of existence and the critical threshold of social development and progress. Becoming the owner of religion, becoming the owner of property, and becoming the owner of the state are the foundations of the principle of liberation that elevates, develops, and gives personality to the human being. It is the true existence of a human being. It is the transformation of a human being into a value, a subject, and a personality.
The Layers That Cover the Individual
The state or authoritarian structures carrying the same meaning, as the concrete political counterpart of the conception of God, and the creator of the ancient tradition, are undoubtedly individuals themselves. Yet paradoxically, both the state and tradition or custom function to cover, conceal, and prevent the emergence of the human being in the pure sense, that is, the individual.
The individual is surrounded by cultural and social customs within minimal relationships centered on the family. Within maximal relationships centered on the state, the individual conforms to the requirements of political custom. As a result, in no social relationship does the individual exist as a subject. The social matrix consists of layers that cover the individual. In other words, every form of social institutionalization takes root insofar as it neutralizes the individual and turns them into a willpowerless part of anonymous wholes. Expressions of individual will play a disruptive role against this order. Therefore, every free action that disturbs the order is met with harsh measures. This harshness possesses a legitimate foundation silently approved within the social subconscious. For the philosophy of natural harmony based on everything ‘remaining’ in its proper place, views the different and the new with suspicion. What is divine is that which is fixed and unchanging. To think what has not been thought and to do what has not been done is, at the very least, shameful and, at worst, sinful!
Behind this negative role of the state, or of smaller authorities and ancient tradition, lie the agricultural production relations based on dispossession, which is the fundamental dynamic that actually defines characteristic both authorities and custom. The fundamental economic and political system of the East, from Egypt to Iran and Rome, and from the Seljuks to the Ottomans, was the Iqta-Timar system (land-grant system). Essentially, this system, which considered property as the common property of the state and thus of society in the name of God, gradually began to function in the exact opposite way as the state became the property of a select group rather than of society, leading to the dispossession of large masses of people. The system called zeamet, based on leasing land to certain families or individuals in return for services, gradually turned into a state-sponsored plunder system as state functions such as tax collection and security provision were added to these privileges. This deviation and the resulting mass dispossession seem to have become ingrained in the social genetics as an instinct to seize what is rightfully theirs by plundering the state at the first opportunity. Even in the modern era, the state has continued a similar order, transferring opportunities and privileges to certain groups, while broad masses, whenever they find the chance, take revenge through corruption, bribery, and abuse of office. This vicious cycle, in which the state exploits the people and the people exploit the state, ultimately leads to the complete moral decay of the country.
In agricultural societies, property is fundamentally land as the primary means of production. It is acquired through war and becomes individual added value only when granted by the state as a favor. For this reason, neither classical forms of class differentiation and conflict emerged, nor were property-owning classes able to develop productive roles.
Dispossession is, in essence, the infrastructure for the emergence of centralized, powerful authoritarian states in which the individual is neutralized from birth, and for the continuation of immutable tradition.
Perhaps for this reason, rational thought based on concrete solutions to concrete problems did not develop. Instead, people learned to speak by alienating reality and translating it into a metaphysical language. The fact that nearly every issue in Eastern societies is expressed through the language of religion and that no subject can find its own real language is directly connected to this mode of economic production.
Human labor and intellect are, in every case, transformed into a tool serving the purposes of other, more important entities (the lord, the tribe, the leader, the sheikh, the state, God). In such a situation, nothing genuinely human can exist as itself and can only emerge after being cast into abstract symbols and molds. For this reason, the history of the East developed as a history of religions.
On the other hand, the fact that collective property (fertile lands) could be acquired as spoils through war played a direct role in this metaphysicalization. For the state organized as a war apparatus, sanctifying war was a necessity both as a motivational element and as a means of legitimation. The sufferings of death, injury, widowhood, and orphanhood could only be alleviated through metaphors carrying emotional depth equal to those pains. The metaphysical language of symbols is an indispensable source for the survival of warrior societies. Virtues such as heroism, courage, sacrifice, and endurance, along with sacred goals, are both the cause and the result of sustaining war as a collective reason for existence.
The conception of God, the understanding of the sacred state and authority, ancient custom, dispossession, and a mode of production based on warfare together form the historical order of the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin as interconnected and mutually reinforcing layers. Within this order, there is no willpower of individuals. The individual has dissolved beneath these thick layers covering them. Since all the layers covering the individual are punitive by nature, every possible effort at individuation faces the wrath of multiple sacred authorities. Anonymous reason possesses a series of punitive mechanisms against those who push boundaries. Every kind of deviation and innovation is met with reflexive reactions and exclusion. The only exception occurs when difference or novelty constructs itself as an alternative power. A movement shaped as a new concentration of power always has a chance of succeeding, and from the moment it succeeds, it merely replaces its rival. Ultimately, the system remains the same; only the actors being obeyed change.
Because reason functions collectively rather than subjectively, no transformative critique of this order has emerged. Even movements of opposition or rebellion have taken shape as inverted repetitions of the authorities they opposed. The tautological character of collective reason absorbs every difference or novelty into its own closed cycle.
Domination and Power
In the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin, the conflict of contradictions produces balance rather than synthesis. No problem is overcome through its natural dialectic by reaching synthesis. Instead, through the interventions of collective reason, synthetic oppositions are produced, artificial balances are established, and matters are left unresolved. Rather than the creative outcomes of dialectical conflict, destructive, exhausting, and consuming contradictions emerge. For this reason, the conflicts of contradictory sides that cannot find their own real language and instead take refuge in the language of metaphysical symbols lead to the reinforcement of authorities.
Politics is precisely the name of these efforts to establish balance or the methods of re-entrenching authority. In this sense, the accumulation and use of power means easily instrumentalizing and converting all material and spiritual phenomena such as religion, cultural values, ideologies, and capital into power.
As a result, spiritual values, as the alienated language of reality, undergo a second alienation and become sources of political power. In this case, politics is not a method of gaining power, but a simulation method in which an already distorted reality is further distorted, making it even more surreal.
On the other hand, one can’t come to power. Power already exists, it’s there, and one obeys it, fulfills certain necessary conditions, and ultimately becomes a part of it. One becomes a part of it. Politics, in its true sense, is only the name of what those already included within power do while borrowing and using the strength of that power. Outside of this, especially for the powerless and propertyless, politics is an entirely meaningless and metaphysical game because it rests on no real class or material foundations. Class reality carries no meaning beyond the metaphors employed at the level of political discourse. Even in the modern era, right-wing parties have represented leftist class realities, while left-wing parties have relied on right-wing status quos. Likewise, secular parties have displayed intensely religious forms of logic and language, whereas religious parties have often been based on more concrete class phenomena. At the root of this distortion lies the ancient socio-cultural order, thousands of years old, which allows nothing to exist as itself. For this reason, democracy and the republic can exist not according to universal standards but only through interpretations ‘specific to us.’
Justice and Oppression
In societies dominated by agricultural production and warrior-centralized states, there are two models of conceptual opposition. The first is the inward-oriented pair of justice and oppression; the second is the outward-oriented categories of friend and enemy.
The opposition between justice and oppression recalls the conflict between light and darkness in Eastern-Iranian philosophy. In essence, the ‘conflict between good and evil,’ both at the social and individual levels and in both political and social dimensions, first emerged in Mesopotamia, the main geography of the Neolithic Revolution where humanity transitioned to settled life. The results of this agricultural revolution, spread over centuries, manifested themselves in theology in Iran, philosophy in Anatolia/Ionia, and technique in Egypt. All social divisions as we know them, rulers/ruled, rich/poor, master/slave, and even the concrete shaping of gender identities as women and men in the context of division of labor and social status, began with the transition to settled agricultural life. However, while in the West these differentiations turned into class-based conflicts, in the Mesopotamian Basin they were absorbed through the influence of powerful and centralized hegemonic orders based on asabiyyah (group solidarity).
The concept of justice fundamentally means establishing balance, maintaining equilibrium, and ensuring that everything finds its proper place. One major reason why Eastern social order lacked the tradition of class conflict found in the West is the influence of the implicit fatalism and metaphysical understanding of balance expressed through the concept of justice.
The philosophy of natural harmony argues that everything was created according to a divine order and that preserving what exists unchanged is the correct state. In nature, there are the strong and the weak. There is the high and the low, the winner and the loser, the beautiful and the ugly; all have their places in a divine order, and the sum of them all forms a whole. The same applies to societies. Some people are born as rich, rulers, beautiful, or strong. Others, according to divine balance, are poor, slaves, ugly, or weak. This ‘destiny’ may experience certain degrees of disruption. Justice, therefore, gained content in Eastern thought as the act of restoring these disruptions to their original place, regulating them, and preserving divine balance.
The social reality reflected philosophically in the opposition of good and evil, light and darkness, is absorbed through the concept of justice and transformed into a different framework. Rulers, as earthly representatives of the divine, suspend this conflict by claiming to establish the rule of the good and completely eliminate evil. Justice is the key concept of this shift in framework.
Likewise, the concept of oppression (zulüm), as the opposite of justice, is defined as the disruption of divine balance, deviation from the path, and opposition to what is essential. The term ‘oppression,’ which encompasses a range of similar concepts such as wickedness, evil, tyranny, despotism, intrigue, malice, torment, and torture, corresponds to ‘evil’ at a philosophical level. The opposition of good and evil is depicted as light/nur versus darkness/zulmet. Yet, like justice, oppression loses its dialectical dimension at the level of social reality. As the opposite of justice, it comes to mean stepping outside the divine order, violating rights, and exceeding proper limits, that is, disrupting balance. In this sense, it is used for rulers who fail to implement divine justice. Sovereigns who exceed limits through arbitrary and tyrannical practices are described as oppressors. The concept of oppression is the complementary opposite of justice. The political and social order of the East can be understood within the framework expressed by this conceptual pair.
The concepts of justice and oppression are, in essence, moral concepts. To be just is a moral obligation; to be oppressive is to engage in immoral behavior. In contrast to the concrete content of rights and freedoms codified in modern times under the overarching framework of law and centered on the individual subject, justice and oppression possess a more abstract, flexible, and ambiguous content. Like all moral concepts, they are highly general and, to the extent that they become generalized, arbitrary.
Morality: Limiting the Essence Instead of Self-discipline
Society’s understanding of morality is the most effective of the layers covering the individual. Similar to the conception of God, moral rules, which manifest within every human being (sense of sin) and as an external observer, controller, and punisher (sense of shame) in interpersonal relationships, also have a function that, in terms of their consequences, stunts and restricts the individual, especially the powerless and the dispossessed. The reason for this lies not in moral rules themselves, but in the nature of authoritarian society, which transforms everything into a means of nullifying the human being. Morality’s function of cultivating inner self-discipline is refracted through the ancient prism of authoritarian order into its opposite, and morality ultimately becomes another layer covering the individual.
Moral rules are not subjective but social. That is, they belong not to the individual but to society, and they function to encompass and integrate the individual into society insofar as the individual is merely one part of it.
Likewise, moral rules and standards are closed to change. They are pre-established and sanctified in one way or another. In this sense, they are traditional.
This nature of morality gradually opens the door to hypocritical and false moralism. As in the famous saying about law, morality too becomes ‘a spider’s net through which the powerful pass freely while the weak remain trapped.’ Clearly, for the dispossessed and powerless to ‘not steal, not kill, to respect their elders, to be content with what they are given, not to raise their voices, not to push any boundaries…’ is precisely what the powerful desire. Although these rules undoubtedly aim at an equal and just social order, within an unequal order they weaken the weak even further and become one of the channels through which power holders maintain control. Through morality, society limits itself and censors itself. For ruling powers, this means fewer police stations and prisons than would otherwise be necessary to keep society under control.
The fact that morality has been burdened with a function opposite to its original purpose certainly does not diminish the value or importance of moral rules. Yet this inverted function can only be corrected through a moral philosophy that grants individuals self-respect and produces autonomous identities.
Friend and Enemy: Finding Identity Through the Other
The social imagination is filled with traces of the warrior tradition in the formation of identity. War is not only an economic-political necessity but also a way of existence. The basis of war is the enemy, the existence of an enemy. War is the fundamental determining factor in the formation of social identity. The mechanism of hegemony operates through the creative power of war.
The enemy is the other. The one who is not one of us. The one standing outside the anonymous sphere of life. In the Mesopotamian-Mediterranean Basin, the subjects of ‘us and the other’ constantly changed through migrations, yet the distinction itself and its logic remained the same throughout history.
The other is not only excluded but also humiliated. ‘We’, meanwhile, are often exalted as the ‘chosen servants’ of God. Although such a conception may be meaningful in the context of creating social solidarity (asabiyyah), it is sometimes also used inwardly. The distinction between us and the other formed within the same community can lead all the way to civil wars and fragmentation. Especially in identity crises, identity is manifested through the definition and opposition of the other. The transformation of the perception of friend and foe into an inward-looking mechanism of creating the other undermines the necessity of basing individual and social existence on genuine foundations. Identities based on false, temporary, and external factors are themselves signs of crisis.
Ideological identities based on religion, sect, ethnicity, or allegiance to the state all possess their ‘others’, and these others somehow contain the definition of ‘us.’ When individuals and groups, unable to find identity through themselves and concrete reasons, begin to survive by creating false enemies, it is also an indicator of their decline.
Throughout history, especially during periods of fragmentation and defeat, the trauma experienced by all communities living in this region has manifested itself through attempts to exist and establish hegemony through the other. Therefore, factors that create the other must be reduced to a minimum in defining friend and enemy. In other words, instead of religion, ethnicity, sect, or ideological preferences, a perception of friend-enemy/other defined on the basis of existential defense and security needs would transform this habit of constructing false identities.
The mutation of this other creative cultural genetic code nourished by causes such as the fear of loneliness and powerlessness, the habit of living in herds, the dominance of sociological units based on blood ties, and the culture of plunder, is only possible through the multiplication of free individuals.
Freedom and the Individual
As a result of factors such as the conception of God, the sacred and authoritarian state, ancient and immutable custom, agricultural production based on dispossession, a moral understanding that forces human beings into limitation, and the acquisition of false identities based on defining the other rather than the formation of a free self, the ‘human being’ (Adam) dies. Singular individuals cannot emerge, and collective wholes along with metaphysical interpretations dominate. Synthetic images and symbols replace reality. The transformation of a social order that is devoid of humanity, that reduces humans to mere tools for other ends, and that diminishes them to worthless and insignificant parts of larger wholes, is only possible through interventions at the points where it is broken. Where the resistance lies, there lies the solution.
The essence of an open, libertarian, law-based state and society is free and strong individuals. The path to liberation lies in replacing the concept of a sacred-king god with the understanding of Allah as ‘a friend and source of mercy’ as introduced in the Qur’an al-Karim; replacing the sacred state with a state of justice belonging to the people; replacing the customs of the agricultural age with law; replacing agricultural production relations with welfare policies based on industry and knowledge; replacing restrictive moralism with morality as the foundation of freedom; and replacing a hostile culture with a culture of well-being and virtue based on self-definition.
Only through such a process of substitution can an individual transcend their human nature and progress towards becoming Adam, transforming into a free human being who chooses to exist through their own labor, abilities, and preferences. Thus, freedom can become the name of humanization, of being human, of being Adam, in the sense of possessing, being master of oneself, being able to choose, and being able to assume responsibility, and it can become the foundation of a social order in which people can live humanely. This ‘freedom is not the daughter of order, but its mother.’
