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in: Change and Essence: Dialectical Relations Between Change and Continuity in the Turkish Intellectual Tradition, Şinasi Gündüz,Cafer Sadık Yaran, Editor, The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, Washington, pp.65-86, 2005
YASİN AKTAY
The title of this article is chosen deliberately to remind the title of one of Adorno’s major books: The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. There are very little discussions, which may influence so deeply the fate of an intellectual adventure so deeply. The dispute over historicism and traditionalism in the Turkish context has many deep implications not simply for the formation of the methodology of understanding religious texts, but also for the conception of religion, the idea of person, the idea of time and space, identity, free will and predestination. In other words, the dispute on historicism is likely to constitute an umbrella for the reproduction of all the classical theological discussions of Islamic tradition in modern times. But the first occasion for opening the question is related to the Muslim venture towards modernity. This venture has double aspects, first of which is closely related to the profound and complicated impact of colonization. The reality of being colonized has raised most of the questions that Muslim scholars have had to face. Some questions have been imposed upon the Muslim intellectual or scholar agenda from political centers, which were dominated by the colonizers. The second aspect is related to the spontaneous and relatively apolitical impact of modernization. Modernity has undoubtedly changed and transformed deeply old manners of thought and life-styles, which has forced, not only Islam, but also all religions to face their availability and relevance in a radically different new world. Both aspects necessarily require a great deal of confrontation with the problematic of historical consciousness. The ability to survive on trans-historical course without falling into an anachronism is an important question for every religion. The Turkish context in that regard is the focus of this article. Since Turkey has never experienced a direct colonization, the impact of colonization has had a very different influence upon the specifically Turkish intellectual atmosphere, which is more likely to be seen as self-colonization.
The last two centuries have raised the crucial question about the development of the Islamic societies. The question was formulated as “why Islamic countries could not find the way to develop the institutions that are essential for making the society a modern-developed one?” Max Weber formulated the question in a quite different and a more refined way. He asked why capitalist institutions did not develop in societies other than the European ones. His series of answers indicated the importance of some institutions or cultural habitus, which were supposed to be exclusively European. All the answers also implied the incompatibility of Eastern religions, in general, and Islam, in particular, as an obstacle to the development of the institutions that made the development of capitalism possible.