The Elements of Culture

 The Three Elements of Culture:

It is necessary to convey and inculcate the theoretical content of Islamic knowledge before passing into the field of application. Those who will carry out this duty must have a considerable level of knowledge in the following three sciences in order to be fully successful: 

Religion, Language and History… 

The real culture is to have the consciousness of religion, language and history because individuals and societies can only survive with their religion, language and history.

The content of religion covers every stage of life. Religion enables us to comprehend the purpose of the universe and man. It covers every stage of life from the cradle to the grave. Even the breath we inhale and the steps that we take… Religion is a set of laws and rules that prepares people for peace of conscience in this world and eternal happiness in the hereafter.

We are freed from falling into mistakes and contradictions when we understand Islam correctly. Otherwise, there is a possibility of making things worse while trying to fix by inculcating some mistakes that are thought to be right.

Islam is also understood and expressed through language. All heavenly books have declared the true religion to humanity with a clear language.

In particular, the Qur’an, which is the miracle of our Prophet that will continue until judgement day under the divine protection, is the unattainable peak of language and literature as it is the words of Allah.

The nations that were honored with Islam also enriched their vocabulary by adopting notions of the true religion from Arabic. In particular, they took abstract and metaphysical concepts from Arabic, which is the language of the Qur’an and Sunnah.

The Turkish language was naturally enriched by the addition of sublime terms from the Qur’an. Unfortunately, in the last few centuries, with the gradual loss of Islamic consciousness and sensitivity; an enmity has arisen against the original words.

The disease of throwing the Arabic and Persian origin words out of the language by making them look obsolete, and imposing a lot of fabricated, rootless and non-authentic words instead of those deep and rooted words began. Words that were adopted and used by people for centuries and were understood even by the shepherd on the mountain were removed and replaced with vulgar, harsh and rootless words. The main purpose of this was to distance the Turkish people from Islam.

The great damage of the mistakes made to the language was not considered. When a word is removed, all the words from that root are erased, and the idioms, expressions and combinations built with that word are forgotten. The language was also impoverished with this destruction. For example; there are significant differences between the words “ihtilâl, 

inkılâb ve ıslahat” (devolution, revolution and reform) which were removed and replaced with “devrim” (i.e. revolution). All of the words “alenî, bâriz, âşikâr, ayan, bedîhî, vâzıh, sarih…” (i.e. clear, obvious, open etc.) were referred to a single word “açık” (i.e. open). While there were 92 thousand Turkish words in the Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary published in 1890, this number was reduced to 15 thousand in the Turkish Dictionary published by the Turkish Language Association in 1945, this is an obvious example of the “sterilization” activity carried out as a coup against Islamic culture under the name of “simplification”.

One of the first things a Turkish Muslim should do today is to save his language from this sterilization, to learn its rich and deep-rooted language, to speak and write, especially by protecting the words of the Qur’an.

The third foundation of culture: HISTORY

History is the science of evaluating an event in terms of its causes and consequences. History is the effort of analyzing the causes and consequences of the events experienced by humanity within the framework of linguistic and religious elements and determining the laws of the history in this way. Societies, nations and tribes have a fate just like individuals and the “sunnatullah” (the pattern of Allah) that determines the main patterns of destiny that the science of history tries to determine. History is the memory and collective of experiences of a nation. 

One third of the Qur’an consists of stories of the prophets and other exemplary anecdotes. In other words, the history of tribes that were prosperous and others that were miserable. 

If the experiences of the past nations are studied with their causes and consequences, they become a compass showing the right direction for the future. Therefore; they say “History repeats itself”.

Based on this saying, Mehmed Akif invites us to take lesson from history:

     They describe history as repeating itself,

     But if any lesson was actually learned,         would it repeat itself? 

Each worldview has interpreted historical events according to its own mentality and understanding. We should also evaluate the course of history in the light of the Islamic worldview. 

The Ottoman Empire established a truly great civilization with Islam. Almost no state can write its own history without referring to the history of the world’s longest reigning dynasty, the Ottoman Empire.For this reason, the Muslims should learn the true religion of Islam in the best way, with its beautiful and rich language, and its history which is full of lessons and examples.

A nation unaware of the lessons from its past is like a sapling whose roots have been cut and it subsequently loses its way. If you take away its spiritual values and historical consciousness, only an aimless group of humans will remain, not a nation.