On extreme respect

Yeni Birlik, 20th August '23

In 2004, Sabancı High School choir was singing the Tenth Anniversary March during the Teachers' Day program in Marmaris. Meanwhile, the majority stood up, but the 7th president Kenan Evren, who settled in Marmaris after his retirement, listened to the march from his seat. He then said the following to the people in the hall:

"I did not stand up because the Tenth Anniversary March is not the National Anthem, you cannot stand up."

Thereupon, some of those who had just stood up turned and applauded Evren Pasha. Some of them had just stood up because everyone else had.

This is an example of our lack of real thinking. We don't really think, we mostly adapt. For this reason, we sit down and stand up, greeting left and greeting right. The main reason is that we do not have a real feeling. There is a phenomenon that we can call emotional shallowness. We don't know what is love, we don't know what is freedom... There is a huge difference between the feeling of freedom when a soldier returns to his village after having fought for three years, and what we think of as freedom. In Turkiye, there is a definiton as "love murder". There cannot be such a conceptualization. We don't know what love is; deep down we don't know what respect is. True love is respect than love. Because this is not understood, our thinking moves in the wrong direction. Today, a hedonistic, an Aristipposian understanding is becoming widespread. Making love... Actually, this is a very dangerous thing.

When we look at Western thought, we first see Kant. We see his concept of "Respect for the Moral Law". He treats respect as an emotion, but different from other emotions... As a central concept... Establishes a system that protects human dignity.

When we look at Islamic philosophy, respect is a concept that we can call the steel core of Islamic morality. While a deceased Jew was being taken to the cemetery in Medina, the Prophet stood up to show respect. When someone said, "But he was a Jew," he replied: "Well, isn't he human?" We can remember the Battle of Yarmouk and Huzeyfe carrying water to the wounded etc.

In Islamic morality, we can talk about a concept that we can call "extreme respect". "Extreme respect" directed towards ordinary people, is an instructive and emphatic form of respect. Prophet made a bussiness contract with a man, Abdullah Ibnu Abi'l-Hamsa. He waits for him at the place where they will meet for very long hours. When the man comes later, he says, "I have been waiting for you here for a very long time." Where else do we see extreme respect? We see it in a legend. We see Osman Gazi standing in the room where he was a guest at Sheikh Edebalı's house, waiting until the morning in reverence for the Quran in the room.