On extreme respect

Yeni Birlik, 20 August 2023

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

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

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

This is an example of our lack of 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. Here 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 more about respect than love. This is not understood, so our thinking moves in a wrong direction. Today, a hedonistic, an Aristipposian understanding is becoming widespread. 

When we look at Western thought, we 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, he establishes a system that protects human dignity.

When we look at Islamic philosophy, respect is the steel core of 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, Huzeyfe was carrying water to the wounded etc.

In Islamic morality, we can talk about "extreme respect". "Extreme respect" may 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 long hours at meeting point. When the man comes later, he says, "I have been waiting for a very long time." Where else do we see extreme respect? We see it in a legend. 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.