The Mode of Politics and Labor: A Running Commentary on Labor in Islamic Thought

Author/s: Hacı Sarı

Year: 2020 Vol: 2 Number: 2

Abstract

Although the interpretation of labor in the thinking of Islamism, which emerged at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries, was generally based on the provisions in the Qur’an and hadiths that must be applied, one subtle variation made Islamism somewhat different from the scholars of the classical period. Islamism, which carried the state and religion’s concern of becoming lost, incorporated additions from the modern Western thought that it addressed at the same time as it opposed. Islamism’s effort at overcoming the difficulties it faced in its challenges with modernism, which can be described as the struggle to exist as a Muslim in the modern age, brought Islamism a little bit closer to modernity, or brought about being affected by it. Islamism’s discourse on labor based on the provisions of the Qur’an and hadiths brought with it the reinterpretation of the concept of sa’y [labor] or sa’y u amel [work force]. Islamism’s discourse on labor, which embodied itself in the framework of Islam and being underdeveloped, had been established on the claim that Islam would be of assistance in Islam reigning anew thanks to the value that would be given to work. Although this research, which has been performed exclusively on the Sırat-ı Müstakim, Sebillürreşad, and Beyan’ül-Hak journals, expresses the use of Islamist thought’s ideas corresponding to labor not as a goal but as a means, the applied method has imposed an essential duty on labor in the process of modernity and made it one of the founding elements.

Keywords
the ideas of Islamism, Islamist publications, Sırat-ı Müstakim, Beyan’ül- Hak, labor, social change

Click for Turkish (Türkçe)