For a woman, conscience is the issue in a man.

What has been experienced in the last two centuries has brought humanity to the brink of an abyss. Western civilization has not only destroyed nature but has also destroyed the thousands of years of accumulated human experience. Nations have lost their memory, historical consciousness has been erased, and they have begun to suffer the pain of existence within a great void. While modern man declared dominion over nature under the guidance of reason, he did not strive to understand or know himself. He sought to build a plastic world woven with comfort, pleasure, consumption, and as much falsity as possible.

This plastic world did not help either women or men regarding the question, "What is a life worth living?" Their searches always remained inconclusive, and their satisfactions always remained temporary. Ideological anxieties caused people to suffer major bouts of anger, and changing consumption habits fueled depressive suicides. Modern man has lived and continues to live the crisis—in a dialectical sense, the madness—of his own age by consuming himself. He has become afraid of facing himself, and for this reason, he has become increasingly aggressive. He has come face to face with losing his soul and his meaning.

The work of Salih Mirzabeyoğlu, who passed behind the veil last year, acts as a medicine, a prescription in this context. It is concerned with putting the values that humanity has lost back into their proper place. The author contributes to man’s search for meaning within the framework of synthetic judgments, distilling all of Western thought under the wings of Islamic mysticism.

THE PERCEPTION OF FAITH

While reading the work, one is caught in a tremendous excitement and witnesses a delicious harmony between tradition and modernity. You realize that you are face to face with a work nourished by a wide basin, from Ibn Arabi to Ibrahim Hakki Efendi, from Pascal to Victor Frankl. The requirement of "The Necessity of Total Thought," which is seen in Mirzabeyoğlu's other works and which shines like a crown, manifests itself here as well. You feel in every line that a human being is a whole consisting of male and female. The states of man—each possessing distinct temperamental characteristics, innate abilities, and qualities of existence—on the path to becoming a complete human being are realized only to the extent that he can place the "human truth" within his own soul. The mission of both genders is proximity to Allah and giving meaning to oneself in this direction. As such, there is an extraordinary storm of perception in the work. The perception of faith means "perceiving through taste," and in this framework, it is a divine formation, an excitement of existence. The subtleties regarding the science of form, the plants that affect the intellect, logotherapy as a new school in man's search, and so on, carry this excitement quite far.

Moving from his famous definition, "Islam is the superior order of the balance between opposites," Mirzabeyoğlu emphasizes that there is not an equality, but a balance between woman and man, and calls this "kıvam" (equilibrium/consistency). They are neither the same as each other nor separate from each other. But whatever that is, you think it is that, yet it is not. Woman has value as a woman, and man as a man. Neither is ever a rival to the other. The perception of a third or fourth gender consists of nothing but sophistry and perversion. With some physical destructions, a woman does not become a man, nor does a man become a woman.

Mirzabeyoğlu says: "In man, woman is the subject of conscience; whose meaning must be equilibrated within himself. In woman, man is the consciousness; whose meaning must be equilibrated within herself. In man, woman is the subject of thought; in woman, man is the spirit that must be proven. In the active, woman is thought; in the passive, man is intuition. One is intellect-weighted in its spirituality; the other is instinct-weighted in its spirituality."

It is a bedside book for those whose minds have been confused and overwhelmed by the debates carried out over the woman-man issue in recent days, which continue between excess and deficiency, and who want to learn the Muslim perspective on the matter without detaching from the modern world.