INTRODUCTION

We live in an era where humanity is being dragged into a great state of intellectual and spiritual confusion. On one side are ideas that consume one another; on the other, perspectives that offer the truth in fragmented pieces... In such an environment, where standards are lost, concepts are blurred, and man is bewildered as to what to believe, how to think, and in which direction to walk, what is needed is not a new crumb of an idea, but a system that encompasses the whole and puts the parts back into their proper places.

The expression used by Master Necip Fazıl when defining the Great East ideal, “A monolithic system of belief, vision, and measurement: The Great East,” points precisely to this need. The Great East is not limited to providing isolated judgments on disconnected issues. It is a worldview that integrates faith, thought, morality, art, politics, society, and the conception of man around the same center. In this respect, it is a proposal for a monolithic order that transcends a mere collection of thoughts and claims to give meaning to the entirety of life.

When we consider the diversity and pervasiveness of the influences directed at our minds today, the importance of such a system of measurement becomes even more evident. In the face of an intellectual climate created by modernism through fragmentation, by secularism through detachment from the center, and by the ego through its desires, individual objections are not enough to protect humanity. What will protect humanity is a sense of system capable of evaluating all these issues within the same standard of truth. This is what the Great East does: it gathers what has been scattered, reconnects what has been severed, and restores thought to a standard.

This issue is an effort to rethink the Great East, which Master Necip Fazıl described as “a monolithic system of belief, vision, and measurement,” against the intellectual confusion of the age. Our concern, beyond merely reminding people of a legacy of thought from the past, is to make the standards established by that legacy speak again to the questions of today. Because the need of the century is not a larger pile of information, but a standard that will put information in its proper place, a totality that will unite the parts, and a system that will reconnect man to the center of truth.

CONTENTS

Idea, Ideal, Ideology - Yılmaz Serbest

The Necessity of Ideology and the Understanding Addressing Islam - Dr. Kâzım Albay

One Cannot Be Groundless in Thought and Directionless in Life - İbrahim Tatlı

The Pure Sharia of Muhammad - Handan Özduygu

Propaganda - Yavuz Arslan

The Record of the Seed - Betül Deniz

The Name Who Declared War on Language to Sever Our Ties with the Past: Nurullah Ataç - Murat Akdemir

The Orator of Mecca, Suhayl ibn Amr - Ahmet Bostancı

Translation of al-Shirazi’s Work “Dastur al-Wuzara” - Ömer Faruk Sakin

From Westernization to the Crisis of Faith: Turkey’s Two-Century Shift in Direction

INTERVIEWS

Vehbi Vakkasoğlu: It is Time to Correct All Kinds of Corruption Collectively and Re-emerge with the Cry of the Great East

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Can Ceylân: A World Order Without Turkey Is No Longer Possible

Mahmut Akay: Education in the Curriculum Should Not Be Handled as Disconnected Subjects, but as Fields That Build a World of Meaning