Building Blocks and the Call of Our Destiny

The late Master Sezai Karakoç’s book “Building Blocks and the Call of Our Destiny” is a collection of essays composed of two volumes, containing his principal articles. It includes a total of 110思想 essays. These texts, originally published as editorials in the Diriliş magazine, offer Sezai Karakoç’s counsel on society, the state, change, and beyond. For Sezai Karakoç did not merely identify problems; he presented readers with the solutions that needed to be implemented. He addressed highly broad subjects with his unique expressive power, conveying them concisely yet powerfully. The first volume is a work in which Sezai Karakoç evaluates various situations through the lens of humanity, Islam, society, and the state. We can best summarize the book by quoting a passage from within it itself.

“Yet if at the very beginning of change, the society’s internal protective force had been employed not through resistance to change or steadfastness in stagnation, but through a principle of softening—that which comes with time passes with time—then the energy spent on preserving what was destined to collapse could have been directed instead toward safeguarding, renewing, and revitalizing what must not be lost or changed, and toward reviving the spirit that was dying. In that case, it would have been possible to reintegrate the fragments torn from society and burdened with the weight of change back into the whole. When the protector defends what ought not to be preserved, and the reformer insists on changing what must remain unchanged, it is certainly impossible for that society to maintain its strength.” (Page 31)

The second volume is a work written without succumbing to the dominant political discourse. Sezai Karakoç, who possessed a vision guiding the nation’s politics, emphasized in this book the political processes, geographical destiny, and an unwavering belief in the power of faith among Muslims who had not lost hope. As in all his books, the concept of revival is given profound attention here as well.

“You must introduce yourself to those who do not know you, and remind those who have forgotten you of your identity. You have entirely new duties upon this earth. Your captive brothers are looking to you with hope. You are their only hope. Certainly, with your present strength you cannot save them, but you must uncover the secret of your ‘great power.’ As in the past, you must gather the peoples around the great truths and the ideology of humanity, and forge a new strength. You must disperse the falsely assembled sums and reunite those that were scattered but ought to have remained whole. You must liberate the world from becoming a land of injustice and a region of oppression. You may ask whether such a vast cause has fallen to me alone. Think: to whom else could it fall?” (Page 110)

Finally, it is most fitting to conclude with the shared idea and sentence from both volumes, in the Master’s own words.

“Know the East and the West well, but be yourself.” (Page 33)