Öz

(İng. essence)

Göndermeler

Mevlânâ'dan

Bir mümin altın put bulsa, onu her putpereste nasıl bırakır? Bilakis alır, ateşe atıp eğreti şeklini yok eder. Böylece altında put şekli kalmaz, çünkü suret engel ve yol kesicidir. Putun altın özü, Hak vergisidir. Altın paradaki put şekli eğretidir.

Bunu hiç yorum yapmadan kabul et ki boğazına bal ve süt gibi girsin. Çünkü yorum bağışı geri vermektir, zira o gerçeği hata görmektir. O hata görme, onun aklının zayıflığındandır. Küllî akıl, özdür; cüzî akıl kabuk. Kendini yorumla, hadisleri değil; beynine kötü de, gül bahçesine değil.

Diğer

Both orientalism and Western civilization begin in the textualist position that civilizations have essences, and that these essences are best seen in the Great Books they have produced. (Who decides what's a Great Book, or what connection it might have to the lived lives of men and women in particular places and times is never satisfactorily explained.) The textualist position foreshortens history, annihilates change, and levels difference the better to represent an image of the past in dramatic form – either as tragedy, as in the case of Islamic civilization, or as triumph, as in the case of the rise of the West. In either case, it is a story whose rhythms are guided by the ineluctable working out of civilizational essences allegedly encoded in foundation texts. Thus we get the history of the West as the story of freedom and rationality, or the history of the East (pick an East, any East) as the story of despotism and cultural stasis.