How the Medina Charter Came onto the Agenda

The document we call the Medina Charter (Medine Vesikası), and which has become known in Turkey by this name, first entered the wider public agenda when Ahmet İnsel, in an article published in the socialist journal Birikim entitled “On Ali Bulaç’s Design of a Pluralist Ummah: Totalitarianism, the Medina Charter and Freedom”, criticized some of my views and invited me to a debate. Until then, the discussion had been confined to our narrow circle. With his intervention, the topic suddenly gained visibility. At that time, I had already been working on the Medina Charter for about three years and trying to develop certain ideas based on this document. The fact that this debate appeared in a journal largely followed by the democratic left encouraged me.

In fact, this was not the first time the Charter had appeared on Turkey’s intellectual agenda. In Düşünce, the monthly journal a small group of friends and I began publishing in 1976, M. Beşir Eryarsoy had written two articles on the Medina Charter. The text and its clauses had struck us as interesting; in the opening editorial titled “Başlarken” (“By Way of Beginning”), written on behalf of the journal, we had tried to draw readers’ attention to it. But time passed, and we were never quite able to return to the Medina Charter. About fifteen years later, especially with the end of the bipolar world and the Cold War, the fragility of the nation-state structure became visible, and the United States proclaimed a “new world order” that would last a century. In this new context, the Medina Charter once again came to mind.

When discussions began in Sudan on drafting a new constitution with the participation of different religious and ethnic groups, some Muslim intellectuals and jurists argued that the Medina Charter would be a suitable point of reference. Hasan Turabi (1932–2016), one of the leading figures of Sudan’s Islamic revival and reform movement, maintained that religious difference should not be a reason to deviate from humanity’s “shared achievements.” In his view, the political order the Prophet established in Medina was a confederation, and the Jewish tribes who joined the agreement had their own states. Turabi said: “This is the model we have taken as an example (in Sudan), and we recommend it to everyone… Therefore, the presence of non-Muslim groups in our country is not a problem. The state in Medina was founded by the Prophet together with the Jews. The constitution was formulated by the two communities. They enjoyed unlimited freedom in their beliefs and cultures.”[3] Shortly before his death he wished to meet with me and the late Akif Emre in Istanbul. During that meeting, when I asked him about the contemporary relevance of the Medina Charter, he once again replied along these same lines.

Personally, I too recalled this important document while following those debates. I concluded that the text of the Charter needed to be studied more thoroughly, and I set to work. Where I differ from Turabi is this: the Charter took shape within the prophetic mission of conveying the final link in the chain of revelation—a message sent for all humankind through the Prophet. It was written down with the participation or approval of the Jewish tribes, who possessed a clearly defined religion and a concrete sharia, as well as the polytheists (idolaters) living in Medina. It was then entrusted to ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib for safekeeping. ‘Ali preserved this precious document by keeping it in the scabbard of the sword he always wore by his side. As my research deepened and broadened, I shared my conclusions with the public in various roundtables, panels, and symposia. Beginning in 1991, these views fed into a series of articles and public interventions in which I examined how the modern nation-state—now entering a new definitional phase—and the will to live together globally could be grounded in mutual consent (offer and acceptance). It was these writings that drew the attention of Ahmet İnsel.

Muhammad Hamidullah makes a striking observation about the Charter: the Prophet was not literate; it is truly extraordinary that such a document should originate from a person who could neither read nor write. Neither the ancient Romans and Greeks, nor the Indians nor the Chinese—no civilization, anywhere—ever thought to proclaim in written form a constitutional law of state. Of course, legal codes had existed, such as the laws of Hammurabi or Solon. But the full text of the Medina Constitution has reached us intact.

Under modernity, which has been shaped according to the basic philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment, the nation-state form—one of its three main pillars—has made it increasingly difficult to preserve difference while living together. Liberal democracy and market capitalism, which raised hopes after the Cold War, exhausted those hopes in less than a quarter century. Enormous inequalities emerged between countries, classes and regions; large segments of society were pushed into the bottleneck of the system; civil wars and invasions did not cease; millions became refugees; environmental and climate problems grew worse; violence, terrorism, discrimination, racism and xenophobia continued unabated; pandemics came to threaten billions of people. What is now being projected is not a more just, ethical, sharing, and nature-friendly order, but visions of the future aimed at deifying the human being and enabling a certain elite, by means of scientific, technological, financial, digital and information tools, to bring the entire earth under its control.

It is clear that we need a new paradigm and a new model. The resurgence of nationalistic doctrines—accompanied by a populism that inevitably corrupts democracy—can only serve to increase the pressure and surveillance capacity of a state apparatus that rests on “national sovereignty,” at the expense of basic rights and freedoms. As we search for new models, we will naturally turn to various sources and seek ways to solve the problem of how to live together while preserving freedom and fundamental legal norms. Whatever civilizational basin they emerge from, such efforts deserve to be received with goodwill.

I worked on the Medina Charter for a full thirty years before I was finally able to publish my study, Medine Sözleşmesi (The Medina Charter) (Ali Bulaç, Medine Sözleşmesi, Çıra Yayınları, Istanbul, 2020). Drawing on that work, I believe that the Medina Charter can not only introduce new dimensions into debates on Islam and democracy, but also serve as a guide as we seek solutions to the global crisis currently besetting our species.

If modern Western democracies take their inspiration from the Magna Carta signed in England in 1215 between the king and the lords—a charter that, in fact, remained in force for only three months—then the Medina Charter, too, possesses a rich socio-political potential that may inspire the development of a new democratic model. I would like to thank Atlas Think Center for giving me the opportunity to present the Charter, in all its many dimensions, to the English-speaking world.