Harran İlahiyat Dergisi

Öz

Whether it is invented by society or it comes from a divine being, religion manifests in a society. The individual needs the existence of a community in order to acquire religious heritage. The community has so much penetrated into the religious world of an individual that it has become almost an organic part of it. There are various ways in examining the relationship among religion, society and individual. In the study, claiming that it is one of these ways, seclusion experience is analyzed. The seclusion experience is used here as a kind of "ideal type". In this respect, the study is an experimental (empirical) study. It introduces a different perspective by approaching the subject with a new method and tests some of the basic theoretical approaches put forward on this subject. Thus, it aims to make an original contribution to the field. The experience addressed here is the one that Michaela Mihriban Özelsel records in her book titled 40 Days in Seclusion. The original title of the book is 40 Tage-Erfahrungsbericht einer traditionellen Derwischklausur.
There are various tools that connect a person to the society. Language comes first among these. It is the first and most important factor in social processes as it is a tool that connects the individual to the society and the society to tradition and culture. Therefore, it is obvious that the most effective tool by which religion is socialized is language. However, the language has a flexible structure; it can be weakened in certain situations. The analysis of seclusion experience has shown that as individuals isolate themselves from society, his/her language ability weakens whereas religious experience deepens. This also shows that there is a direct relationship between society and language and that the same relationship is also seen between language and religion. However, although the language gets weaker, the individual cannot be completely abstracted from linguistic tools. Her memories, cultural knowledge, religious education are all directly related to language. It can be argued that conscious world of an individual is substantially full of them. The seclusion experience reveals that the individual can not completely get rid of these connections. What is more, the deepest personal experiences arise in relation to them.
Thus, it is concluded in the study that the individual cannot live a religious experience totally independent from the society. This ontologically means that, as far as religion is concerned, the individual and society cannot be considered as independent of each other. Another remarkable conclusion drawn in this study is that when a person starts to move beyond the linguistic boundaries, he/she starts to break away from the reference area of physiologically living society. In this case, he/she looks for the reference area of another community. For a person in the seclusion, this area is the community of "Sufis" who have applied the same method from past to present. By staying faithful to the formal teachings of this community, he expects to live the same experiences as they have.
The study also finds out that a person needs a community approval even during the seclusion experience. This means that the need for approval of a community is one of the deepest physiological and spiritual needs of a person. Although the person intends to be isolated from the society by secluding, he/she still needs linguistic, religious and cultural references of a society in order to get most of his experience. The “recluse” doubts whether an experience that is not approved by a trusted community is religious. This shows that all classical claims that a religion cannot be conceived as a phenomenon independent of society can be justified. The conclusions drawn here are limited to the seclusion experience examined in the study.