بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
You Are Responsible for What You Complain About!
News:
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke at the “TRT Youth Channel Opening Event” held at the Beştepe Nation’s Congress and Culture Center:
“The family institution is under attack and siege. When we look at the family tragedies experienced in our country recently, we see that the biggest culprits are alcohol, online betting, gambling, and drugs.
From TV series to cinema films, from cartoons to games and toys, distorted relationships are being promoted through carefully placed characters in all kinds of related or unrelated content.” (15.01.2026 – Agencies)
Comment:
The emphasis that “the family is under siege” is, at first glance, a correct and appropriate assessment because in Islam, the family is not merely a sociological structure; it is also the fundamental ground for the preservation of faith, belief, values, morality, and lineage. It is clearly evident that protecting the fortress of the family is a primary responsibility of the state and its rulers for rulers are responsible for every hardship faced by their subjects.
However, the problem is this: although the perpetrators of this siege and the causes of this destruction are well known, those who stand at the very top of the positions that should be waging a real struggle against this siege are instead complaining to the public. The President’s identification of alcohol, online betting, gambling, and drugs as the main causes of family tragedies is an undisputed truth from an Islamic perspective, for Islam has forbidden everything that clouds the mind under the category of khamr, and has described gambling as “an abomination of Satan’s handiwork” (al-Mā’idah, 90).
Yet, all of these prohibitions are today legal due to laws enacted by the rulers themselves. Moreover, these evils are sustained and regulated directly by the state. Gambling, under the name of “games of chance,” has been normalized and spread to every corner of the country with state guarantee. While online betting sites have enslaved millions of young people and torn families apart for years, no effective or sincere struggle has been carried out to this day. Broken families and those who have taken their own lives are the clearest proof of this. Alcohol sales, advertising, and accessibility are increasing day by day and becoming ordinary. The drug issue, rather than being addressed at its source and eradicated at the root, has been reduced to a fight against street dealers. The barons and mafias who trade in this filth via ships and trucks continue to remain untouchable.
Today, evil is not only open and visible; it is protected by laws, decorated on screens, and integrated into the economy. While relationships described as “deviant” are encouraged through TV series and digital platforms, those who govern the country merely watch what is happening.
At this point, the following question is unavoidable:
How can the family be protected in a system where haram has become institutionalized and these harams are secured by law?
In Islam, the state cannot remain neutral in the face of evil, for enjoining good and forbidding evil is not merely an individual responsibility; it is fundamentally the duty of the ruler to fulfill the responsibility of being a shepherd over the people. What destroys the family is not only TV series, games, or externally sourced cultural attacks. The real destruction is the corruption of integrating Muslims into the secular capitalist order. On the one hand, rhetoric about “spirituality” is produced, while on the other hand interest, consumption, pleasure, and individualism are sanctified. It is now necessary to remind President Erdoğan that he is the head of the executive authority and should stop complaining because you will stand before Allah bearing the burden of everything you complain about.
A sincere struggle is not carried out through rhetoric, but through paying a price. Stop comforting your conscience by lamenting the consequences produced by dangers while continuing to enjoy the comfort of the very system that generates them. If you are truly sincere, you can begin by setting aside this filthy secular democratic order that produces these evils. If you do this, you will already have closed many of the doors you complain about and will attain honor and dignity through it. If you do not, then you will face a severe reckoning as the one who bears the load of these harams, injustices, and crimes. The choice is yours.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
AHMET SAPA