Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Friday seminar series of the fourth week of Michaelmas term.
As many of you will will know, our theme for this term has been on contemporary Islam in the Middle East and North Africa.
Those of you who came last week will not know that we hosted Stefan LaCour speaking about Salafism in Egypt.
This evening, we move our attention to focus on Turkey, and we are very pleased to welcome our friend and colleague,
Dr. Katharina DELACOURT Katharina, Associate Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
And she is a leading authority on the role of Islam and Islamism in the international relations.
As her last two books attest. Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights Implications for International Relations,
which came out in 2007 and then in 2011, Islamist terrorism, democracy in the Middle East.
And we are very privileged to welcome her here this evening.
Talk about her latest project for which she has secured a major research fellowship from a lever HUME Trust.
Now, anybody who knows about getting research grants and the people who trust it, this is the golden, golden buzzer of the grant.
If you get one of those, you get a three year fellowship and they are very tough to get on only the top and most impressive researchers get that.
So we can see that you've got this, Catarina, that we really are getting the absolute top notch, cutting edge researchers we're delighted with.
Catherine is actually in the midst of this project.
So we're particularly pleased that she gave time out from that to come and talk about the ongoing project.
Now, the project she's working on is one of an intellectual, intellectual history,
but she wants to engage in various aspects of international relations, particularly the idea of global eye.
And she's looking at it through the international thought of the Islamist movements and Islamist thinkers in Turkey,
indeed is the title of the project. And tonight's lecture states the international thoughts of Turkish Islamists history, civilisation and nation.
Catarina. Thank you very much for the kind invitation.
I was going to talk a little bit about my past myself, but you've covered some of that.
Michael I just want to make one point before starting that.
Over the past seven years or so,
I decided through my own work to make a shift away from international relations to something more akin to Middle Eastern studies.
And of course, my work has always been at the intersection of these two broad areas, but language has been the key issue here.
And I have started learning Turkish in order to be able to do this kind of project.
And I have pursued it through more detailed empirical research compared to what
I was doing in the past within the broad field of international relations.
So this has been an intellectual journey for me, which is something I have been wanting to do for.
Now what I'm going to do in this lecture is talk to you about the project I'm engaged in.
I will say a little bit, a little bit about the theoretical framework and my methodological approach.
And I will focus mostly on the empirical side of what I'm doing, and in particular on the work I have completed in the first year of the project,
which has just finished up now in the second year, which is on history and historiography.
So the broad context for the project is the theoretical context.
If you want to say it is what is nowadays called global international relations.
The term I find is very contested and I see that there is a fault line between two camps when it comes to this term.
Those who see the global as a unified entity with underlying interconnections, making it fruitful to study is one thing,
and those who see the global as fragmented and specifically between Western and non-Western thought or Western and non-Western are all.
I'm very much of the first camp. I find the terms Western non-Western when it comes to international relations very
problematic and reductionist and not leading us anywhere really in our debates.
And my knowledge of Islamist thought in Turkey has made me question these categories even more.
So the aim of the study is to provide empirical data and to back up this idea that perhaps when we talk about West Northwest,
it doesn't make very much sense. So when we come specifically to Islamist support in Turkey, which is my area of focus.
I find that the commonalities between the western wild west of modern frames and concepts that straddle across societies.
The intellectual context in which Turkish Islamism developed was shaped by Western
Muslim and other philosophical and political debates in terms of thought.
So there are parallel developments and influences with global intellectual trends through all these triggers.
And it was thought in the Republican period, for instance, the shift of Turkish Islamism to conservatism and authoritarianism from the 1930,
it's always reflected the decline of Islamic modernism in the Middle-East.
And it's a shift away from secular nationalism towards socialism and even fascism.
Simultaneously. It echoed the rise of conservative and fascist Spencer.
In another example, in the 1970s and eighties, Turkish Islamism reflected the rise of identity politics, politics globally,
the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism on the list, and simultaneously the post-modern critique of progress, reason and modernity.
A third period is the 1990s in which the third way of Turkey's Islamists came about as they became increasingly
engaged with their global counterparts and endorsed universalist ideas such as democracy and human rights.
However, Turkish Islamist parties, and especially the AKP, continue to have close links with Arab Islamist organisations.
So this is the project that I'm doing. In its broad theoretical context.
So I was interested in Turkish systems. And I started off by placing it.
And this is what the project can do by placing it in this international relations context called global air.
So there is if you want to stay with that thought,
there is there is a concern that I have within the discipline of international relations that I want to speak to while doing this project.
So this is the first part of what I want to say.
Now, what this means in methodological terms is that I examine who has influenced Turkish Islamist thinkers.
To put it very simply, I inquired how Turkish Islamists are situated within transnational networks.
And to put it even more simply, who it is that they are reading.
So a lot of the empirical work that I'm doing is actually looking at the sources of knowledge of various Turkish Islamist thinkers.
Now. The project is a broad based historical project.
It starts from 1923, covers the whole Republican period.
This is the aim and it is a work on intellectual history.
So I'm not looking at the sources of Islamist ideas and I'm not looking at the impact of these ideas.
I'm not looking at foreign policy, for example, of any of the other Islamist actors.
I'm just looking at ideas in the abstract. And of course, as the author, I am able to narrow this down to the particular focus.
I focus on individual thinkers.
I situate those thinkers in the broad intellectual context, which is often defined by the Sufi tarot card audience in Turkey and the Dumont as well.
And within the Ottoman tradition, the legacy of Islamic thought, which is very, very important still in Turkey in many different ways.
The way I have chosen to do this work is by studying texts.
So I'm looking at what Islamists have written and the discourse and insofar as they are alive.
I'm also trying to interview as many of them as possible.
I rely extensively on my two excellent research assistants, one of whom was here, Marksman Winner.
And to use this in Turkey, because I do have Turkish, as I was saying earlier,
but not enough to cover the reams of text, which is often the production of these Islamist thinkers.
Now. I've travelled to Turkey a lot and I will be travelling more, going back and forth in the coming to use of the project.
As I've said, I've completed the first year. How this has worked and this is interesting with regards to the fellowship as well,
is that in the build up to the application for this fellowship, for this grant,
I constructed very carefully a network of connections in Turkey, and I tried to draw these connections in order to,
first of all understand the topic, but also gain support for the applications.
To date in the first year of the fellowship,
I have conducted about 14 interviews with Islamist thinkers and have additionally talked to about 25 academics,
journalists, people who are studying Islamism in Turkey, but also.
But here I don't want to create the impression, however, and I know I'm talking to people who are writing things from the master's dissertation.
So it could be these it could be any of that.
I don't want to create the impression that fieldwork and primary research are the only or the most important things that I'm doing.
A large percentage of my time is being spent on the secondary literature, of which there is a tremendous amount.
When it comes to Turkish Islamism and I have spent a lot of time this past year trying to map the various schools of thought within
Turkish Islamism and often tearing my hair out about the different sort of strands and how they really relate to one another.
So I've talked a little bit about the frame of the project globally,
and I've told you a little bit about the methodology or the methods I'm using, the way I've decided to do that particular project.
So now let me move to the third and really the bigger part of the lecture, which is about the empirical part of the project.
It consists of three sections history and historiography, civilizational culture, nationalism and the state.
In all three cases.
I am trying to outline how Islamists think about these topics and indeed how they think about them when it comes to the international realm.
This is not a project about domestic politics, but it's about the the sort of broader global context.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk first about culture and civilisation.
Briefly then about nationalism, the nation and the state.
And then I will talk about historiography and history, which is the bigger part of what I want to just say.
Cultural civilisation of 19th century concepts, which became defining aspects of how modern individuals thought about the world.
And what we see in the case of the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the 19th century.
There arose a distinction between civilisation in the universal sense and particular civilisations European, Islamic, Asian and so on.
A group of thinkers of young Ottomans were instrumental in introducing the idea of the Muslim world into the Ottoman public discourse,
an idea that then Sultan Abdul Hamid adopted, adopted and adapted to his own political purposes.
Now, by the time of the establishment of the Republic, the distinctions between East and West,
European and Islamic civilisation had become hardened realities,
not least in the Kemalist elite that ruled the new state and also in the Islamist opponents of this new state.
For them.
The essentialist approach and idea that there was such a thing as an Islamic civilisation which spoke to the authentic culture of the people,
became really an acceptable the sooner form of what they have to say.
Now there are some exceptions here, such as is mademoiselle one thinker who defied this consensus and talked about civilisation in rejectionist terms.
So in the project I'm examining how Islamists such as, for example,
natural team overcome and his militarist movement and many others distinguish between the different aspects of civilisation.
Crucially, the material and the moral aspect, and try to think through their respective benefits,
typically by arguing that Muslims must adopt the material aspects of Western civilisation or European civilisation,
but retain the moral aspect which was of course superior to this material aspect.
Now Turkish Islamists believe that the Islamic or Muslim civilisation is the creation of Islam,
the religion, and often use the two interchangeably, even though civilisation is a secular idea.
This is a tension that I use as background to my analysis.
Different generations of Islamist thinkers approach the subject of civilisation very differently.
So earlier thinkers such as the Deposit of the Sacred saw civilisation as being in perennial clash.
So the Muslim and the Western, but also of the civilisations.
In a more recent wave of thought in the 1990s. People like Ahmet Davutoglu, Ibrahim Kalin rejected the idea of the clash.
But in my studies have found that they are still very essentialist in how they think about Muslim and European civilisation.
Now, I believe, and I'm hoping to show that this essentialism hides from our view a more profound underlying reality.
But the very categories of culture and civilisation are more than categories, as I said, emerging in the 19th century.
And that, in fact, they are shared across the board between Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers,
allowing for a conversation, even if not for agreement between.
Now let me move to the second, uh, uh, uh, to the second, to the second empirical section of my project.
This is about nation and state.
Thank you. Now, clearly the subject of nation and state has preoccupied Islamist thinkers for the last hundred years of the republic.
But here again, the story goes back to the 19th century.
This is a time described by many historians as the age of nationalism, and it is certainly the age,
the 19th century during which the state emerged as a set of institutions.
Now it is common knowledge that one of the defining elements of Islamism is the belief that the Ummah, the community of believers,
was artificially divided by nationalist ideology and that Muslim loyalties must supersede state identities and overcome the divisions of ethnicity,
race and language. At different schools of Islamists within Turkey have worked out the relationship between the nation and the Ummah very differently.
Although this inquiry. Just as the project as a whole is about the international role.
As I've just said, there are also close connections with how Islamist thinkers think about nationalism domestically.
And here I want to mention the Kurdish issue.
And of course, there are many, many linkages between how Islamists approach the Kurdish minority and how they see the role of nationalism.
But beyond the Turkish borders. Now, Turkey, as we all know, is a country with a very robust and deep seated sense of national identity.
It's also a country with an imperial past which for its Islamist ideologues, confers the role of central player in the Muslim world.
So Turkish Islamists of the militarist movement, for example, was shaped by this very potent sense of nationalism in recent years,
even though those have moved away from militaries continue to operate within the Turkey centric world.
And we see from 2002 onwards that the AKP has tried to put into practice this Turkey centred view.
Now, naturally, many Islamists in Turkey have rejected this hypocrisy that many see of proposing an Ummah
centred ideology while at the same time retaining a nationalist turkey centred position.
Now there were strong reactions to it by revisionist reformist renewal list Islamist thinkers who from
the 1980s onwards became influenced by broader Islamist ideas in the Middle East and South Asia.
And we see a wave of translations actually causing a lot of this revisionism and the reaction to nationalist programs.
Islamists of all hues in Turkey have attempted to think of specific ways in
which the Ummah can work in tandem and Muslim unity can be achieved in practice.
Mostly these have been about political cooperation and the establishment of alliances in the international system.
Another way this is worked out is through proposals about the global financial system and the workings of the economy more generally.
So we see a number of schemes coming from various Islamist schools of thought with regards to the workings of the international economic system.
No. Let me move to the third and final empirical part of the project.
This is on history and historiography. This is the part of the project that I mostly completed the work on.
I started with it because it was new to me.
Newer than the others. So it was a very steep learning curve in order to achieve a satisfactory level of knowledge.
So as I good bye is my career and other historians interpret.
Before the 19th century, Ottoman universal histories began with the idea that there was a moment of creation of the world.
Then they moved on to the rise of Islam and offered more detail about Ottoman history,
which was thought to be the last a major chapter in the history of Islam.
So history was framed within a religious context and it was thought often to be advancing,
if not necessarily progressing towards Judgement Day and non-Islamic people.
So societies featured very little compared to this Islamic centre view and indeed Ottoman centred you.
Now would be seen again during the crucial century, which is the 19th century.
Is a shift away from that, as realities of power forced the Ottomans to acknowledge Europe as often,
the centre of power and with the realities of power change historical approaches.
As a result of these shifts, there's a new periodisation of history going back to the Phoenicians, to the Assyrians and other civilisations.
Now this historical framework became widespread in Turkey after the establishment of the Republic,
and it is within this context that Turkish Islamists must be situated, and it is to this that they are reacting.
Now what I have done for the purposes of writing this chapter or section of the book and for the purposes of presenting it to you as well,
is focus on four themes. The first is agency who drives history.
The second is period of ization. What are the starting points, the major turning points of history?
Thirdly is the idea of change and the direction of history.
Is history progressing? And what is the relationship between present and past?
And fourthly, what is the centre of history?
The core geographically, but in other ways as well.
Now what I'm doing is tracing the answers given to these questions of themes by different Islamist thinkers and Islamist schools of thought.
So I spend a lot of time in the past year trying to talking to people, reading the work,
trying to understand what are the answers that they're giving to these four issues.
When it comes to history and historiography. Now on the first one agency.
The basic question is very simple. It's who drives history?
Is it God or is it human beings?
The traditional idea is that God turns everything.
But I have not come across many Islamists who actually think in this way.
There is no absolute such a view. There are differences of degree.
When you start looking at the total picture, so to speak.
But humanism tends to be rejected as a Western import and a very problematic one.
What happens more often than not is that there is not an acknowledgement.
But isn't this thinking that God determines everything?
But then the real discussion is about the nature and the degree of human responsibility.
This is a very familiar. Now, there are many examples of how the question of agency connects with historical perspectives.
More specifically. A number of theologians explore how the theological idea of heat unity of thought influences perspectives on history.
There's a connection between ideas on history and predestination at the moral
individual level with implications for what happens at the collective level.
Another example is the issue of leadership. Is history driven by the strong individual or by society collectively?
Islamists often focus on the strongmen model and interpret historical change through it.
Now the idea of Muslim victimhood and also nostalgia for the past, for a great past, but very often can also be linked to ages,
according to Hari Cavusoglu, for example, who's a well-known progressive Islamist in Turkey.
This idea of victimhood allows Muslims to evade historical responsibility for their own issues and problems.
And connected with it is the idea that conspiracies occur.
This is also linked to a sense of lack of agency.
I drew a connection in this work between historical agency about historical debate about agency
and the discussion in Turkey at the moment within the bounds of Islamism over historicism.
This is a discussion around people like Mustafa and others from the Ankara Theology School who
are influenced by more Rahman and have commonalities with contemporary modernists in Egypt,
such as Hassan Pahlavi and people from Iran such as Abdul Karim.
So who's. Now.
Historicist argues that the text and in particular the Koran, must be interpreted within the boundaries of the historical moment in which it emerged.
This implies because humans have to do the interpretation,
that human beings have the ability to do that and that therefore they're agents of their own destiny rather than following the Word of God.
And it goes against the idea that God intervenes directly in history.
I can return to this in the Q&A, if you wish. It's a complicated issue.
And historicism in Turkey connects with many other different schools,
reformist schools of thought of the sort of differences and similarities there, including what some people undo.
For example, how it has called Salafism within the Turkish.
Periodisation is another thing.
The second theme around which I organise the material now for the most part, is the belief that history begins with art.
This has implications for how they view, for example, evolution theory.
Those of you who follow Turkish politics will know that there's a big debate and a big problem in many ways around how evolution theory.
But again, I found that many Islamists actually do not completely reject evolution theory and they try to
find ways of reconciling the beliefs that history starts with and with the idea of evolution.
There are other questions here. For example, the importance of seventh century Arabia, the moment in which Islam appears in the world.
How does this relate to other periods and other important perhaps areas of history?
More particularly thinking about periods such as feudalism and modernity and the extent to which they are appropriate for Turkey.
It is something that is raised time and again within those debates.
So someone like Mustafa Ahmad, for example,
questions these historical periods and says that they are completely unfit to explain what has happened in Turkey.
The connections here with ethnic conceptions of history.
These are debates within Turkish historiography that have been going on in various forms for.
Now, the most significant issue in my mind is about the theme or the theme about the direction of history,
and specifically the idea of change and progress.
As I mentioned already, in traditional theological terms, the end of history is thought to be Judgement Day.
But this obscures a number of disagreements between Islamist thinkers and especially about how present day society should relate to its past.
So someone like a classroom of children, for example,
would argue that the Muslim world must end its romance with the past, which has blocked progress in a variety of ways.
So he criticises those other Islamists who idealise, for example, some century Arabia or even the Ottoman period,
and argues that this is a very problematic way of relating to the past which should be overcome within the boundaries of Islamist thought.
Again, there's a difference between abstract thinking and the actual views of Islamist thinkers.
Indeed, some view 17th century Arabia as a model,
but they use it loosely as such and tried to draw broad principles for it as opposed to literal guidance about how a society should be run.
Often they use the metaphor of the spiral to reconcile progressive thinking,
expectation about change and improvement, and the classical idea that as a result, that should be sort of trying to.
Well, there's another group of Turkish Islamists, the most nationalist oriented of them, who are,
in fact, the majority in Turkey, who see the Ottoman Empire as the pinnacle of Islamic history.
Now this is straight forward. I will not sort of spend too much time with it, except to say that even within those ultimate lists,
there are different interpretations about what was valuable in the Ottoman Empire and what principles
should be derived from looking at the Ottoman Empire as the pinnacle of Islamic and indeed world history.
So the key here is not which posture you relate to, but also how you relate to the past.
Now finally, there is the question of the centre of history.
This is a particularly poignant one in Turkey for the reason I just mentioned, which is its imperial past.
The first disagreement over this is between those Islamists who see the Ottoman Empire as, as I said,
the pinnacle of Muslim history and others who view the seventh, seventh century Arabia as that pinnacle of Islamic history.
So one can describe this as a turkey centred versus an Arab centred debate or two views.
Take yourself into the Arab centres and there are of course other parts of the Muslim world Iran,
South Asia and Southeast Asia, which can play a part in this debate and taking into account.
But last but not least, there is a conversation about Europe and the West in general in the modern period.
So you're all familiar with the debate on Western centrism or eurocentrism?
It's a big thing nowadays within the boundaries of international relations.
It is raging in Turkey. It is it is absolutely very much at the top of the agenda, not just of speakers, but, of course, worldwide.
Now it has become part of a small industry, I would say, sort of provided for by the act itself.
So for those of you who are interested in the material production of knowledge,
Turkey is a fascinating case because you actually see how if you if you have the material means the money and the will and the power,
you can begin to promote and build a new world.
And and this is very much something that the AKP has done in its 25 years in power.
But this is, of course, not to say that there isn't really also a valid debate about eurocentrism.
Okay. Let me conclude by trying to summarise very briefly.
Um, what I have, um, uh, what I have said and I'm trying to do in this work.
So there are two objectives. And the work itself can be read on two levels.
And hopefully when the book is produced, written and produced, it will be read by two different types of audiences.
First. It's a work on intellectual history and specifically on how Turkey's Islamists in all their diversity approach the international world.
And this is done in terms of ideas rather than policy through the three themes that I have selected.
So what the book is hoping to achieve is of new material about about or new knowledge,
new empirical knowledge that I have gathered and I will be gathering over the three years.
Now, some parts of this project, for example, the history and historiography I want to talk to you about, are much more lacking.
There's this clearly something that people have worked on with civilisation nationalism.
Of course, there are more familiar topics and more has been done on them.
But always the question here is how you present a particular topic.
One example is the following I talk to you when when I came to history of historiography
about the four themes through which I'm presenting the materials that I've.
This is, in fact, the fourth version of this chapter.
And the fourth way of organising this chapter that I reached after a lot of work.
Starting first with a chronological approach, then going on to a way of organising it, which was about schools of thought.
Then the third one was focussed on us through Sadat and the Turkish centred versus Arab centred way of looking at the debates.
And then finally I reached the four themes way of organising the chapter.
As always, when you move away from chronology and you go to a thematic approach, it's a lot of work for the author, but it pays off.
I think ultimately,
because you can convey something in in a new way that perhaps is easier for the reader to digest and hang on to at the end of the day.
So this is the empirical level, the first part, the first purpose of this project.
The second is to offer an empirically grounded view of what global oil needs to move the debate away from
forward in a field which is sometimes very general in its aspirations and sort of and more about aspirations,
actually, than delivering the detailed material to show something persuasively.
So my argument here is that because the concepts that pervade Islamist thought in Turkey, such as civilisations,
such as national, the nation, nationalism, progress, the Muslim world, all these are mostly 19th century modern concepts.
There's a lot of work on that in our which allow for a conversation, a kind of mutual understanding, if not agreement between different settings,
between different societies, that in fact there's much more commonality here than, for example, the idea of Western non-Western life.
So when I look at these authors, when I look at the notes, the footnotes, when I look at their bibliographies,
when I talk to them, they have read all kinds of Middle Eastern European, South Asian intellectuals.
And it's very difficult to separate and say, oh, this is just about the West or just about about the Islamic context.
So when you when you look at the detail, I think the categories of Western and non-Western.
Thank you very much. Thank you very. Thank you very much for the presentation and thank you very much for coming.
Talking at a project through its half way through and and guiding us through your thought processes and how you put the project to light again,
which is very valuable. Often we hear people when things are is it completely finished?
Which doesn't get a sense of how and why and in what ways approach your project.
And I found that was fascinating.
Thank you for being quite honest about the challenges of coming on that, which is something we love and I think we all that.
But that's a really important part of research. And I know we've been talking to the students, but thank you for that one.
One thing that I was very interested by this, your approach to take looking at Periodisation,
because I think Periodisation really gives us an insight to how people view world and how they view history.
And you talked obviously about the centrality of how the Ottoman Empire I thought you said you're coming across about
how Turkish Islamists paradise for post Ottoman period because it's probably going to be rather different than,
say, Islamists elsewhere. Look at it. Or is it all have you got a sense of or is that a period that they don't really paradise?
It really might be. The end of the empire is the end of the last significant period.
Um. Actually, I'll go to the market. So it's very difficult for me to answer that because.
That tends to be that tends to be a feeling of, well, an embattled and embattled feeling.
And and and this has translated into many Islamist thinkers attempting to reject
the Republican narrative about who the Turks are when their history started.
They have tried to. Well, they've castigated the Republicans, the communists, essentially, for cutting off the republic from its roots.
And they have argued that as a result, Turks have been impoverished by this by this decision.
And this decision had practical and sort of it was built on the basis of practical steps.
But it was also a conscious intellectual. Decision.
So there's no there's no there's no periodisation post 1923 such.
That's the last big division. Yes. Yeah. And there is.
And now I will say something that I didn't perhaps touch on as much.
I didn't I didn't have time to lecture, which is that.
There is there's really not much positive historiography writing.
There's not this there's not much production which has which has followed the critique of that.
So a lot of my time over the past year has been spent trying to find Muslim historians who.
Not Muslim and not Islamist intellectuals. But Islamist and Islamist historians, there's a very big difference.
I was trying to look at people who have written about who are properly historians, but who come to this from an Islamist point of view.
And I have not been able to find. Anyway.
There are people like, for those of you who know, is my current mansion in Maryland, but he's the historian of Islamist thought in Turkey,
which is very different from an Islamist historian who wants to revisit the big questions
and who we are and where do we belong and how do we relate with other Muslims.
And this work has not been done yet. Now, in my in my desperation and of course, as I became curious how I was trying to find,
for example, Egyptian, Egyptian Islamist historians, but there again, oh, there's not a much.
Of course, it's not my area. It's difficult to get to this information.
But but you find actually very little of the positive as opposed to the critique of which there's plenty.
So in terms of my methods, what I've decided to do is tease from the work of Islamist intellectuals,
the broad work to tease out the implications of that broad worldview, that broad work for history.
But but I've had to do that as opposed to relying on something that would be readymade, so to speak.
Yeah, that's fascinating. And the the absence says something quite clearly, which is very, very interesting.
And even when it comes to Islamic historiography, again, I have tried very hard to find those 19th century.
19th century stories. But. But what happens is that Muslim historians from the 19th century onwards become modern historians.
So they become historians of Egypt or of Turkey or other specific nation states, but not of the Muslim world.
This, this, this. This is very difficult to.