Between power, rote and truth in historiography, our rote is too asymmetrical, Nuray Mert

From the first years of the Republic, through the Takrir-i Sükun, the Tevhid-i Tedrisat and the Press Law, and through the teaching of the Nutuk, which is nothing more than a party congress speech by a political party chairman containing his claims and accusations about other politicians, as almost the sole source of history, an understanding of official history was constructed, and for years nobody could even raise a voice against it. Yet we have a heavy archive of what befell those who did raise their voices. What kind of mental structure these beliefs, memorized by children in formal education like mythological beliefs, actually form over time has never been dwelt upon. Tons of critical studies have been produced on what kind of persona the Ash'ari creed's approach to fate might produce theologically, and Muslim scholars and intellectuals have tried to respond to them. The fact is that there is an inevitable relationship between certain beliefs, conceptions of history, mythological conceptions and social personalities. A person's creed and belief determine his morality as well as his way of conducting himself on earth. A narrative of history that is entirely distorted, whose understanding in certain ways is made compulsory, and all of whose paths to an alternative narrative are blocked, far beyond mere rote learning, also forms a personality structure, a moral code, a world of mentality and behavior.

Thanks to Nuray Mert, she has started a debate that will provide an occasion for facing up to these matters a little. Although I said, in our last article and in the reply she gave in Medyascope, that what we put forward remained at the level of a modest effort to liberate history somewhat, and that if there are those who are worried, official history still stands firmly in place, she presented me again, from the very headline, as a "representative of the new official history." Bless her heart.

But what we did is, in the end, no more than an objection to the forced imposition of official history that still wounds all of us day by day and paralyzes our brains. Are we not to do even this much? Should the first to object to this much have been Nuray Mert? And, moreover, by saying "Answering one rote with another rote..."

First of all, I would like to say a thing or two about Nuray Mert's antipathy toward rote. If a person's repeating what he knows to be right is rote, what is bad about this rote? Shall we not insist on something we believe in just so as not to look like rote? Shall we not persevere in what we know to be right, so as not to appear rote-learners to others? In this equation, I honestly could not understand what kind of person a person without rote is.

Of course rote is a bad thing when it has turned into a dogma accepted without questioning, when it has no evidence and no foundation. But if the repetition of certain verified, evidenced, reasoned truths also gives the appearance of rote, what is bad about that?

If what is meant here is that those who oppose official history distort history in the same way, I can speak only for myself. I have no historical claim that I put forward without evidence. I can even go further and say that the general conservative historiographies that question official history are much more scientific and courageous in matters of historiography. The official history they face is, owing to the hegemonic tools it also uses, so dominant and so "rote-imposing without questioning" that it can immediately condemn what they say as "nonsense."

So far I have not seen anyone who said something outside official history and was not immediately discredited by the hegemonic discourse. This discrediting stems not from any weakness of these dissenting discourses but from how dominant and despotic the official discourse still is. The same thing, moreover, has happened to Nuray Mert many times, as she herself reminds us. How many lynchings she endured, how many times she suffered character assassination, for poking at a piece or two of official history or its "rote"... So we are not at all at the level of answering one rote with another rote. The critical discourse still put forward against the official discourse may perhaps constitute a hegemony based on the power of truth, but in terms of officialdom it speaks from an extremely asymmetrical level.

I too repeat, as a rote, Nuray Mert's warning that historiography is not independent of politics and cannot be objective. In both my books Türk Dininin Sosyolojik İmkanı (1999, 2021) and Tarihbozumu (2010, 2025) I made sociological analyses, including methodological suggestions, to the effect that historiography cannot be independent of the debates and politics of the present and of the historian's political and ideological value judgments and preferences. History therefore becomes a narrative in which each of us justifies our present stance by relying on the past. But honesty is nonetheless possible in historiography; it is certainly not a field closed to dialogue, where everyone hurls his own narrative at everyone else.

Against my statement that there is no application of an imposition of a new official history, Mert reminds us that the expression "Drunkards used to rule this country" was used by the highest office. I cannot help asking: whoever it was said by, when did this statement turn into an official history? Moreover, all the historical data about Mustafa Kemal's table are somewhat more out in the open today than before, and known in all their details. Shall we remind you what kind of censorship there was for years even over this way of life whose every detail is known today? Why was it so, how was it? What kind of protection was provided by applying such censorship? Why was there such fear of the truths that would emerge from speaking about these things today without resorting to a literature of defamation against anyone? Besides, once the subject is opened, no one can set limits on who will say how much about what.

Again, while Nuray Mert says that she sees my expression "wars are first lost in the minds," regarding the Republican cadre that emerged from among those who led the National Struggle, as unfair and detached from reality, as evidence against me she puts forward nothing other than that Mustafa Kemal, as an Ottoman pasha, went from front to front before the First World War and led the National Struggle. Perhaps if the debate proceeds, she may put forward other evidence too. But I think I have sufficiently documented, in the articles I wrote earlier in Yeni Şafak on this subject, what I base this statement on. It is 1908 already, there is no war yet, and the whole Middle Eastern geography is a part of the Ottoman state. Of course there are problems, but there is a Mustafa Kemal proposing, as a thesis, "withdrawal from there" for the radical solution of these problems. His own friend Ali Fuat Cebesoy tells this, and Şükrü Hanioğlu, from other sources, speaks of this view having existed in him from very early on. No one has properly questioned this until now. Yet this is an understanding that contains the whole software of the Ottoman collapse and of the founding, in its place, of a state squeezed into Anatolia in a Kemalist format.

Yes, this idea existed among some of the Ottoman officers, but of course not among all of them. Indeed, by Falih Rıfkı Atay's own aforementioned statement, had there not been strong names such as Ali Fuat Cebesoy at that table, the other officers would have reacted very strongly against Mustafa Kemal because of these ideas. This is of course not a subject to be brushed aside easily by pointing to a service record. Perhaps it needs to be taken up on a more academic ground, as Nuray Mert has done.

I must also say that I received with regret Nuray Mert's statement that "pointing to Mustafa Kemal's authoritarian political understanding is one thing, making heroes of everyone who opposed him is another," as taking my approach too lightly. It is impossible for Mert not to know that recounting what befell Kazım Karabekir, on account of the reply he tried to give to a Nutuk narrative in which he was openly wronged, does not mean exonerating him in every respect. After all, on many points Kazım Karabekir shares in many of the sins of the Union and Progress. We do not forget his role in the deposition of Abdülhamid either. But this does not mean that we should ignore the situation of rightness/victimhood that emerges from his being purged as the chief actor of the War of Independence and then not even being given the right to reply to the claims made about him exclusively in the Nutuk.

And the subject goes on like that. The festival is ahead of us; we will continue if necessary.

On this occasion, I congratulate you on the Ramadan Festival.