The Left in Turkey: Once upon a time

The title is the heading of the special issue of tezkire magazine's 50th issue, which takes the Turkish left as its main subject. Published since 1991, tezkire magazine had taken a long break from publication after its 47th issue, published in 2007. With its 48th issue, published in 2014, tezkire resumed publication, picking up where it left off. The magazine, which dedicated its 48th issue under the title "Islamism: Possibility and Reckoning" to the memory of the 150th anniversary of Said Halim Pasha's birth, carried comparative articles and analyses on the old and new forms of Islamism.

The 49th issue, which appeared under the title "The Middle East in the Generation of Counter-Revolutions," carried extensive critiques of the Arab revolutions and important analyses of Islamism, particularly in its states of power and opposition.

Since its first publication in 1991, tezkire, having adopted as its motto the principle of "depth and continuity in theory" in the context of Islamist thought and stance, has duly fulfilled the responsibility it took on in this field. On its subjects, among them multiculturalism, democracy, citizenship, Eurocentrism, revealed knowledge and human knowledge, historicism, hermeneutics, political theology, political participation and the current, philosophical meaning of politics, tezkire has tried to do justice not only at the theoretical level but also at the level of stance and position.

tezkire in general cared about the political, about politics. It never gave credit to cynical, anti-political, para-political, archepolitical or ultra-political attitudes aimed at suspending, postponing or neutralizing the political. It did not ignore the seduction, through a radical language that looks more political, by which these attitudes cancel human will and therefore in fact the human being. That is why in days when hopes in politics were most exhausted and people's political participation was thought to mean nothing, it came out under the title "Long Live Politics."

tezkire has also been a good school. Writing, working or reading in tezkire became an occasion for an intellectual and spiritual depth that made its privilege evident. Many people raised in that school today share the honor of lending a shoulder to the construction of the New Turkey, while also carrying the consciousness and wisdom that what they do is ultimately nothing but the remembering, and reminding, of human virtue and value (tezkire). For those who know that nothing has been left unsaid under the dome of heaven, true knowledge is in the end merely something remembered. That is why no one has the right to turn being knowledgeable into an opportunity to hold power, and there is no moral side to it whatsoever.

tezkire is therefore always written in lowercase. The responsibility of ensuring depth and continuity does not belong exclusively to one or a few people at the center. Without neglecting the accumulation and contribution of earlier generations, I already greet with hope the new generation of thinkers who have taken on tezkire's responsibility in this period, especially those who draw attention with their fine writing: Öner Buçukçu, Asım Öz, Bahattin Cizreli, Aydın Aktay, Suheyb Öğüt, Salman Sayyid, Hatem Bazian, Salman Öğüt and many more.

Let us come to tezkire's 50th issue, still in the bookshops. As its name suggests, it has put the Turkish Left on the table, and includes articles taking up the Turkish left in different dimensions. It must of course seem a little strange that a left wandering the heights of Enlightenment arrogance should become the object of others' research. Because it is a point of view adopted since Marx himself: "They do, while we think about what they do and theorize what they do." This point of view and attitude has granted the left a self-proclaimed "privilege of objectifying and naming the world and everyone."

This privilege the left produces and grants itself is of course worth examining in its own right. It is among the foremost subjects that best explain why the left can never recover. Those looking for the left in Turkey should look right here for why they cannot find it, and indeed why they never will.

The left only names, but because the names it gives have no counterpart in Turkish society, it ends up afflicted with the superficiality and distortion of labeling. It produces a typology of progressive-reactionary and labels the elements outside itself as reactionary, but it never truly directs its own course toward the forward direction of history. It remains behind both history and society, yet keeps claiming its own progressiveness as if reciting a religious litany.

Meanwhile, in the face of a conservative politics that democratizes the country in every respect and raises the quality and participation of citizenship to levels it could not even have imagined, it continues to find its consolation in the label of "progressiveness" that it has hung on itself, though it practices the finest conservatism and reaction. Even the cleverest of them, when political heat rises to a certain level, has the makeup fall off, and from beneath appears Kemalism with all its fascistic tendency, elitism, privilege-seeking and cliquishness.

Ultimately, when it comes to the left in Turkey, at certain levels and moments we can say "it might not have been a bad idea," but of course only if it had been what they claim. However, no one has ever seen a left such as is claimed and promised. That is why tezkire has summed up the matter perfectly under a single title: The left in Turkey, once upon a time there was, and there was not...

In this issue, in addition to quotations from Sadreddin Celal and Niyazi Berkes, the writings on the left by Bahattin Cizreli, Abdülaziz Kıransal, Yakup Öztürk, Asım Öz and Öner Buçukçu stand out. There is also an article of mine in this issue titled "Politics and History Between the Sons of Abraham and the Sons of Hegel: Islamists and Leftists in Turkey." The article tries to show that, instead of the class or other antagonisms the left in the world tries to see, entirely different antagonisms are valid, which can be exemplified even from the sides the left itself takes. If the opportunity arises, we will explain our point at greater length later.