Said Halim Pasha again, on the occasion of the "Tezkire Conversations"

6 December was the anniversary of the martyrdom of Said Halim Pasha, one of the last grand viziers of the Ottoman State. Akif Emre had made important observations about this valuable thinker of ours in his article in Yeni Şafak. His presenting Said Halim Pasha in this piece as "An Islamist among the Unionists" is important in showing the continuity of opinions about the Prince.

Said Halim Pasha, with the academic interest that began to develop especially after the 1980s, is shown as one of the important representatives of Islamist thought in the Second Constitutional Period. But in addition to this quality, the Pasha was a serious statesman who held extremely critical posts such as President of the Council of State and Minister of Foreign Affairs in quite critical periods.

Said Halim received the title of Pasha in 1885 from Sultan Abdülhamid himself. Declared Beylerbey of Rumelia, again by Sultan Abdülhamid, in the early 1900s, the Pasha was sent into exile because of his opposition to the regime; he met the Unionists in Paris, and from there went to Cairo, where he was appointed inspector of the Committee of Union and Progress.

After the Italians landed troops in Tripolitania, and with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, when the need for a peace treaty with the Italians arose, they made Said Halim Pasha head of the delegation that set out to carry out the negotiations. This in itself is noteworthy in showing the confidence that politics and state institutions had in him.

This quality of Said Halim Pasha as a statesman also drew the attention of the representatives of foreign missions or state officials in Turkey at that time. The opinions of Liman von Sanders, who was in Istanbul in this period to serve the Ottoman army, about the Pasha are as follows:

"The Grand Vizier Prince Said Halim, the highest office holder of the Turks, combined in his person the qualities of an Asian grandee and a modern diplomat. The Grand Vizier, like all the other ministers, spoke excellent French and was a very courteous person. Short in stature and very active, the Grand Vizier later proved himself to be a complete statesman. He succeeded, with great steadfastness, in reining in the generally excessive ambitions of the Young Turks until the time he was compelled to resign in February 1917."

I had the opportunity to take up Said Halim Pasha, who assumed the office of Grand Vizier in the most turbulent days of the First World War, once again within the framework of the Tezkire Talks held in Erzurum, at the historic Yakutiye Madrasa, where a scholarly meeting was held for the first time after a gap of 100 years. The questions asked in the talk also enabled me to look more carefully at some matters about Said Halim Pasha that I had not thought about before, or had not thought about carefully.

Although Said Halim Pasha's articles were published in the Islamist publications of the Second Constitutional Period and he made a not inconsiderable contribution to Islamist thought in this period, in later years he did not take as much place among the reference sources of Islamists as he deserved. Three basic reasons for this can be mentioned.

The first is that Islamism in the Republican period found the possibility of re-institutionalisation roughly in the 1960s. In this period, while Islamists were trying to get to know the Islamist intellectuals of the Ottoman period and to understand their ideas, they also turned their attention to the Islamic movements in countries such as Egypt and Pakistan. The translation activities, which intensified from the end of the 1960s and intensified considerably in the seventies and eighties, also appear to have delayed the recognition of some Islamist thinkers of the Ottoman period.

The process of getting acquainted/reconciled with the Ottomans through the figure of Sultan Abdülhamid, the effort to settle accounts with the early Republican period and, accordingly, the process of othering the Union and Progress can be seen as another factor that delayed the recognition of Said Halim Pasha. That Said Halim Pasha held very important posts in the Union and Progress, and that he was seen as the representative of an anti-Abdülhamid position, brought with it the result that His thoughts were not taken seriously.

Finally, the fact that Islamist thought in Turkey has generally found the possibility of expressing itself through literary figures has also prevented figures like the Prince from coming to the fore. For example, the tendency to treat Mehmed Âkif as an Islamist reference is more pronounced than the tendency to treat Elmalılı Hamdi as an Islamist reference. In a way, literature has come before creed or doctrine, emotions before rationality.

In the Republican period too, Islamist thought made its voice heard through figures whose literary side and aesthete personality weighed heavier, such as Necip Fazıl, Sezai Karakoç and Nuri Pakdil. This has brought with it the result that both academic and intellectual interest have concentrated on these names.

Concentrating on the ideas not only of Said Halim Pasha but of many intellectuals from the Second Constitutional Period to the Republic is quite important for the formation of an intellectual continuity. In the coming period, Tezkire continues to work on subjects that will bring this intellectual memory to light. These studies will have given us the opportunity to place thinking on Islamism in Turkey on a firmer footing and to position it more soundly historically.