Understanding Şerif Mardin's contribution correctly

Prof. Dr. Şerif Mardin, the doyen of Turkish sociology, has passed to the mercy of God.

However much the question of what he meant for Turkish social scientists and for the history of Turkish political thought has been debated over the years, it has now acquired an entirely new context, with his death added on top of it. Whatever kind of activity a person was engaged in while alive, once he dies his whole life, his past and his meaning acquire an altogether different context.

In one sense, when a person dies he turns into a completed text; from another angle, with his death the whole oeuvre of the deceased reaches a brand-new wholeness.

Seen from this angle, a person is not completed when he dies; he continues to carry out his work in a new lane, or to receive new contributions to his work or to its meaning. Here it is an important detail to see that "receiving contributions" now matters more decisively than "making contributions". Because he can no longer decide by whom and how his work will be understood; evidently the strength of the work he produced affects its being understood and interpreted more effectively, but in the end who will understand what from it and reproduce what has entirely passed out of his initiative.

I recalled the debates that took place very recently over the TÜBA award, withheld from him for a lifetime, being given to him with the rank of "honorary" added to it. I had written two separate pieces in this column on those debates.

When I looked at what was written about him right after his death, it was not surprising that the context of those debates was, in broad outline, immediately voiced again.

As is known, Mardin was in fact never on a conservative or Islamist line. But because of what he wrote, he was much criticized especially for having made Said Nursi and Nurcuism shine. With the emergence of the FETÖ face of the Gülen movement, he could even retroactively be accused of complicity in this movement's growing strong. Yet, as we said before, all Mardin did was to try to understand and explain the cultural, sociological and historical roots of this movement, which has a serious social counterpart in Türkiye. On the contrary, to remain indifferent and unconcerned toward a movement of this scale is a serious disgrace for a school of sociology.

Unfortunately, in an environment where the social scientist is expected not to try to understand the subject he studies but to take sides in advance on it and work like a propaganda functionary, Şerif Mardin could be branded as if he were directly engaged with the subject he studied. Although throughout my academic life I have never given credit to Kurdish nationalism, I have both studied the Kurdish political movement myself and had my graduate students study it. Likewise, despite my evident distance from the left-socialist movement and outlook, I have both studied the various journals, trends, factions and discourses of the left-socialist movement and had my students study them. In doing these things, what I demanded of my students was to keep a distance from the subject they studied and not to set about criticizing the movement they were studying out of the blue, but only to try to understand. By doing this I have not thought of making a political contribution to either the Kurdish movement or the Socialist movement. This is an indispensable rule of social science; if you cannot even do this, you have not so much as brushed the edge of social science.

This tradition of understanding sociology is in fact, in the West, the line of interpretive sociology (verstehende), which, as against the positivist social science that stays at the limit of "explaining" what happens starting from its own ideology or theory, cares first to "understand" what happens from the viewpoint of the actors of the social fact. Of the two most important representatives in Türkiye of this line, whose most important representative in the West is Max Weber, one is Şerif Mardin and the other is F. Sabri Ülgener.

In an environment where Marxist militancy was mistaken for social science, Mardin's foregrounding of understanding, ideology and culture naturally disturbed the existing academic establishment. Otherwise it is not possible to say that he felt the slightest sympathy for Nurcuism or the fields he studied. Indeed, just as we never expected that, we also noted earlier that he never managed to free himself from an orientalist attitude toward this field he studied.

Meanwhile, in studying Nurcuism, by revealing its link with modernism, which Muslim or which Nurcu did he make happy and content? This subject would bring much debate. What is certain is that, while studying Gülen and his movement, even his having declared in the middle of the work that he had "given up" in the name of all the effective social science methodologies he knew should have been counted as a serious contribution to understanding FETÖ. Because according to him, studying the Gülen movement would always leave a dark area behind, because of their efforts to present themselves to the social scientist as they wished, and so would never be possible.

Likewise, it has strangely turned into a complete Şerif Mardin paradox that those who evaluate Mardin on the basis of opposition to the AK Parti criticize him for "paving the way for the rise of the AK Parti" with his studies. What contribution could merely trying to understand the AK Parti have made to the AK Parti's development? Do they consider that a movement with deep social roots like the AK Parti developed because a social scientist tried to understand or explain it?

I think this is also partly connected with exaggerating the roles of social scientists more than necessary. In Türkiye, and in fact all over the world, social scientists have no role beyond trying to understand what happens, generally after it has happened. An expectation of a kind of soothsaying, or foresight about the future, even of leadership, has always been placed on the social scientist, but very few social scientists have been able to do even that.

Even Marx, who disparaged "the philosophers who merely interpret the world" and was determined to become "the philosopher who sets out to change the world", needed only 4 years, and more than enough, to understand that this role was impossible for a philosopher and to flee from it.

Şerif Mardin made not the slightest contribution to the development of Nurcuism nor to the development of the AK Parti as social movements; his only contribution is having contributed to the understanding of those movements from the standpoint of social science thought. This much has been enough to make him the most important name in Turkish sociology to date.

May God treat him with His mercy.