From Erzurum to Tillo, from Marifetname to TÜBA

It was a complete coincidence, but a very meaningful one.

On the morning of 23 September, when the light mechanism that Ibrahim Hakki of Erzurum had set up in Tillo for his teacher Ismail Fakirullah was at work, as I was getting ready to set out to attend the event in Tillo, I remembered the note in my calendar that TÜBA's regular GEBİP evaluation meeting this year would begin in Erzurum exactly one day earlier, on 22 September.

So it was our lot that on the road we were setting out on to commemorate Ibrahim Hakki, author of the Marifetname, we would this time go by way of the place where he was born. This coincidence is truly very meaningful, because the meeting I will attend in Erzurum, the birthplace of the Hazrat, is an intensive three-day scientific meeting of TÜBA, which also claims to achieve the unity among all the sciences that he achieved in his own Marifetname.

The annual evaluation meeting of TÜBA's Program for the Reward of Outstanding Young Scientists (GEBİP), of which I am a member, has for some time been held every year in one of our Anatolian cities other than Ankara and Istanbul, in cooperation with that city's university. Thus the dimension of travel, which throughout history has always added another horizon and depth to scientific work, is not neglected, and an important contribution is made to the integration of our newly founded universities with the world of science.

Last year the same meeting took place on the university campus in Kastamonu. At the meeting commemorating Prof. Dr. Fuat Köprülü on the 50th anniversary of his death, we had partaken of a magnificent feast of ideas, with Prof. Halil Berktay speaking on Köprülü and scientific method, followed by Prof. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak.

The main agenda item of the meeting in Erzurum, which will also include presentations by some 60 young scientists who will be rewarded for their outstanding achievements this year, with projects in the fields of Science (Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics), Engineering, Health and Life, and Social Sciences, is "Smart Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future". Under this heading, TÜBA member and Energy Studies Group chair Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Dinçer will give an opening speech.

Within the scope of GEBİP, one of the most respected and original award programs of our country, TÜBA has so far rewarded and encouraged 404 of our young scientists. Of course, GEBİP is not TÜBA's only program; together with the pre-doctoral or post-doctoral research scholarships abroad that it grants, it makes its contribution felt in the progress that Türkiye has recently achieved, relatively speaking, in every field.

We can attend only the opening of this beautiful meeting in Erzurum, because we are setting out to take part in the event of light that will work by means of the mechanism set up there by a man of Erzurum who had arrived in Tillo from here some 300 years ago.

"If the first sun born in the new year does not light up my teacher's bedside, what would I do with that sun!"

The motivation that led İbrahim Hakkı to have this light mechanism built, which he prepared under 18th-century conditions for İsmail Fakirullah, under whom he studied in Tillo, and which looks extraordinary for those days and for this geography even more than today, lies in the feelings that these words express. This is a feeling that expresses a person's love of learning, a feeling that establishes knowledge as an object of love.

The saying attributed to Hz. Ali, "I would be the slave of one who taught me a letter for forty years", points to another domain of appreciation that the value of knowledge cannot be measured by numbers or by the power it will add to us. Today knowledge is either power or cash. It can be bought and sold, and who possesses it has no spiritual meaning or value whatsoever. Our relations with the people from whom we acquire knowledge have also turned into a relationship of material exchange. No one hands over his child to his teacher any more saying "the flesh is yours, the bones are mine". On the contrary, there are students who feel like a boss because of the fee they have paid their teacher.

In such a world, naturally, the production of knowledge also becomes no different from the production of any other commodity. In place of philosophy as the love of knowledge (philo-sophia), a sophistic motivation prevails in the world, one that turns knowledge into an instrument of power and can put any truth in whatever packaging is ordered.

Is there not a need for all of us to feel, from such a world, the debt of gratitude that Ibrahim Hakki felt some 250 years ago toward his teacher in Tillo, who had passed on to him his share of the knowledge of this world and the next?

Realizing this debt of course increases our gratitude. One who does not know how to thank a servant of God does not know how to thank his Lord either. One who does not appreciate the worth of his teacher cannot appreciate the truth that we know nothing but what He has taught us, and cannot fulfill the gratitude owed for this truth.

Ibrahim Hakki thanked his teacher in order to fulfill to his Lord the gratitude owed for this truth. Some 250 years ago he set up in Tillo such a mechanism that, on the equinox dates when day and night are equal, the first sun of the year, as it rises, lights up the grave of his teacher Ismail Fakirullah, who is buried here, before it lights up Tillo. While lighting up his grave, it also lights up our minds and our consciences about the meaning of seeking knowledge.

Every year on 23 September the event is repeated in Tillo with this mechanism. Anyone who wishes comes to witness it.

Incidentally, I have proposed that next year TÜBA's GEBİT annual evaluation meeting be held in Tillo on this date, in cooperation with Siirt University. Perhaps the love of knowledge reflected from this light will bring a brand-new love to our world of science.