A star slips from the sociology sky: Hüsamettin Arslan

At the end of the first day of 2018, as we were preparing to evaluate the reckoning of a year and the vision of a coming year or years, we are, with the news of a friend's death, invited to take stock of a human life.

The news of the passing of our valued friend Prof. Dr. Hüsamettin Arslan, who made very important contributions to the craft, the literature, the bibliography and the theory of sociology, came at the end of the first day of this year. Moreover, not much time passed between my hearing that the illness he was being treated for had "advanced considerably" and his death.

I had come to know Hüsamettin Arslan from the atmosphere at the Sakarya Tea House in my Ankara days. Those who knew Ankara in those years know that the Sakarya Tea House was an important public space in which the agenda and the intellectual lines of the new Islamist thought were taking shape. In this space Hüsamettin Arslan had a very special place.

As early as the nineties, he had translated Alan Chalmers's book What Is This Thing Called Science?, and then Barry Barnes's book on Thomas Kuhn, who gave the concept of the "paradigm" to the philosophy of science, and published it under the title "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge". Both books were publications that would virtually shape the identity face of Vadi Publications, of which I would later become a partner and editor, and which would go on to publish hundreds of books. Vadi Publications laid the first foundation stone of its interest, concentrated on the philosophy of science, modernism, postmodernism, hermeneutics, the critique of Western-centrism, and the analysis of new forms of Islamism and the construction of its discourse, with these two publications by Hüsamettin Arslan. Apart from book publishing, this interest continued through the journal Tezkire.

Hüsamettin Arslan completed his doctoral thesis right after those first publications or in the same years, and moving to the Istanbul milieu, published his doctoral thesis as the first work under the title "Epistemic Community" at Paradigma Publications, which he founded himself. Along with that book, he also published the translation of Imre Lakatos's joint book with Alan Musgrave, "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge".

Truly, as far as I know, "Epistemic Community" was the earliest and most successful study done in Turkey on a kind of sociology of the academic world. His thesis also contained subtle criticisms of how knowledge production in academia proceeds together with the formation of a closed community. Contrary to the virtues attributed to scientific knowledge, such as enlightenment, free thought, objectivity and openness, it drew attention to how scientific circles preserve certain presuppositions, ritual behaviors and beliefs among themselves as conditions of affiliation to a profession and of remaining in it. The discipline's common jargon and the ceremonial habits (habitus) repeated continually for admission to and continuation in the profession in fact turn into a perspective that limits and restricts the members of the profession in looking at the world, etc...

In the end, while on the one hand applying Kuhn's concept of the paradigm, he was on the other hand relaying the debates between the famous theorist of the anarchist theory of knowledge and Paul Feyerabend and adapting them to his own observations.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the strongest sociological observers of the academic world, had of course written Homo Academicus (English edition, 1988), but it had not yet had any serious reflection in Turkey. In this environment, Arslan definitely deserves to be recorded as one of the first Turkish sociologists to explain that academic circles and academic research can be a very entertaining, interesting and quite instructive object. Even Şerif Mardin's TÜBA adventure can become more meaningful in the company of this concept of the Epistemic Community. Moreover, the community's closed structure, and the discourse it produces with its common jargon, acceptances and prejudices, also constitute a pressure mechanism that applies automatic sanctions to anyone who steps outside it. In this respect, Arslan's work can be seen as an early salute to Şerif Mardin, who produced the concept of neighborhood pressure and felt to the full the pressure of that "epistemic community".

Arslan taught for many years in the Sociology Department of Uludağ University. From there he continued his activities at Paradigma Publications, which he had founded in Istanbul. His most important activity was translation. His defense against those who belittled translation work was very strong and very justified. Certain important texts in Turkey had to be delivered to readers who had no recourse but to read in Turkish. For those in a position to do so, this should be a duty and responsibility. He worked quite hard to fulfill this responsibility. He did his work with a puritan ethic, lovingly, with pleasure and with great meticulousness.

He translated into Turkish many important works of the philosophy of science, postmodernism, Continental European philosophy, and French and German philosophy and sociology. He translated and published, as a 3-volume work, a significant part of the English texts in the bibliography of our book "In the Beginning Was the Word: An Essay on Hermeneutics", which we published together with our mutual friends Erol Göka and Abullah Topçuoğlu in the early nineties. He translated and published Truth and Method, the masterpiece of the famous German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who died in recent years at the age of 104 and is the founding figure of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics. This work alone deserved strong thanks from the social science community.

Although Arslan focused largely on translation, in the difficult processes Turkey went through he did not hold back from producing position articles with the responsibility of an intellectual. He always made his stance and his side clear.

In this context, against the attempts of non-political forces to occupy the political field in the 2007 e-memorandum process and the closure case, and against the glorification of PKK violence and nationalism that was about to become a discursive norm among the so-called intellectuals, he held his own "conversations with his unknown reader" under the title "Young Turks, Young Kurds, Conservatives".

With the articles, television programs and conferences he produced, out of the prudent and truth-loving concern of an intellectual, against the Gezi events and the 17-25 December coup processes, he set out his stance against FETÖ in the clearest way.

Literally a falling star from Turkish sociology. A star that will always be remembered for his science, wisdom, personality, stance and, of course, his work...

I pray for God's mercy upon Hüsamettin Arslan, and offer condolences and patience to his loved ones.