International Mulla Khalil al-Siirdi Symposium

As Turkey moves swiftly toward the June 24 fateful elections, in an atmosphere where the agenda is occupied by the clumsiness the opposition displays in adapting to the new system, which it evidently has great difficulty understanding, attending a scholarly symposium is a good opportunity to look at the concerns of the day from another window and in another state of mind.

Of course we find this opportunity not only to seize it, but to answer an invitation that was among the obligations. Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, who serves these days as Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Siirt University, reminded me of his invitation at least once every month from the first day, for the Molla Halil es-Siirdî Symposium, which he had been preparing for about two years. Starting last Friday, for two days, this symposium took place at Siirt University as a tremendous scholarly feast in which about 100 papers were presented from morning to evening.

125 academics working at different universities, from Morocco to Egypt, from Syria to Iraq and Northern Iraq, from Jordan to Turkey, took part in the symposium. The symposium, in all of whose sessions Professor İhsan's scholarly seriousness and discipline was reflected, was recorded as the first symposium of this scale on Molla Halil.

Molla Halil is known to everyone in the eastern madrasas, and to many people in many parts of the Islamic world, but until now no opportunity or occasion had arisen to look collectively at his works, his life and his era. His relatively scattered scholarly legacy was, so to speak, gathered to some degree in such a meeting. Thus the portrait of a scholar truly worth studying from every respect has come fully to light. In a way, a hidden treasure has been brought out.

If the death of a scholar is like the death of a world, then bringing out a scholar's works and presenting them again to attention is like the revival of that world; on condition, of course, that no scholar is sanctified, nor made innocent and regarded as exempt from error. In similar gatherings, particularly in gatherings that take up a figure who also has a spiritual dimension, the literature of exalting and sanctifying the person reaches such a degree that, since everyone has by that route somehow been cut off from the world of reality, there remains no way at all of benefiting from the person in question or of advancing his ideas by discussing them.

In my view, the most successful aspect of the Molla Halil symposium was that, although it took place in an atmosphere that could most easily give rise to a culture of sanctification, the approaches were generally far from such sanctification, and the scholarly distance could be maintained in a quite measured way.

Molla Halil Siirdî is a scholar whose name is well known, and whose books are known and read, in the madrasas that are still active in the East. So much so that everyone who currently passes through the lectern of the Eastern madrasas is in a way his student. In the ijazah they receive, the chain of reference is always traced back to him. This aspect alone suffices to arouse curiosity to know him more thoroughly.

Molla Halil lived and produced works in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century... He is a name whose works have not so far been properly critically edited, and whose place within the scholarly traditions before him has not been fully studied. It is known that there is a treasure there, but what exactly is the value of this treasure, what does it tell us, what does it provide, and especially, for which problems of Muslims living in the 21st century, and how, could it shed light toward a solution? For this, of course, his works first need to have come to light.

His work on the tafsir called Basiretu'l Kulûb, known to be a work between the Tafsir al-Jalalayn and the tafsir of Qadi Baydawi, was recently printed in Arabic, but its critical edition is only now being prepared by Abdullah Özcan of Siirt University Faculty of Theology. Apart from that, Molla Halil has nearly forty works, from fiqh to hadith, from sira to rhetoric, from Sufism to logic. From the sum of these works and the biography of their author, important data also emerge about the state of the eastern madrasas in those years.

Molla Halil was raised within a madrasa system widespread in the East, and is considered the most important name in representing all the educational curriculum, discourse and line of that madrasa system. Those who know this madrasa system know that one of the most distinctive characteristics of those raised there is their unwillingness, other than raising students, to carry out scholarly research and produce a work to say new things. Therefore those who produce works are very few. Scholarly research is, at best, produced to answer the people's day-to-day needs for fatwas when they turn to them.

Apart from that, the learning of the tradition and its faithful transmission to coming generations is the subject on which the greatest care is taken. In such an environment, it is understood that Molla Halil undertook a kind of compilation and consolidation, restating in concise form and abridging (summarizing), so that the tradition he was charged with transmitting could be better learned and transmitted pedagogically. In this way, by expressing very well the body of knowledge that had multiplied to the point of becoming inextricable by his own time, he can be said to have carried out a kind of reform of discourse and teaching method in the madrasas.

Very solid data on the sociology of the period and the region can be obtained through Molla Halil's life and works. The Siirt University Faculty of Theology had previously organized international symposia of a similar nature on Imam al-Ash'ari and Saladin Ayyubi. Both had constituted the first studies in their fields, and again the papers of both were published collectively by Beyan Publications in two volumes each.

Universities of course become more lively and enriched with their staff and their toilers. I heartily congratulate Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, the dean of the Siirt University Faculty of Theology, who carried out all these works, as well as Prof. Dr. Cemalettin Erdemci, Dr. Adnan Menduhoğlu, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Fadıl Aygan and his other toilers.