Meeting Turkey's geography of the heart with its economic geography

The Eid al-Adha is like an interlude that gives us the chance to look through an ancient window at the political and economic life we are living, with its ever-increasing tempo and momentum, and from there to look at our losses and our accumulated heritage. Though in this interlude too the world keeps turning, and our economic and political activities do not freeze somewhere. On the contrary, our economy gives direction to our festivals as well, and our festivals cannot be entirely free of our political character.

Coming every year and flooding into our lives, able to seat its own time, calendar and routine activities in the place of honor, the festival is a favor of God to humanity. Because the festival is an event that integrates our social existence that disperses us with our differences, that returns to us the purity in our sameness from which we have grown distant by becoming different, that turns us into our pure existence, that reminds us of our belonging, and that brings us together in a single square.

Now, having experienced this meeting freshly, we can continue from where we left off.

The first waves of the economic war that Trump opened against Turkey using Pastor Brunson as a pretext had produced entirely uncalculated results. The people of Turkey, by showing an exceptional reaction to these attacks coming from the economic side, not only foiled the calculations of those who probably planned and carried out the operation, but also made them pay for these attacks very dearly in material terms. A heavy cost for which they gained nothing in return.

The Turkish people's showing this time with their property the desire and will to be a nation for which they had previously paid with their lives should be regarded as an important example that political economy must record carefully. One may pass it off by calling it an exception, but it is clear that it will make it possible to review all the received notions about the interaction between people's economic behavior and their ideals.

That the event went beyond Turkey's borders and acquired an international character is an entirely different dimension that deserves to be recorded.

During the festival we came together and chatted, on the occasion of festival greetings, with hundreds of Egyptians, Yemenis, Syrians, Iraqis, Qataris, Kuwaitis. For almost all of them, the number one item on the agenda is the measures to be taken against the attacks on the Turkish Lira and the dollar. Everyone has almost put aside their work and is thinking for Turkey, racking their brains for Turkey. A Lebanese I met tells that, upon Erdoğan's call, he exchanged his 1 million dollars at 4.7 liras, but that this did not matter to him in the slightest, and that he is ready to do even more.

Another, a Yemeni, tells the detailed plan he has prepared, that by affecting even just 200 million of the 1.7 billion Muslims against US products, we could teach the US a very important lesson. Another tells that Yemenis are very hardworking, that wherever they are they attract investment by working like ants, and the plans that could be implemented to direct their investments entirely toward Turkey.

What drives all these people to make these plans is of course the feeling of ownership toward Turkey. As Erdoğan stands up for the oppressed, as he devotes his own existence to the struggle for a more just world and describes it so, a movement that perceives this as an invitation and rushes to answer this invitation begins to be noticeable all over the world. This carries Turkey's geography of the heart far beyond its present physical geography and makes Turkey a power that no one can calculate.

"Those who meddle with Turkey today must know well what they are meddling with," we said in one of our recent articles. Those who touch Turkey's interests must also be willing to risk the awakening against themselves of a wave of antipathy and hostility directed at them all over the world.

At the same time, we have begun to see that the limits of Turkey's economy are not bounded by the limits of its recorded gross national product.

We saw that the effect of the latest attack on the Turkish Lira was broken to a noticeable degree by "investments made from outside". In fact, Turkey's economic power at present is not limited to this either. This asset can be turned into an unlimited resource with a more effective, rational, efficient economic organization. Our investment agencies can create an unimaginable economic resource by mobilizing resources eager to invest in Turkey with good, efficient, feasible, understandable projects.

I know many people from precisely this geography of the heart who could invest or want to invest in Turkey but cannot realize this wish because they cannot find a proper path, a feasible project, an interlocutor who can guide them with confidence.

If there is an economic power lying idle there, and moreover willing and motivated to turn to you, but it cannot be drawn in in any way, then at the very least we have a serious economic hermeneutics problem.

We must get to know better our allies whom we have seen standing in solidarity right beside us with great examples of heroism against the latest economic attack, and follow a better economic policy with projects from which both they and we will come out gaining together.

Let the crisis we are going through be a lesson for recognizing these economic resources of ours.