What does the Generation of Âsım seek in Berlin?

Mehmet Akif, with a poet's eye and tongue, is a man who gave the most solid testimony to the dissolution of the 600-year Ottoman state and, together with it, of the 1300-year Islamic civilization, which had taught what justice, what humanity, what knowledge and civilization were, and had given order to the world. He bore witness with great pain both to the state being subjected to every kind of intrigue, conspiracy and betrayal, and to its own children gradually degenerating, drowning in ignorance, and drifting away from Islam, from reason, from knowledge, from competence and from justice. He expressed his testimony in the most effective way, in words each of which was weighed down by carrying far more than its literal sense.

Words that in others' language and in others' sentences are the representation of an ordinary object shone in his poetry as strong and vigorous bearers of the deepest and weightiest meanings. The true witness of the martyrs of Çanakkale is of course Almighty Allah, but without Akif's strong testimony in his poetry, Çanakkale would probably not have acquired its present epic meaning in the eyes of us mortals.

The Çanakkale poem is a perfect example of the capacity of words to make an experience that is in reality distant from us both in space and in time feel as if it were lived here and now.

Akif did not remain merely a passive spectator of the dissolving Islamic civilization; he gave a testimony that also diagnosed the causes of its dissolution and all the diseases that led to it. With these diagnoses, while lamenting the dissolving civilization on the one hand, he also gave glad tidings of the luminous mornings that will rise after this pitch-dark morning, and tried to show the ways to it.

That is why Akif's poetry never abandons the "Muslim Subject" to the vise of a fatalistic pessimism or gloom in which there is no way out. However badly everything goes, there is always a way out. Allah's earth is wide, and it does not befit a Muslim to surrender in despair, using the conditions that surround and restrict him as an excuse. If need be, he must migrate from one place to another, and if not, from one state to another.

If the Muslim has used up everything down to zero, he will begin from there, rely on Allah, cling to sa'y (effort, work), and be tamed to wisdom.

If the present generations have rotted, if they have drifted away from Islamic morality, character and spirit, then it is necessary, even if from scratch, to begin raising new generations who will carry that morality, that character and that spirit. Even if it were known that the Day of Judgment would break out tomorrow, one must not hold back from planting the sapling in one's hand.

It was for this that Akif was going to point to the generation of Asım. The generation that does not let the nation's honor be trampled. Asım, in his heroic, wild, bursting-out-of-himself state, who as soon as he sees an evil sets about correcting it at once with his own hands. However, in this state he does not yet have, for Akif, a very ideal character and equipment. Truly, he has the most basic things a generation must have: sincerity, patriotism, honesty and devotion. But contrary to what is supposed, these qualities will not suffice to carry the burden of the great Islamic civilization, to revive it, to cure it of the diseases to which it has been subjected and set it on its feet.

Asım's Generation is a treatment project in which Akif not only diagnoses the causes that brought our civilization to its sickbed and to melting away, but also shows the ways of setting it back on its feet.

Asım is the purest child of this nation. He is a daring hero. He has no tolerance for injustice, he is honest, heroic, sincere, bold. All of this is very fine, but his father complains about him, is worried about his state, because Asım is very impetuous (he attacks in rage and anger without thinking of the outcome): "He takes no advice, he heeds no scolding… his ways are not pleasing."

Akif will state his personal opinion in order to soothe Asım's father Köse İmam about his own son's faults and lead him to think well: "With his endless follies the fellow is a world apart; yet in his endless follies, nonetheless, he is a human being."

Yes, in its present state the generation of Asım is the only hope; it guarantees that honor will not be trampled; but in this state it is lacking and insufficient for a revival, for the construction of a future. There is no sense in consecrating it as it is, in regarding it as perfect as it is and assigning it a savior role. If it is to play a role in this nation's revival in the future, it will have to add many things to this heroism, to these bold and impetuous virtues.

That is why, in order to enable Asım's generation to acquire the virtues he attributes to it, Akif shows a long, arduous path that must be borne with patience. The path will not be Afghani's path of revolution, with its political top-down approach, but the path of Abduh, who recommends imparting all kinds of scholarly, moral and gnostic virtues through education at the individual level.

But Asım must acquire all the equipment the age requires; therefore, if necessary, he will go to the West too. Because if knowledge is there, he will take it from there; if it is in China, from China. Since an ocean of science has formed there in our day, one must go and take from it without any complex. That is why Asım must, at all costs and without delay, set out on the road to Berlin. Akif will not let go of Asım's collar until he has his word on this.

"On this side, my son, let your eyes never be daunted; / Let your faces turn simply to the knowledge of the West alone. / Toil with those children, night and day; / Gather the knowledge of the past three hundred years with a firm hand! / The endless spring that seeps in the land of science, / Drink of it yourselves, and bring those beneficial waters to the homeland. / To revive the very same springs here at last, / Let your minds work, my son, let them become a canal between."

What does the story of Asım's generation say to today's youth? Or for what, do you think, did Akif give this testimony?

We need to see what light Akif, who has a special sensitivity for taking a lesson and for history not repeating itself, casts with this story on an experience that we too are about to repeat. For that, of course, one must look at the event it illuminates without getting stuck on the light, that is, without being stuck on the brilliance of the poem and the story itself.

For those who want to think with sound reason and sincerity about the recently much-debated words of Atasoy Müftüoğlu, the author of Vakti Kuşanmak, which functioned in the eighties as a kind of school of Asım's generation, Mehmet Akif's story of Asım's Generation stands ready to guide the way with ease.

On this occasion I remember with mercy and gratitude our National Anthem Poet, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, the witness and powerful voice of our condition through his poetry, on the 82nd anniversary of his death.