An academic reckoning after Mehmet Genç Hodja

The historian-sociologist Mehmet Genç, whom we sent off to the eternal realm ten days ago, passed away from our world as quietly as he lived. Quietly, because the way he carried out his scientific activities and his historical research, in a world where academia too has become part of the culture industry and been hitched to the wheel of production and consumption, evidently did not bring in much money. For

Mehmet Genç never appeared on screens, hardly took part in current debates, and did not yield to the temptations of current questions to produce history studies that could be consumed quickly and easily. In a sense he asked his own questions, and guided by those questions that he knew to be right, he carried his academic work through to the end with a jeweler's meticulousness.

This scientific-academic meticulousness is a subject well worth reflecting on in its own right. By acting thus, the Professor also fell short of acquiring the degrees and titles that the academic world requires. For the time necessary to produce a work good enough to satisfy himself was not enough for him. Hence he could not complete his doctoral work, or perhaps, even if his own institution would have deemed that work worthy of a doctorate, it did not sit well with him to hand in a draft of his own, hastily put together to "get by," and take the doctorate. He carried out his work not to come to the fore, to become popular, or to obtain academic titles, but entirely to do justice to a value he defined as "doing a job he had undertaken in the best possible way."

In this respect he embraced academic life not as a profession through which, in the sense we are accustomed to, one's bread money or certain titles and statuses are earned, but as a way of life, with a puritanical religiosity. Indeed, with this puritanism he would have done whatever profession he practiced with the same meticulousness. For this is an approach connected with seeing professions as a trust given to a person, as a call and an assignment from God through which a person can realize himself. Doing whatever profession, whatever job we are doing with the care of an act of worship... A similar example of this meticulous labor, lived like a love, was seen in Professor Fuat Sezgin, whom we likewise sent off to the eternal realm about two years ago in academic life.

Professor Fuat Sezgin, with this meticulousness, was excluded from the Turkish university world under the political conditions after the 1960 coup and was forced to emigrate to Frankfurt. Perhaps differently, Professor Mehmet Genç did not experience such exclusion in the Turkish academic world; on the contrary, his puritanical meticulousness and love of his profession kept alive a respect for him from every segment, and perhaps his not being much concerned with the current spared him an encounter that would have damaged this esteem. His not obtaining degrees in the academic world remained his own choice, but this did not prevent him from raising his scholarship, his academic identity, above degrees.

In this respect it actually recalls an emphasis on the relationship between academic influence and academic titles in the book Homo Academicus by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who took a photograph of the discourse analysis and the complex network of relations of the academic world. Bourdieu draws attention to the fact that great names of French thought such as Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, world-famous, immensely influential, names that no academic work produced after them can ignore, were extremely dim by French academic criteria. That is, none of these names wrote a doctoral thesis in the known manner, and moreover nearly all of them had serious problems with the universities where they served and were subjected to exclusion or to certain injustices. For the works these names produced were not deemed to conform to the known academic criteria. Nevertheless, the works produced by all of these names became the most important reference sources of all philosophical-academic works produced after them, not only in France but everywhere in the world. Here there are serious examples that require everyone to reflect on the role of the criteria of the academic world in the production of knowledge that is useful in the world, that truly enlightens or opens a way.

Mehmet Genç too is a name who, by not binding himself to the criteria of the academic world from the outset, tried to proceed on his own path. Of course, this does not mean that everyone who does not recognize these criteria can become a Mehmet Genç or like the French thinkers in question. But these examples offer the possibility of a serious awareness of the restrictions that the hierarchies of personnel and disciplines of knowledge, on which the academic world rests, impose upon knowledge.

Mehmet Genç, who began his academic life in 1966 as an assistant to Ömer Lütfi Barkan, made great discoveries in the archives he entered while studying the interaction of Ottoman industry with the Western industrial revolution.

Historiography is a far more difficult craft than is supposed. Genç's way of working and the choices he made in this regard show this even better. One of the theses current in the academic world, namely the thesis that Ottoman economy and industry began to dissolve and collapse from the 16th century onward in the face of the developing West, he refutes with the archival documents that he brought to light and interpreted by working them meticulously, by digging.

Let us touch on his work on this subject later, if you like.

May God have mercy on him, may his abode be paradise and his station full of light.