Are you sure you are Alparslan's grandchild? Shall we do a genealogy check?

Shall we make a proposal to those who appear fiercely opposed on the question of migrants, who appear to be ardent supporters of taking the most radical measures against migrants and of sending away, without any mercy, those who have happened to get in? For example, let us not go back only over those who migrated to Türkiye in the last ten years by one route or another, but, following the speed their radicalism lends them, go back still further, say 100-130 years. Suppose we say: let us somehow send back to where they came from all those who migrated to this country in those years?

You will say, of course, that this is an impossible proposal. Of course it is impossible. But sometimes the way to see certain realities better is to wander on the borders of the impossible, even, if need be, of the absurd. Only by wandering there can we sometimes see the dimensions of the irrational delirium we are in. Because, have no doubt, it turns out that those who are showing the sharpest hostility toward migrants at present are, curiously, people who came to these lands within the last 100-150 years. A significant portion of them are not even Turkish by origin. Yet they practice racism in the name of this country and nation. Is that not strange and tragic enough?

In my last article I had just one sentence that touched only on this contradiction. It seems it struck so deep, hit its mark so well, and caused discomfort to the same degree. These words of mine were pulled into headlines and made the target of an almost unbelievable amount of rancor, hatred and lynching on social media platforms. What those who incited this lynching evidently produced and put into circulation at the outset is a cliché that stuck to everyone's keyboard: "We came with Malazgirt and made this place a homeland; how can you compare us with these war-fleeing, cowardly migrants?"

What a mind this question came from, I am amazed. Questions are asked by the intelligent, but there is not an atom of reason in this question, no sense of reality, no sense of history, no conscience, no discernment.

On social media platforms the target is not the mind anyway, but emotions. Nobody writes with their mind, nobody gives their reactions after thinking. The social media platform has turned into a medium of lynchings without trial or questioning, or of hooligan fandom. Nobody really wants or expects an answer from you, either. Anyway, past a certain point when you speak, you are mostly clenching your fist at the darkness.

There is no reason in the question, but there are a thousand and one kinds of ignorance. If you asked, everyone who could know at most their 4th, or if pushed 5th, forefather and has no knowledge at all of anything beyond it, suddenly claims himself or his forefather as a soldier of Alparslan's glorious army at the field of Malazgirt, do they not? Attributing themselves to that place can of course be seen to have a positive side in terms of the values Alparslan Gazi represented. But what if they also took at least a little share of the values Alparslan represented: ghaza, martyrdom, jihad, the order of the world?

Would the children or grandchildren of Alparslan fall for the egging-on of provocative political barons raised by CIA agents and go to lynch helpless, defenseless, oppressed, wretched people who had already fled disasters and massacres and taken refuge with them? Would they add heroic poses to this contemptible lynching? Were you not ashamed before that tiny little girl smeared with blood? Which grandchild of Alparslan Gazi could have brought her to that state?

Are you sure you are Alparslan's grandchildren? Go and learn a little about Alparslan, read him, read what he read, what influenced him... Will you be able to establish any connection between him and yourselves? Above all he was influenced by the Qur'an, he was influenced by the Messenger of God.

The Qur'an commands people not to oppress others, to be merciful, to be just, to share what they have, to stand by the oppressed, to be grateful, to be content with what they have, and to act with the awareness and faith that they will surely die and that when they die they will give account of what they did and of what they could have done but did not. If you lived in the age of Gazi Alparslan, in whom this awareness had penetrated to the marrow, or if he lived in your age, in this state of yours you would not take your place beside him; you would only fight against him.

By the way, I really felt like asking those who say "we came to Anatolia with Alparslan in 1071": How do you know? How do we know whether your forefathers were then at Alparslan's side, or in the ranks of the groups that were plotting every kind of intrigue against him? If we said "prove it," who could step forward? After all, in Alparslan's time not everyone was subject to him. A significant part of society was either against him or on the side of the guardians of the established order or of the Batini troublemakers. How easy it is today for everyone to attribute themselves to some great, honorable, noble hero in history. Still, let us remember the Islamic principle. No one bears another's sin or reward. What each one does is for himself.

But let us not hold back from stating the scholarly truth against these ignorant boastings: true heroism is not for you to cling like a parasite to the memory of that great hero. True heroism is to display today the nobility, courage and refinement he displayed.

Yet people who would say, if Alparslan came back today in flesh and blood, "what business do you have here," have set about exploiting his dear memory in the most parasitic fashion.

When we say "those who came first," is it not clear enough that what we mean is those who came by way of migration? The debate is not over the character of these lands as a homeland, but over the history of migration movements. But with what brazenness they drag the matter into a debate on making these lands a homeland. Most of those who do this are people inclined to come down from the mountain and drive out the one in the vineyard, and have not the slightest share in the concept of homeland.

How would you know what it is that takes a piece of land out of being mere terrain and makes it a homeland? How will you understand Alparslan, Fatih, who was granted the Prophet's praise for his conquest, Ertuğrul and Osman Gazi, Saladin, who acted with the awareness that seeing Jerusalem one more day in the hands of the Crusaders was a burden of guilt for all Muslims?

Your horizon of homeland is imprisoned within the narrow borders that imperialists drew a hundred years ago.

Live in that prison of yours for life if you wish, but give up your passion for stuffing this nation into that prison too; you will not be able to stuff it in.