"The border is honour"

An utterly correct statement. A statement that no one can object to, that should disturb no one. In every place and time where there is the concept of the state, the first condition and element expressing the existence and sovereignty of the state is the border. In proportion to the height of the level of loyalty to the state, citizens too take part in some way in the process of protecting the state's borders. Border security is one of the promises the state gives to the citizen, and the strength and continuity of the state depend on its fidelity to this promise.

It is borders and distances that also determine a person's individual existence and the law of his relations with others. About ten years ago Ferhat Tekin of Selçuk University (now Necmettin Erbakan University) wrote, under my supervision, a doctoral thesis titled "The Sociology of the Border: The Nation-State and Border People." In it the relations among border, state, identity and citizenship were treated with all their implications. When distances are closed and borders disappear, a person's individual existence is gone too. At this stage honor becomes a concept determined precisely by borders and distances. These borders and distances vary from society to society, but they do not disappear entirely. Even so, when the saying "the border is honor" is heard, it remains a saying that makes one say "we believe and we affirm."

So how can such a saying, which no one objects to, become a subject of debate, even of division, in Turkey? Why can a saying that no one would object to become the subject of a legal prosecution?

As is known, some young people were detained because they hung a banner with this saying written on it. A situation that at first glance seems strange emerged: the security forces, devoted to protecting the content of that saying, to ensuring that saying's validity by their very existence, intervened against those who spoke it. Following this, we began to hear this saying on social media platforms, in a short time, as a slogan that one side claimed against the other and turned into a taunt.

It is truly a strange situation, because there is no one opposing it, yet the repetition of the saying in certain mouths creates discomfort.

Of course there is nothing about this strange situation that cannot be understood. The matter has to do with how a saying can mean the exact opposite at an inappropriate time and place.

In the debates we have had about migrants, the subject came around to the officious roles that some make for themselves out of the situation and to the exclusionary and divisive nature of identities. Indeed, what faced us was a serious obsession that could only be described as Kharijite bigotry. National Kharijism can find in itself the right to judge and exclude everyone by conditions it has made up for ideal citizenship. Just like the Kharijites who killed Hz. Ali, the legitimate, elected and rightly guided caliph of the believers, for God, for stability, for the state. They too turned into a slogan the verse "The judgment belongs to God," which no one objected to and for which Hz. Ali had put his life on the line, and used it against Hz. Ali.

Making a duty for themselves out of the situation by using this saying that no one could object to in that period, they launched a rebellion movement against Hz. Ali. Hz. Ali made the most accurate observation about this form of reasoning, saying "they are saying a very true word in a very wrong place and against the wrong people." He made this observation for the history of humanity, but this bigotry led to his life and to the Islamic world being exposed to one of its greatest fitnas.

In the use of true words in the wrong place against the wrong people there is far more of a problem than simple inappropriateness. A word cut off from its occasion becomes, first of all, an instrument of unjust power; where it should unite, it divides and fragments.

That is why Kharijite bigotry does not remain a matter of mere shortness of mind; most often it is also the cheapest, most convenient way for those who make a duty out of the situation to collect power and other interests.

The Kharijites who killed Hz. Ali were in fact among the tribes that became Muslim latest, but although they came later, they claimed to be more Muslim than everyone, on the claim of having understood Islam more correctly than everyone. Just like the situation of those who, taking the most radical stance against migrants today, say they are defending Turkey and Turkishness. These too both came to Turkey relatively recently and, although they are not ethnically Turkish, practice the most rigid Turkism in order to settle into the seat of honor, to seize the position of leadership over Turks. Thus they lower the quality of Turkishness, and by installing themselves in leadership over the Turks, they cause the Turkish nation to fall from the world's leadership league.

By whom, and against whom, is the saying "The Border Is Honor" being said? Those who could be the last to say this saying, those who would have the least right to say this saying, hollow it out by saying it to the very people to whom it can never be said.

In the mouths of those who have done nothing but diminish themselves and the country they govern before the world through their attitudes and their history, this saying loses all its meaning. Above all, the brazenness of saying this saying to a cadre that, through the development it has achieved, has made the world accept Turkey's economic, political and military power first befouls the honor of the saying.

The dishonorable ones, whose concept of the border in their heads has turned into a sieve, who are imprisoned within the borders drawn by the imperialists, say this to the honorable cadres who have extended the country's borders to the entire geography of the heart.

Until recently Turkey's protection of its borders, as a matter of honor, remained merely in words. There has never been another period in which the borders were protected as well as today. Even the terror organizations that for more than 40 years rendered our borders meaningless have, in the last five years, been introduced to the concept of the border and begun to know their place.

Moreover, Turkey now has the horizon and the measures to ensure the security of its borders by establishing its defense lines through observation posts from inside Syria to Afghanistan, from Somalia to Libya, from Azerbaijan to the interior of Africa.

To such a horizon, to such a measure, the saying "the border is honor" can only be said with Kharijite bigotry and inappropriateness.

The border is honor, but you do not know your own limit and border.