Expecting an ideological legacy from a suicide

According to TÜİK data, an average of 8 people a day commit suicide in Türkiye. That means three thousand people a year take their own lives. But recently nothing has drawn our attention to suicide more than a single case.

Our young man named Enes Kara, who took his own life after filming a video in which he described his feelings about life and how what he experienced in the dormitory he was staying in, a community dormitory, had overwhelmed him, caused us to put suicide on the agenda intensively.

It did become an agenda item, but it is not possible to say that it has been sufficiently discussed, that is, sufficiently evaluated by those who are experts in the matter, sociologists, psychologists. Because the agenda that has formed gives way to nothing but a race to take a share of this suicide's estate.

Turning a suicide, after the fact, into an object of political profit is in fact a typical situation. Generally it is not fully possible to understand the real causes of suicide through the feelings and thoughts of the person who took his life. For that domain is now closed to access. All that remains is for this event to be interpreted by those left behind and for everyone to feed their own theoretical, ideological, or simplest thoughts through it.

Perhaps that is why the famous sociologist Emile Durkheim thought sociology should enter the picture, and produced one of the most important works in the history of sociology, one of his three important masterpieces. (The other two are The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and The Division of Labor in Society).

In this work, Durkheim tried to establish a relationship between suicides and the social events experienced in places where suicide rates rose. Otherwise he himself proceeded from the acceptance that it is no longer possible to get at the real motivation of someone who has killed himself, even if he left a message behind. The correlation he established between social factors, particularly the meaninglessness caused by the serious condition of normlessness experienced in industrial society, loss of belief, and suicide, later became one of the factors first taken into account in suicide debates.

Years ago, suicide became a very serious agenda item because of the significantly high suicide rates especially conspicuous in Batman and seen particularly in women of a certain age range. At that time too, because of these suicides, tribes, traditions, customs and their pressure were furiously denounced. A significant rise in the suicide rate, and moreover all of them being seen in women of a certain age group, truly produced a situation in need of explanation.

Yet even in those days, in the places where tribal pressure was emphasized, the tribes were at their weakest. In the climate of rapid urbanization and excessive ideology, neither the influence of traditions nor of tribes was even mentioned any longer. On the contrary, on the path of rapid migration, women had become as free as possible, and no custom or value remained to hold them. Even so, seeing that the comments made went no further than feeding their own theoretical positions, I took up a summary of my studies on the subject in Tezkire magazine under the title "The Unshareable Legacy of the Batman Suicides."

Tribe, custom and tradition are always the usual suspects for a modernist mind. Yet looking from a somewhat wider horizon, it could be seen that one of the greatest factors in the number rising by concentrating abnormally in a certain demographic cluster was the language of the news reports. To put it more clearly, suicide news and the language used in this news had a serious triggering effect. Just as the effect of the news on the death of Marilyn Monroe or of famous people was repeated here. From that suicide in the summer of 1962, the highest number of suicides in US history was recorded within just one month.

It was understood, for example, that Murat Kekilli's song "Bu akşam ölürüm, beni kimse tutamaz" ("Tonight I will die, no one can stop me") had such a triggering effect too.

Suicide news and the language used in this news can bring suicide to mind as an option in psychologically suicide-prone people faced with a problem they cannot overcome, and in this case suicide can turn, quite unexpectedly, into an epidemic. So one must be careful about this news too. In fact not only suicide news, but also news categorically called "page 3" about violence, rape, infidelity, far from creating preventive awareness, advertises such acts, brings them to mind and gets more of them committed.

Since the subject of suicide has been opened with this unfortunate event, let us not pass without including the very apt and fine analyses of Dr. Abdülkadir Şen from Muş Alparslan University. Dr. Şen, confirming most of what we said above, and referring also to the suicide literature, underlines among the causes of the suicides recorded at three thousand a year in Türkiye their having lost the joy of living, their lives seeming meaningless, their not finding a branch to hold on to, their not being able to obtain spiritual satisfaction. But he also draws attention to a well-known important statistic: among the first 50 countries in the world with the highest suicide rates there is no Muslim country. Among the first hundred there are only three Muslim countries. In suicide rates per 100 thousand people in the world, Muslim countries have the best report card. In Western countries this rate reaches the 40s, while in Muslim countries it stands at 2-3.

Research shows that there is also an inverse relationship between religiosity and suicide rates.

According to this, when religiosity rises, whatever the religion, suicide

cases also decline.

A study conducted by Gallup in 67 countries shows that the phenomenon of suicide in religious Muslim countries has almost hit rock bottom. Catholics commit suicide less than Protestants, and this is also a study that confirms Durkheim's thesis. Muslim peoples are in a better condition than the rest of the world not only in suicide but in other forms of crime. No Muslim country ranks among the top 25 in the world in drug use, and in general the countries with the best report cards are Muslim countries.

Dr. Şen nevertheless warns, of course: that the correlation is so, or that Islam not only prohibits suicide but gives meaning to a person's life, does not mean that a Muslim can never commit suicide.

Indeed, he does.