Remembering Turkish modernization through Tezkire

Turkey's quest for political body integrity, if you look at it, neither began today nor has there been any period in history in which it was lived without problems. In every period it has passed through certain processes and phases and has taken shape historically in different ways. It also shows within what kind of social and political body integrity people imagine themselves, and in what kind of relationship of guardianship (velayet) they stand with the people they live together with.

The people who joined the social fabric of the city of Yathrib with the Muslims' hijra to Medina, welcomed through the door opened by the Aws and Khazraj tribes, established a society of brotherhood. But there were also Jews there, and they too, abiding by the decision of the Aws and Khazraj with whom they shared Yathrib, agreed to form a new society with the emigrants (muhajirun) under the leadership of the Prophet.

The society that came into being produced a covenant that can be counted among the earliest constitutional texts in human history. In this covenant the Qurayshi Muslims, the Aws, the Khazraj and the Jewish tribes of Yathrib would together form one "ummah." They would jointly undertake any attack on Medina. It is noteworthy that in this covenant the concept of "ummah" defines a bond of citizenship that does not include only Muslims. However, the attitude of the Jews during the war would in time dissolve these bonds of citizenship, and ways would part with them. This was of course not a historical necessity; had the Jews remained faithful to their covenant, that body could have continued to function that way.

The Ottoman rule, which lasted six centuries, shows the success of this definition of ummah in providing a body integrity made up of social differences. In this, no one can say that all the political and social models the Ottomans put forward were original models free of every social and historical interaction. The greatest success of the Ottomans, and indeed of all Islamic countries, is that they were very open to learning, taking and borrowing from outside, and developing by adding their own spirit. This is a feature that Marshall Hodgson sees as striking in Islamic civilization in general. Here even the Churches and the Synagogues become part of a meaningful whole within the general configuration of Islamic civilization, and everyone feels they belong to this whole.

Taking new ideas, institutions and people and arriving at new syntheses from them, producing hybrid cultures, is among the routines of Islamic civilization. At the core of the matter lies the fact that Islam came not to prohibit but to untie what people had forbidden in order to establish authority over one another. The default state of things is permissibility (ibaha), the essence of human behavior is freedom, and obstructing everything produced by human reason or development in advance, with judgments whose basis is unclear, with labels of forbidden, prohibited, bad, blocks humanity's path.

We can say that in the age of scientific and technological superiority that the Ottomans lost to the West in the last two hundred years, for one reason or another, they continued these processes of learning and taking without falling into any complex. New discoveries had been made in the West, advances had been recorded in science and technology. Taking and borrowing these by the most natural means was done by the state. Some of the students, diplomats and bureaucrats whom the state itself sent to the West to carry out this borrowing, while doing so, moved away from the spirit and way of life of Islam and were also exposed to an ideological enchantment. There were also many who were not exposed and did not depart from the essence of the matter.

While Ottoman modernization proceeded on its own course in this way, World War I and, after it, the reflection of this modernization onto the whole Islamic world as occupation and imperialism identified the Muslim experience of modernization with a hard-to-overcome traumatic effect.

Tezkire magazine has devoted the last issue of its 30th year to a dossier on Turkish modernization. In fact, this has been one of the topics most dwelt upon since the day the magazine began publication. For our experience of modernization or non-modernization is precisely an event that must be constantly remembered (tezkir), that must not be forgotten. What must always be remembered first on this subject is that Turkish modernization, especially after World War I, left its natural course and turned into a coercion. A resistance forms against every coercion, and treating Turkish modernization through its internal dynamics alone is always doomed to leave the analyses incomplete.

Of course, even if forced, it is an experience that has been lived and must be taken up with all its dimensions. At this point the articles in issue 78 of Tezkire set out this experience in its different dimensions, through the pens of young, horizon-opening academic-intellectuals.

Mustafa Kemal Şan of Sakarya University, for example, takes up Turkish modernization, which he describes as "radical modernization," in terms of the "divided society" it produced. The division here underlines precisely the incapacity of the newly made, developing or lived experience in forming a social body integrity.

M. Veysel Karataş of Batman University, on the other hand, sees Turkish modernization always in terms of being "in the Western grip" and tries to capture the distinctive features this brings about. An experience in a grip is also an experience, of course, and it is lived as the alienation of a significant segment of society from the process and even as a pain felt in the political body.

In the dossier-themed issue, with the articles titled "Paradoxical Modernity and New Quests in Turkish Modernization" by Ayşe Sili Kalem, "Religion in the Founding Imagination of the Republic" by Hicret K. Toprak, "The Prescription of Salvation and Progress in Ziya Gökalp in the Context of Republican Modernization" by Fatih Akyüz, "A Lament for the Muslim Clock: An Essay on the Modernization of Time" by Mustafa Günerigök, "Poetry Pervading the Object: Loneliness, Pessimism and Modernism in the Poetry of Edip Cansever" by Muhammed Hüküm, "Space, Change and Modernism in the Early Novels of the Republic" by Ahmet Faruk Güler, and "Nurettin Topçu's Understanding of Ideal Governance, the State and Anatolian Socialism" by Betül Karakoyunlu, there are also an interview with Prof. Mehmet Karakaş, rector of Afyon Kocatepe University, who has publications on Turkish modernization, and book reviews and contributions by Mahmut Hakkı Akın, Özge Seda Uğraş, Recep Bozkurt and Rukiye Geçer.

This issue of the magazine, whose editor-in-chief is Yunus Badam, was prepared by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa Günerigök of Sakarya University.