Those who cannot keep pace with Turkey's growth, or who try to be a wedge

The world turns in a strange way. Not only around the sun, not only around its own axis, but also around the people living on it and with those people's movements around their own axes. It has no monotonous course; as it turns, with its own curves and bends, its ascents and descents, it seems to tell us that it is not eternal and that nothing can be relied upon in this world.

If, looking at the tremendous technological developments and the advances at the level of science displayed on this earth, you start expecting that everything will be better in this direction, the world is quite ready to show another face at once: what the Covid-19 pandemic made us live through should have been enough for you to face the fact that these developments in science and technology came at the price of human beings becoming much weaker, regressing and growing more ignorant in many fields. Meanwhile we all lived together how all of people's accumulated acquisitions could be voided; we lived it with everyone, without feeling any distinction or privilege. We saw by experience how lonely we are despite so many crowds, how poor despite so much wealth, and how helpless despite so much power and means.

We saw, and then what? What kind of awakening of consciousness did this knowledge lead to in us? Did it lead to one? How long did this awareness last? As the effects of the pandemic slowly withdrew from our lives, we began to fall again into the same disdain, the same arrogance, the same intoxication of power and possession. We still think this world is ours, we still think things are ours, and we carry on from where we left off, taking guarding this from others to be shrewdness.

On the one hand, Türkiye is truly in a great breakthrough. This is the inevitable fulfillment of a role loaded upon it by its historical, geographical and cultural existence. This makes Türkiye truly bigger than Türkiye now. This should not be an occasion for boasting and arrogance, but rather it must in fact impose a responsibility. Truly, Türkiye has been fulfilling this responsibility more than ever in recent years. On the one hand, it is the hope, dream and ideal of the oppressed across a very wide geography of hearts. As much as this responsibility it imposes, it also gives it great power. In recent years Türkiye has been the most visited, and the most wished-to-be-visited, country. One can follow this in the waves of tourism coming to Türkiye from the Islamic world and in fact from other geographies as well.

This tourism comes not only to the beaches, but also to culture, identity, science, gnosis (irfan), health, politics and trade. That Türkiye, growing on its own distinctive route, creates an attraction for such interest is an inevitable result. The colorful presence of people from every part of the world, of every people and every language, that we see in Türkiye these days is an indicator of this increasing attraction, power and working effectiveness of Türkiye. THIS human presence is a contribution to Türkiye, a participation in Türkiye's opening.

A HUMAN RESOURCE BIGGER THAN TÜRKİYE, FOR TÜRKİYE

When I met TUSAŞ General Manager Prof. Temel Kotil at the airport before the holiday, as he introduced me to the rector and scientists of the Pakistan University of Technology, his face was literally glowing with suns. He was recounting with great excitement the point of cooperation they had reached in his talks and meetings with them. He was recounting his talks with the delegation of the Prime Minister of Malaysia, who was visiting Türkiye the same day, and his joint work with Malaysian scientists. He was explaining that, as human resources, they are making full use of Türkiye's growing human presence but are not content with that, and that with the offices they have set up in many countries they are also integrating the trained human resources of many countries into the work they are carrying out.

What has overcome distances, and made it possible to reach in particular all the trained human presence of the Islamic world, is the great opening Türkiye has experienced recently. There must be very serious inferences, to be reached by those who want to do a sociology of Türkiye on this situation alone.

Civilizations that are always growing and developing find, and must find, a way to merge cultural diversity under a larger superordinate identity. In fact, it is very important that Türkiye, with all its institutions and people, also develop a culture and mentality in harmony with this increasing attraction.

This awareness and harmony exist, thank God, in very wide segments of society, but unfortunately some segments, instead of helping Türkiye's development and keeping pace with this opening of Türkiye, have fallen into a rush to obstruct it.

They do this in the name of nationalism, in the name of Turkishness, moreover. Yet with their state, attitude and mentality they are doing nothing other than trying to condemn the Turk to the walls of a prison. Let alone the Qur'an, these people have no knowledge of Yunus, no knowledge of Hacı Bektaş or Hacı Bayram. They take their stomping over the ruins of the hearts they have broken to be heroism.

Look at the contradictions of the world: one expects that cultural pluralism and education will further develop the feeling of tolerance in people, concepts of democracy and human rights, and one expects it to file down ignorant feelings such as racism and hatred of people.

THANK YOU, SÜLEYMAN SOYLU

While Türkiye is in this great opening, that those who deem a bigoted racism fit for Türkiye come from among well-educated people is one of the great contradictions, paradoxes, that our world has made us live through. A true story of a turning world.

The person who poured out all his hatred on a smiling Senegalese man on a metro, solely because of his color, says these things in English; evidently he is an educated person.

Yet that Senegalese man, because of the value he places on Türkiye, has also learned Turkish in Istanbul, where he has been for ten years; he has no need at all to answer those words in English, and it seems that he is surely contributing far, far more to Türkiye's values, its richness and its growth than the person who says "go to your country."

Interior Minister Mr. Süleyman Soylu, who visited our Senegalese fellow human being, who was subjected to this shameful treatment, at his home, with his visit and his words showed a stance befitting a rising Türkiye: We are Türkiye, we are Muslims before everything else, among us there can be neither racism nor xenophobia. The attitude of those who do not know themselves is not Türkiye.

Thank you, Süleyman Soylu, bless your mouth and your heart.