The Man Who Does Not Kneel: with respect to Ramazan Keskin Hodja

Hodja Ramazan Keskin was a believer who in recent years carefully tilled the fertile Muslim soil of Malatya to raise generations, and who, in raising them, set an example through a stance in his life, his struggle and his discourse that was as authentic and organic as possible. The news of his death came last weekend from the Turgut Özal University Hospital in Malatya, where he had long been receiving treatment.

The news of his death was given in all the agencies as "one of the victims of 28 February," but to confine him within the limits of a victimhood, to reduce a life story from which the history of a whole world could be written to a victimhood, is a great injustice both to him and to the very special mission he represented. After all, an emphasis on victimhood is a call for pity, for compassion.

Yet in Hodja Ramazan's stance, in his endlessly colorful and varied story, there was not a pitiable condition so much as an enviable nobility, the pride of one who holds sincerely to his claims. A resistance and determination that does not kneel before oppression, a will to exist as a free Muslim subject by overcoming the constraints of his history, geography, culture and self, could be read in his every disposition.

Malatya is a city of ours that has produced a very distinctive model of the organic integration of Islamic thought and struggle with the people in Turkey. The desire for a return to the essence of Islam, carried out in the tailor's shop begun by Said Çekmegil and Said Ertürk, each of which offered a kind of school, a kind of open-university environment, and in the tradesmen's coffeehouses and gathering places, and its quests that turned into a questioning, rational and scripture-based Islamic movement, in time found a very broad base among the people. The instruction that began in the tradesmen's shops would in time reach wider masses in bookshops and mosques: the Boğaziçi Tea House, the Talebe Bookshop, Zekeriya Şengöz (also known as Zeki Baba), Davut Güler, Ramazan Kayan, my dear friend and elder brother, whom I knew from the Siirt Imam-Hatip High School, the late Orhan Kenasarı, and many other names...

The influence of those who studied in this university environment, who breathed this air, was not limited to Malatya alone. It can be said that in Turkey this open university of Malatya has been one of the strongest nourishing veins of thought and action of the Islamic movement's discourse, which emphasizes tawhid, the Book, reason, human will and work. One of those who best describe this university environment is the esteemed man of ideas Metin Önal Mengüşoğlu, who took all his lessons in the best way and tries to convey them with his powerful literary style. This was in fact part of the struggle to revive the consciousness that took shape in Anatolia and made this country a homeland, against the process of self-colonization that Turkey was subjected to after the First World War.

The headscarf and coefficient oppression to which this homeland was subjected on 28 February could only have issued from an occupier's mindset, and it was unthinkable that the people of a city sufficiently equipped with this consciousness would remain silent against it. Hodja Ramazan Keskin, raised in the school of Malatya, with his distinctive personality and leadership, displayed his stance against this thoughtless attempt at "self-occupation, self-colonization," like a Sütçü İmam of that period.

Displaying this stance in a period when people disrespectful of this country's values, looking down on it from above, had run wild was bound to carry a price. Hodja Ramazan and his friends did not hold back from paying this price. Because of a sermon he gave against the uninterrupted education policy that would lead to the closure of the Imam-Hatip Schools, he was tried on charges of inciting the people against the state, with a possible death sentence. We still remember how that speech of his, or the stance he displayed in public against the headscarf ban, turned in the national media into a smear campaign against him. The occupier mindset, in all its shamelessness, declared him a criminal too, and could present the hostility to Islam it displayed in a place like Malatya as a nationalist victory.

Hodja Ramazan perhaps paid the price his stance required; he was tried, imprisoned, tortured, and came out. But to reduce what he lived through to a story of victimhood is unfitting. After all, he attributed what he lived through to a tradition that put it in these words: "My brother, we are free, even if we are behind bars; we are free, my brother, even if you are bound with these chains, if you are a servant of God alone, what harm can the tricks of slaves do to you?"

Although perhaps in his life it had the significant effect of bringing him onto Turkey's agenda, Hodja Ramazan was of course not merely the price he paid in this struggle. It would be far more apt in this respect to describe him as the most just witness, as evil, of an evil that took place in this country on 28 February. He bore witness, with his stance, with his struggle, by not neglecting to stand in the right place that witnessing requires, with regard to the oppression and injustices he was subjected to and to the oppressed. Had he not stood there, he would not even have counted as a witness.

From his childhood on, through what he lived, his education, his friendships and his enmities, along the most ordinary course of life, he became a perfect example of how a Muslim subject can be built in every circumstance.

He was not a man of writing. He never wrote a book, so today we have no handle by which to examine the Hodja's views academically. Thankfully there is a Life-Memoir book titled "The Man Who Did Not Kneel: Hodja Ramazan Keskin" by Şevket Başıbüyük, published by Beyan Publications. With this book (in fact together with the others in that Memoir Series of Beyan Publications, which has more than 10 titles), much more can be reached than the portrait of Hodja Ramazan Keskin that it puts forward. Indeed, a good window can be opened from here onto understanding the whole of the Islamic movement in Turkey.

The Hodja's communication took place entirely through oral, face-to-face relationships, behavior, conversations, a way that touched people and was as authentic as possible. He was a personality who stood out as a de facto role model in society entirely through the practice of daily life, through a fine exchange in its proper place, through a delicate demeanor and presence, at weddings and funerals, together with friends in good times and bad, rejoicing together, grieving together, trying to convey truth and right, the good and the beautiful, to the most ordinary people, without calling them ordinary.

His close friends say that there are very few people in Malatya to whom Hodja Ramazan Keskin, in this capacity, did not make his voice heard or his heart felt. In fact, since we have come to the subject of friendship, a friend from Malatya with whom I was talking about my recent writings on friendship explained that the secret of Hodja Ramazan's influence on people lay precisely in the quality of his friendship: he was not a politician who propagandized to people and tried to persuade them of things he did not believe in. First of all, he himself believed what he said. Thus, while he treated his message and what he said as a friend, he was also a very good friend to his comrades on the road; moreover he had many friends, and the multitude of friends did not diminish the quality of his friendship. For to him the foundation of friendship was love of God and enmity to the oppressors.

May God have mercy on him; may his abode be paradise, his station exalted, and condolences to all who loved him.