Talking with Alevis instead of talking about Alevis

The obvious difference that has emerged between the CHP's approach to the headscarf and the AK Parti's approach to the Alevis spontaneously lays out all the details of the particular political style of each.

With the Jacobin style of politics it has represented from the beginning, the CHP has concepts and categories about society that it has never questioned. Whatever voices come from within society, however different segments of society express and define themselves, this political style reads what it itself knows, listens to the sounds its own ear produces from society, understands them, and rules according to them. For years, for example, it kept voicing the story that the headscarf is a tie that restricts women's freedom and holds them captive to a patriarchal order of power.

This story was not a story conveyed by listening in the field to headscarved women and asking what they thought about their own actions. This story consisted only of the fantasy of an Enlightenment-Orientalist point of view about the headscarved woman, but our leftist-Kemalist intellectuals and politicians never took the trouble to verify this fantastical story. The headscarved woman was a victim and had to be saved. If saving her required sacrificing a generation of headscarved women, they did not shrink from doing that either. The uncomprehending and stubborn bans they applied were no different from a massacre of the headscarved.

Even the CHP's most favored, most prominent Cumhuriyet-writer sociologist, having had no share at all of the tradition and level of interpretive sociology, immediately repeated in one breath, upon Kılıçdaroğlu's headscarf initiative, the rote concepts and stories in his head, without feeling any need to test them against the self-expression of a single headscarved woman. Thus he showed that he had remained in the darkness of his own concepts in the shallow, explanatory, reductionist waters of sociology. Instead of talking with the headscarved, he remained at the level of talking about the headscarved as objects. As though discovering a great secret, he spoke of how the headscarf was really the "sıkmabaş," of the political intentions of those who wear the "türban" and so on. Whom did he ask, whose statement did he consult, with whom did he talk? Does sociology consist only of operating the obsolete prejudices, theories and categories in your mind? Is there no talking, in the field, with those you speak about, listening to them, lending them an ear?

Explanatory sociology means explaining reality starting from the theories in your mind. What the social actors you are talking about, the society, the community, even the individual thinks about his own action, how he expresses himself, is not important at all. Whatever he says, it is possible to bring it within the scope of the theory in your mind. In interpretive sociology, on the other hand, before letting your own theories speak, you lend an ear to what the people you are speaking about say about themselves. Is that not a very obvious difference? Look, if you like, at how the different segments about whom we make politics in Türkiye, the Kurds, the Alevis or the headscarved, are objectified in political discourses and at how much anyone listens to them. You will see whether interpretive sociology or explanatory sociology is at work.

The AK Parti, from the beginning, listened to the segments in Türkiye that were always talked about and never talked to. It did not attribute its own concepts and its own categories to them and reduce them to its own categories. Instead of talking about them, it talked with them. With the Kurds, with the Alevis, with the Roma. The elite cadres of the Kemalist CHP, on the other hand, talked about them, made their own definitions about them and crammed them into their own concepts and categories. In these concepts and categories there was no such people as Kurds. They were Turks who made "kart kurt" sounds as they walked on the mountain. The identity and culture demands that emerged today were entirely ill-intentioned separatist demands. And Alevism, like all religious demands, was a reactionary demand that was supposed to be left behind. There was no such thing as Alevism at all.

In the AK Parti's democratic opening periods, all of these were talked to. In fact it had been well acquainted with the matter before too. But in the period when it governed the state, it talked with them on behalf of the state, and listened directly from them to their demands and their own definitions of themselves.

Especially on the subject of Alevism, the series of workshops conducted under the coordination of Necdet Subaşı and under the administration of Faruk Çelik as minister formed a groundbreaking model example for interpretive politics compared with the current style of politics in Türkiye.

The state was taking as its interlocutor and talking with a segment whose very existence it had until then denied, or at best ignored. It was not making its own official definitions about them and reading them out to them; it was talking directly with them. Perhaps some associations that had long since taken their guard with unshakable prejudices did not appreciate how important this was. There were even those who declared the participants in the workshop "düşkün" (outcast). Yet if the aim was truly to be integrated with the nation, with the political body in Türkiye and to be made a part of it, one had to start somewhere, regardless of who said what.

The most important objection of those who opposed was that these workshops were trying to create a state-guided Alevism. Yet the state, precisely so as not to leave room for such pretexts, was only listening and trying to understand with an utterly interpretive approach. Indeed that is exactly how it was. All views were listened to. There were great differences among them. In fact, one of the most important reasons for the delay in going to a solution package on this matter was this disagreement of ideas and views among them.

We can say that the criticisms of some that "despite so many workshops not a step was taken" show their unwillingness to appreciate the state of undecidability these differences brought about.

The demand that "cemevis be regarded as places of worship," on the other hand, was impossible for the state to meet, because this was not for the state to do.

There is nothing to be said to those who see the cemevis, where they perform the cem ritual, as places of worship. But some did not see that the state's recognizing the cemevi as a place of worship would mean recognizing Alevism as a separate religion as well, and thus would hand a trump card precisely to those who want to see Alevism as outside Islam. Yet one of the perceptions that the great majority of Alevis suffer from most was that the Sunni segment did not count them as Muslims. For the cemevis of Alevis who object to not being counted as Muslims to be recognized as a separate place of worship would have meant, as it were, a state-made confession that they were not Muslims.

Yet the Alevi package that President Erdoğan announced also made a very delicate adjustment by leaving the status of the cemevis as places of worship to the decision and perception of the Alevis themselves, while giving the support they rightly demanded.

This delicate adjustment is also a reflection of the sincere efforts at understanding, which began with the workshops claimed to have been of no use and which have behind them a broad intellectual accumulation and a style of politics.