Remembering and understanding Tevfik İleri

Sometimes, to make what we live through, what we talk about, what we hear and see more understandable, it can be very illuminating to cast on them a light from history, especially recent history. Sometimes this light comes and falls in front of you without your wanting to shed it at all, lights your way, warns you, lets you see the pits, the rubble and, of course, the traps laid on your path. It does not remove that rubble and those traps itself, of course; it only lets you see a little more.

To see what the CHP and its coup-minded mentality have made this country go through, but also what a difficult road it is, entered with what sincerity, to do something good for this country, and that it necessarily requires constantly confronting that mentality, our way led last Wednesday to Kayseri, to commemorate and to understand Tevfik İleri.

At the program organized by the Kayseri Governorship, the Kayseri Metropolitan Municipality and Erciyes University (ERÜ) for "Understanding Tevfik İleri," a documentary film of the same title, directed by Ahmet Bikiç and produced by Baran Mayda, in which I also appear with my assessments, was screened. Tevfik İleri is not from Kayseri; he is from Rize-Hemşin. His tie to Kayseri is that he spent here the last phase of the prison life that led him to his death. We congratulate the Kayseri Governorship, the Kayseri Metropolitan Municipality and Erciyes University, who, developing a sense of ownership from this tie, took the initiative for such an activity.

Tevfik İleri is known, in conservative circles, as the Minister of National Education of the Democratic Party who opened the Imam-Hatip schools and saw to it that religion courses were taught in schools. In fact, one side of this information is a widespread error, and another side is of course the truth. For although he had a very great role in the strengthening, institutionalization and spread of the Imam-Hatip schools, their founding had been carried out by the CHP, which had closed them 17 years earlier.

The reopening of the Imam-Hatip schools was seen as a kind of political bribe that the CHP had to pay to the reality of the people that it faced from the moment of the transition to multi-party life. Because the CHP had done everything it had done until then against the people, and had never had to pay the price, for it had never until then come before a people to give an account.

Seeing that it would for the first time come before the people in 1950, it had been compelled to get to know the people, to listen to them a little, and had seen that this people held an extremely negative assessment of what had been done so far, especially in religious policies. Of course, it had also seen that the civil, informal religious education that the people took up on their own as an alternative to the closed religious education institutions formed an uncontrolled field.

What was targeted through the Imam-Hatips that were to be opened was not the religious scholar or imam, preacher and muezzin that the Muslim people wanted, but, on the contrary, the raising of an "enlightened clergyman" who would struggle against the people's understanding of religion. These expectations are clearly seen when one reads the debates held on this agenda at the 7th Grand Congress of the CHP and the later debates held in the General Assembly of the TBMM.

Tevfik İleri waged the struggle to bring the Imam-Hatip schools, whose official re-founding had been carried out by the CHP for other purposes, into line with the expectations of the nation and to spread them, with a well-prepared curriculum, throughout the whole of Türkiye. While trying likewise to make the re-established Ankara University Faculty of Divinity the nation's own, in the same concept, he saw to the founding of the Istanbul Higher Islamic Institute, which he thought would meet the nation's expectations even better.

In addition, because of the role he played in the closing of the Village Institutes, which in the single-party period had become almost the ideological apparatuses and backyards of certain circles, and their conversion into teacher schools, he became one of the CHP supporters' most important targets.

Yet it is generally forgotten that, alongside these conservative policies of Tevfik İleri, he was also one of the architects of the Democratic Party's development policies, through the Ministries of Public Works and of Transport that he ran with full-fledged accomplishments. His attitude toward the Village Institutes was related to a vision of development rather than being ideological. In place of the agrarian and rural society vision laid out for Türkiye, a new route was set that would send it down the path of industrial development, and on this route a far more advanced, far more visionary educational move would be launched. To this end, during the DP period METU, Ege, KATÜ and Atatürk Universities were founded in Türkiye, so that the number of universities, a mere three in total, reached two and a half times as many within ten years. Urbanization, which had remained almost fixed at 25 percent between 1923 and 1950, rose to 35 percent by the end of 1960, a shift toward urbanization and industrial employment was realized. In this respect Tevfik İleri was one of the most important architects of all the cultural and development policies attributable to the DP period.

The most important key to understanding him is expressed in the documentary in question by his grandson Dr. Ömer İleri as "his love for the country, the homeland, the human being and his work, and of course his family." Love, passion, friendship, have become virtues we consider so little fitting for politics, have they not? Yet in the person of Tevfik İleri, both when he did his work as an engineer and in politics, even in the face of the cruel practices of the coup he was subjected to, we see in everything he did the works of love, friendship, good intention.

The magnificent dimensions of this love, which permeated his whole life, can be felt from the letters he wrote to his long-suffering wife, Mrs. Vasfiye, and to his children. In every line and word of those of the letters sent from prison, one can watch with admonition what kind of cruelty the coup-makers deemed fit for such a magnanimous statesman and man of the nation. The magnificent power of love and affection overflowing from letters permitted not to exceed 50 words suffices as expressions to condemn those who tried him.

Let us end with a letter in which he recounts his reply to the charge of dictatorship he faced in the face of the services he rendered to his homeland and nation with love, particularly underlining its last sentence: "Dictatorship has never even crossed our minds. Besides, who is dictatorship and who are we. For 10 years we served this nation like slaves. With the permission of the Chairman, a glass of water I drank during the speech kept my lips from drying. In short, I am content. Vasfiye, I know that you are not simply longing, but I know your every thing, your every second, your every thought. Trust in God, submit. Enjoy the great taste of suffering."