What Mehmet Akif also said by keeping silent

Today we must not skip the anniversary of the death (27 December) of the poet of the Independence March, who settled by a covenant, by a deed of pledge, that Turkey is a homeland and those who live upon it are a nation, and who set out the meanings and dimensions, the horizon and mission of this in a manifesto. Both before and after he wrote this manifesto, the Turkey he lived in holds traces and works by which we can follow our condition and our direction.

Thinking about him is always a good occasion to turn and look at our own state. Through his life and writings we can also recall what we lost, what we managed to catch and save as we were about to lose it, how we were deceived, what betrayals we were subjected to, or what heedlessness and straying we fell into. Indeed, he, the magnificent master of words, showed all these truths in the most beautiful way through his poetry and, as everyone can accept, "through his life and stance that were like a poem."

Mehmet Akif is a symbolic name who, in the conditions that made him write this march, attributed a religious meaning to the unity of Islam and the state and added an excitement to that meaning. Earlier, he himself had said a great many critical things about the situation of the caliphate or the Islamic world of that day. He cannot be said to have approved of the politics put forth in the name of Islam in those days, nor of the general practice. Muslims had added to the purity of Islam a great many innovations and superstitions which they called tradition, and this had led them astray from the Straight Path.

However much he criticized, though, he could not consent to the abolition of the caliphate, still less to the liquidation of the Islamic identity of the state and the nation. It is told that immediately after the abolition of the caliphate and the hat revolution he began to find life in Turkey thoroughly suffocating and unbearable.

He is undoubtedly one of the most influential heroes of the National Struggle, but, like the other heroes, nearly all of whom were purged right after the National Struggle was won, his turn too came. The magazine Sebilürreşad that he was publishing was closed, a spy was put on his tail and he was followed like a criminal, and the friends who met with him were put on file. The course of events made it a strong possibility that the poet of the Independence March would be tried before the Independence Tribunals. So as not to leave his country in this state of shame, he emigrated to Egypt in 1925 and remained in Egypt until shortly before his death.

There is also a state of silence that the poet entered in the aftermath of these events, and it can be said that it is this aspect that makes his situation in post-Caliphate conditions truly typical. The poet, finding nothing to say in the new period, could find no way out other than silence. But this silence of his did not prevent him, through what he had said before, from being one of those who spoke most in the new period. He fell silent, but the text kept speaking again and again, and what he had written earlier on other occasions was adapted to the condition of Muslims in the new period. For instance, the famous poem Bülbül (The Nightingale), which he wrote upon a false report reaching Ankara that Bursa had been occupied by the Greeks, later became a literary classic expressing what was lived in post-Caliphate conditions:

You have a mate, you have a nest, you have the spring you awaited;

What was it, O nightingale, to raise such an uproar, what is your grief?

You perched upon the emerald throne, you founded a heavenly sultanate;

Though all the world's lands be trampled, your land is never trampled.

.....

Let the non-mahram then roam in the sanctuary of Islam's harem...

Mine is the right, hush, O nightingale, yours is not to mourn!

The situations Akif depicts here, what he speaks of as the one trampling the homeland and the non-mahram roaming in the sanctuary of the harem, expressed the perception of country and homeland experienced by the Islamists of the post-Republic period. His words "I am not parted from the homeland, yet in its separation / I roam weeping like an émigré in my own land" formed the first example of the diasporic literature to which later Islamists resorted to describe the environment in which they lived. This diasporic condition, which later found expression in the lines "a stranger in his own homeland, a pariah in his own fatherland" in Necip Fazıl Kısakürek's Sakarya Türküsü, would stand out as one of the most important attitudes produced by Islamists in the post-Caliphate situation. But the case of Mehmed Akif was that he would prefer to emigrate from his own land rather than suffer the agony of living a diaspora in his own homeland.

His disappointments, his leaving the country, his never writing poetry again, his choosing silence as a kind of speech are well known, but all these meaningful acts were not seen merely as "resentment" or "giving up"; they were also evaluated as a radical stance. Yet always within a density of message sustained by the attributions of others. It can be said that he was also the first person to adopt silence as a form of communication.

It is known that while he was at first very warm toward the task of writing a translation of the meaning of the Qur'an that was offered to him in the early years of the Republic, indeed had begun the work with great excitement, he later gave this up too and came to the decision to destroy even the copies he had made. Yet until the period before the founding of the Republic, one of Akif's greatest ideals was "to make the Qur'an speak to the comprehension of the age." Being open to every kind of intellectual and scholarly effort that this required, one could have expected him to carry this offer through to the end.

Indeed, just as the idea of the Qur'an addressing the Turkish understanding had a positive resonance in Mehmed Akif's world of feeling, it also showed that he was equally doubtful about the expectations of those who made him the offer. Because of the intentions in employing discourses, the parallel between the religious discourse preferred by the Republican cadres and Mehmed Akif's discourse would not be a matter of satisfaction and happiness for Akif.

He knew very well that the Qur'an could be a guide only for the God-fearing. With the intentions and expectations of those who wished to Turkify the Qur'an laid openly bare, Akif, the poet of the Qur'an, could not knowingly be made a tool for this.