The 7th Workshop in the Alevi Opening

The seventh and final workshop in the series launched under the Alevi Opening is being held in Kızılcahamam. Unlike the previous six meetings, the last one has been organized to run for three days, and its participants form a mixed group drawn from those who attended the earlier workshops. In the meetings so far, the discourses and demands of the Alevi groups have been reflected as fully as possible. At the final workshop, the picture that emerged from the earlier ones will be turned into a final report.

A significant portion of the participants are Alevis, but representatives of certain institutions directly concerned with the problems and demands of the Alevis are also present. Because whatever is to be done about the Alevis does not concern only the Alevis.

It is plain to see that, compared with where they started, the participants have come a considerable distance in understanding one another and in approaching the problem in a more solution-oriented way. There is visible progress in everyone's sense of how reasonable the demands voiced in the early days were. On the question of what is to be done with Madımak, they are trying to articulate and formulate a search for a reasonable solution instead of a revanchist or reactive stance. Everyone remains within a reasonable framework of negotiation regarding the possibility that the proposed solutions might lead to other problems.

The "common language of negotiation" that Dr. Necdet Subaşı, who has managed the process very well from the beginning with his excellent moderation, has called for since the start has in a sense found a concrete example at this last workshop. Representatives of the Alevis and of the Diyanet are negotiating together around one table, without quarreling, a reasonable formula on religious education, on Madımak, and on the status of the cemevis. Tayyar Altıkulaç, the former head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, and İzzettin Doğan, the president of the Cem Foundation, agree on many issues.

There is as yet no concrete formula, but there is an approach that receives almost every demand favorably. State Minister Faruk Çelik, as in all the previous meetings, follows these meetings attentively from beginning to end, and at times when the discussions get stuck he makes interventions that are very unifying and conciliatory and cause no discomfort whatsoever. If you saw him, you would not say "the state."

In fact, in an atmosphere where the discussions grow a little tense, Arif Sağ's interventions, always with a joke fitted to the context, lend the language of negotiation an entirely different and very warm dialect. An anecdote, told like a joke among a series of jokes, was both thought-provoking and quite cautionary regarding the whole process. It is an anecdote to be remembered and pondered deeply at some point not only in the Alevi question but in all political debates. I relate it, omitting the names, as two Bektashi jokes.

Two Bektashis had had a few drinks one evening and sank into conversation. The subject of their conversation was what the number 99 on the Sunnis' prayer beads corresponded to in their own Bektashi numbers. They began counting: the threes, the sevens, the forties... Then the number in their hands reached 98, and they could not find 99 anywhere. Add from the bottom, 98; add from the top, 98; they could not find 99, and meanwhile they grew tired and worn out. One said: it is late and our heads aren't clear either, let's go to bed, we'll wake up in the morning and work it out with sober heads. They went to bed, but in the middle of the night a spark suddenly fell into one's mind and, enlightened, he leapt out of bed, could not wait, poked his friend awake, and shouted with all his astonishment and amazement: "Get up, get up, I found that missing 'one'. Hey, we forgot God!"

When we plunge into an argument we often forget ourselves; we forget our deeper values that tie us to one another, and we fall into heedlessness. How beneficial it is when someone gives this warning.

Because this workshop lasts three days, unlike the earlier ones, it also gives rise to warmer settings of fellowship and conversation. At the evening gatherings, Arif Sağ tells jokes, and while İbrahim Kalın plays the saz, striving to learn from Master Arif, folk songs compiled from Alevi deyiş are sung together. At one point the subjects drift to theology, and as Ali Bulaç patiently and carefully answers the questions put to him, both sides experience the warm feelings of a belated acquaintance.

While stating together with Ali Bulaç that the dominant culture of Turkish Sunnism is in fact closer to Hz. Ali and his Ahl al-Bayt, some Alevi representatives receive these statements with astonishment. Their astonishment comes from hearing these things from Sunnis whom they generally did not know to be so close to Hz. Ali. But when they learn that this is quite ordinary for the Sunni side, their astonishment and warmth grow even more, of course.

A clearer outcome of the workshop will have emerged toward this evening, but what has become clear about the background of the meetings is a state of being completely acquainted, of making the work easy and the road short.

There is no issue that cannot be resolved with this approach.