Without competing in pain

The subject the Alevis rightly voice most is the pressures, persecution and policies of denial to which Alevis have been subjected for centuries. It is a fact that an exclusion fed by prejudice, which forced them to hide themselves everywhere, has made life hard to bear for an Alevi. Whether or not his true identity is known, an Alevi may never feel a full sense of confidence about how he might be received by others. This may require him to live his daily life always in vigilance, in caution. Trying to understand what kind of torture this state of vigilance can turn into is the duty of everyone in Turkey who believes in the principle of the equality of citizens.

During the latest workshop, too, there were those who expressed feelings in this direction in some way. In response, many anecdotes were also told about what devout people have suffered in Turkey. It was emphasized how, through certain policies gradually put into effect up to 1950, devout people were turned into second-class members of society.

With the alphabet revolution, the intense pressures on Quran teaching led to scenes of unbelievable cruelty. That some mosques were ruined or demolished to be used for purposes other than their own, and that severe prosecution and penalties were applied against possessing any book or document in Arabic letters, are among the best-known stories of that period. The stories of teachers who were raided by the gendarmerie and beaten by the gendarmes for teaching the Quran are among the indelible records of the collective memory of the devout world. How many scholars or opinion leaders were executed on the pretext of the Menemen incident or the Sheikh Said rebellion, with not even a record kept, is not known, but in every city you can hear from the same memory records a series of anecdotes about these executions. The torment that the call to prayer recited in Turkish was for the devout is a bonus.

As a result of the complete abolition of religious teaching institutions, by 1950 the people had no one left who could properly conduct their own funerals. The aim of the religious affairs policy up to then was certainly far from an outlook of preferring the Sunni world and offering it a service. It was very clear that the ultimate aim was to eliminate all organized religiosity entirely and to leave religion entirely to a fate at the level of individual opinions. This policy was defined by the expectation that, since religion would retain no appeal in such an environment, it would transform itself and be confined to a level of conscience with no social demand. The Alevis responded positively to this policy and in a way acquiesced to this kind of level of religiosity, but the Sunnis could not acquiesce. Because this level of religiosity had nothing compatible with religion. Indeed, this level had nothing compatible with Alevism either. But the sociological, perhaps political, conditions of the Alevis of that day perhaps made it easier for them to respond more positively to such an exchange.

The Sunnis, insisting that religiosity requires more, did not hold back from using all the possibilities of democracy to improve their religious conditions. But they were never regarded as acceptable citizens by the ruling power. At many levels they too were subjected to an exclusion no less than that of the Alevis. They often felt and expressed their situation as "a stranger in the homeland, a pariah in the homeland." The half-joking banter of the Alevis who listened to similar anecdotes at the workshop, along the lines of "look what these people have suffered; we thought we had suffered something," was, I think, a very human and truthful reaction.

Those who have not lived through the headscarf ban cannot sufficiently appreciate what kind of logic of exclusion it rests on. Today we probably have difficulty grounding in any logic the fact that Emine Erdoğan could not enter the gate of GATA three years ago. In Turkey the headscarf continued to be coded as a pretext for exclusion and led to hundreds of thousands, not one or two, being deprived of the right to education that "normal" citizens can use. This is not a discrimination that arises in individual cases from the officiousness of some officials but a norm of the order supported by laws. Because of the memoranda and profiling files that have come to light today, we see much better how being devout in the military was a ground and a norm for exclusion.

All of this is not, and cannot be, meant to compare the sufferings of the devout with those of the Alevis, to make the pains compete. But on this occasion it is necessary to point to the strangeness of the devout or Sunni segment's knowing the sufferings of the Alevis. In Turkey there is of course an outlook that sees oppression, like victimhood, as a kind of watch taken in turns. But our problem is a problem of acquaintance and awareness far beyond this.

While some people try to engrave Maraş and Sivas in the Alevi memory as contemporary and national Karbalas, they point to the grandchildren of Hüseyin as the Yazids of this Karbala. Since the experiences lived cannot be shared, it cannot be understood who is Hüseyin, who is Hurr, and who is the real Yazid. Because everyone is wanted to turn their own pain into a lament and bury their head in the hatred that this pain stirs up.

That Başbağlar is wanted to be set up against Madımak in fact requires looking again at what happened in Madımak too, but a hatred that has once been set in motion thrusts its mind into its easiest target and leaves it there.