The Kurds, the Islamists and "Self-Criticism Exercises"

Self-criticism, confronting oneself, even humility are fine virtues, but only when they are exercised before the right addressee and without abandoning fairness.

It will be remembered that during the days of February 28, the air was thick with people "confronting themselves" on behalf of Islamists. Past a certain point, it even became a trend for people who would hardly be able to acquire any identity other than Islamism to speak about Islamists in the third person. What began as a kind of self-criticism gradually turned into a discourse of saving oneself by detaching oneself, and of informing on others. As one might guess, these so-called "self-criticisms" and "self-confrontations," recorded under the heading "mistakes made by the Islamists," were immediately pulled onto the front pages in order to legitimize the February 28ers' shameless occupation of the political sphere and their intrusions into private life.

In those years, together with my friends at Tezkire Magazine, we declared a stance that could be summed up as "suspending self-criticism altogether and, on the contrary, criticizing the shameless power." What needed to be criticized that day was not our own selves but the tyrannical order itself, whose oppression and wrongs had become so blatant as to shake heaven and earth. Stepping before that tyrannical power or its agents to practice self-criticism was no different from a kind of "confessionalism." These self-criticisms were being used not as a sign of the Islamists' maturity and virtue but, on the contrary, to show how much they deserved the oppression inflicted upon them.

The article titled "Self-Criticism Exercises: The Language and Ethos of the Defeated" (issue 18, 2000), written in those days by my dear brother Murat Güzel, who these days writes book reviews for Star Açık Görüş with his formidable pen, deserved to take its place among the classics on the analysis of the discourse of self-criticism. One of the important realities to be kept in mind in self-criticism exercises is to be careful about the possibility that self-criticism before a powerful wrongdoer may increase the wrongdoer's oppression. The second is to know that when you practice humility before the ignorant, there is a very high chance that it will be mistaken for genuine abasement.

New self-criticism exercises are back on the agenda these days in different contexts. The words of Cemal Uşşak, again a "dear brother, elder brother," in an interview given to Ezgi Başaran in Radikal, which can be summarized as "as religious people, we did wrong to our Kurdish brothers in the Kurdish issue, we ignored their troubles," overlook these realities, in my opinion, as a self-criticism exercise. That is why his words were soon perceived as a confession that justifies the discourse of Kurdish nationalism, which, like all nationalisms, is in the end arrogant and disdainful.

Akif Beki and others made very good assessments of this interview. But I need to add one or two points of my own.

First of all, even if he did not say it in exactly these terms, it is not right that he took on such a self-criticism "on behalf of all religious people." When you read the history of the Islamists in Turkey, the story of the Islamists and the Kurds is so intertwined that it cannot be separated. So much so that the Islamists have not needed to deal with the Kurdish question separately. For one thing, it is impossible to separate from Islamism the Kurdishness of both Saids, who occupy a vital place in this history.

There is no doubt that Uşşak has aspects that may be valid for the experiences of a certain segment of the religious. An important wing of Turkish Islamism remained under the hegemonic influence of Turkish nationalism. This influence led them to see the problems of the Kurds as insignificant and ignorable, but even that wing was, in the same period, subjected to no less oppression from the same centers of oppression than the Kurds were.

Throughout his life Said Nursi was made to suffer in courts, prisons and exile for his simplest words because he was religious, but the effect of his being Kurdish on the treatment he received cannot be ignored either. The goodwill shown by Turks toward both Saids should also be seen as a reaction against the state's exclusionary nationalist stance. Where religiosity itself was treated as a crime, it is easy, but not fair, to criticize today the religious for avoiding the burden of a second crime, cursed by the system, such as Kurdishness. Moreover, the burden of that movement we call religious, even Islamist, was for a long time carried by the Kurds themselves. In this respect it is not so easy to tell the Kurds apart from the Islamists, or the Islamists from the Kurds.

Uşşak's own sincere experiences surely have a basis, as do very different experiences. But it is worth remembering that Turkish Islamism was, at times, undeservedly subjected by the dominant nationalist discourse to the separate accusation of being "pro-Kurdish." Of course the Islamists were not in an attitude that would deserve the label "pro-Kurdish" either. But as Beki also reminded, within the MNP-MSP-RP tradition's stance against nationalism there was a distinct interest in the Kurds. Erbakan's famous Bingöl speech is there for all to see. In that speech, his words "If you say 'How happy is the one who says I am a Turk!', then my Kurdish brother will also say 'How happy is the one who says I am a Kurd!'" became the subject of the closure case against his party.

Associations such as Mazlum-Der, founded in the early 90s, and Özgür-Der, founded in the late nineties, as the human rights organizations of the Islamists, have been accused of dealing almost exclusively with rights violations stemming from Kurdishness rather than from religiosity. Likewise, no one could speak of a lack of interest in the Kurds in the important magazines of the Islamist discourse such as Girişim, which appeared in the mid-eighties, and its successors Yeryüzü and Yeni Zemin.

Truly, the Islamists' interest in the Kurds can be considered sufficient only from the perspective of a Kurdish nationalist. But the Islamist view of the Kurdish question has never been the same as that of Kurdish nationalists, nor has it ever sought to be. The level that those who find this Islamist interest insufficient today take as their baseline is, let us name it honestly, a level of nationalism.

Yet the Islamist criticisms of nationalism are not criticisms that apply only when Turks do it. The view toward nationalism does not change when Kurds, Arabs or anyone else do it.

Muslims do not oppose nationalism in order to put another nationalism in its place. They oppose every kind of nationalism. Because when Muslims oppose idols, they do not do so in order to set up an idol of their own making in its place. They oppose the very idea of the idol.