Drawing lessons from the earthquake

An earthquake does not only shake the ground and bring down buildings built on rotten foundations and with deficient materials. It shakes, rattles and brings down everything, and offers people an opportunity to rebuild better. It shakes feelings, it shakes lives and perceptions, it shakes human relations, it shakes the stance of the state. After this shaking it corrects some things, but it can also make some things worse.

When we look at the course of human relations after every earthquake, we face an interesting sociology of earthquakes. The earthquake of August 17 played a very important role in the change of the paradigm of state-society relations in Turkey. That earthquake, setting aside the houses it destroyed, the lives it extinguished, the souls it wounded, led to the revelation that society in Turkey is far stronger than the state. In doing so it also showed that a strong state will only be possible if it takes this society as its basis. The earthquake thus causes a mobility in people's social lives as much as it stirs the earth.

There is also the warning dimension of the earthquake. This concept of "warning" is very susceptible to abuse. Some take this warning, however painful, as an occasion to put their own lives in order; others on the contrary treat it as if it were a help from God to themselves against their enemies and a punishment to the others... In any case it is certain that the earthquake warns people by shaking them.

The warning that comes with the earthquake is very painful, very tragic, very dreadful. In truth, the quality of the person can never be taken out of the equation regarding how much each person benefits from this warning. Those who are able to take a lesson, whose eyes and ears of the heart are not yet sealed, already receive those warnings. The tragic side is that perhaps those who most need to receive the warnings prick up their ears at first, but soon become blind and deaf again.

You surely know how risky it is to say that the earthquake is a warning. What makes it risky is the attitude of those who immediately appropriate that warning, abuse it, and instrumentalize it to reinforce their own stance. The earthquake may be warning them before anyone else, but they usually take nothing upon themselves from that warning. They immediately move the earthquake to their own ranks and count it as a proof of their rightness against those they regard as adversaries. For some reason, those who take the earthquake as a warning are always interested in what it says to others, not in what it says to themselves.

Yet, if one pays attention, when an earthquake comes it distinguishes no one, innocent or sinner, small or great; it strikes the Turk and the Kurd, the Arab and the Armenian at the same moment, in the same way. Perhaps the only ones it does not strike are those who have taken the necessary precautions against the earthquake. Even them it does not refrain from frightening in any way. So even if the earthquake is a warning, it is a warning for everyone; it distinguishes no one.

From what we lived through during and after the Van earthquake, everyone again drew conclusions in their own way, but first of all it must be recorded that this earthquake revealed the fact that Turkey is a very strong society. This in a way confirmed the reality that emerged in the 1999 earthquake. In other countries we may see people rushing to looting instead of aid after such disasters. In Turkey, however, we encounter a completely opposite scene.

The feelings that motivated the aid mobilized from every part of the country were of a kind that makes one say that however much we thank God, it is too little. Thousands of thanks be to God. One of His blessings upon us is that, when we were enemies or had grown so cold to each other as to hate one another, He made us brothers by the sakina (tranquility) that He sent down into us and among us...

It is not that there were no events that cast a shadow over this scene to be thankful for. Yet trying to bring them to the fore benefits no one. Next to the greatness of the brotherhood displayed, those actions are very feeble and wretched. But as they are brought onto the agenda by being shoved in our faces, they begin to be seen as though they were the only thing to be seen in this perfect scene.

Yet, in proportion to the aid mobilized and the fellow-feeling expressed, such incidents are extremely exceptional. As one listens to them, what is essential is overlooked. What is essential is the brotherhood of this country, between Kurd and Turk, remembered and revived again.

As we look at what Satan tells us to see, our eyes are soiled; as we hear those news items, our ears rust and our hearts darken. Therefore there is a perfectly possible way: not to look, and to condemn them to their wretchedness. Spreading an evil word, an evil image serves to strengthen it and spread its advertisement. One must not give evil words and acts that opportunity.

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We received the news of the earthquake in Cairo, during a conference on the "comparative study of democratic and constitutional changes in Egypt and Turkey" organized jointly by the newspapers Al-Youm Al-Sabi' and Al-Ahram and the Strategic Thought Institute. Had it not been for this event, I was going to relay my impressions of that conference, God willing in a later article.. But I should not pass without telling one episode. When, at the start of the session in which I gave the opening speech, I invited the participants in the hall to pray and recite the Fatiha for those who died in the earthquake in Van, the Egyptian speaker after me said the following: "Shall I tell you a sign that Turkey has changed? In such situations the Turks used to invite us to a ritual quite foreign to Muslims, a minute of silence."