Brotherhood

In the context of the Kurdish question we have always said that brotherhood as dry rhetoric has never been enough. We also did not refrain from stressing the hypocrisy of an approach that for years spoke of brotherhood and abused this brotherhood solely to get Kurds to renounce their rights.

When the head of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, Prof. Mehmet Gormez, said in precisely this context, "the rhetoric of brotherhood is not enough, we also need the law of brotherhood," we applauded both because he exposed this abuse and because he called for placing brotherhood within a framework of law. For that was what mattered.

The call to brotherhood should not have turned, as it always has, into a way of deceiving people into acquiescing in whatever the current situation is. It is also possible to understand that its having been exploited in this way until now has led to the development of an antipathy toward the rhetoric of brotherhood among a segment of Kurds.

Unfortunately, many of the maxims and principles of Islam that honor human beings can turn, in some people's hands, into a mere instrument of power, a subject of abuse. It is obvious that those who engage in the rhetoric of brotherhood while at the same time denying the Kurdishness of Kurds have no connection whatsoever with religion, with Islam. Is it not warning enough that those who engaged in brotherhood rhetoric toward Kurds and called on them to renounce, in the name of this bond of brotherhood, their most natural rights stemming from their Kurdishness, are the very same people who imposed the headscarf ban on this nation, who waged war on religious education and on the symbols of Islam, who closed the Imam-Hatip schools? Those who dropped from planes onto the mountains leaflets full of verses preaching brotherhood to the Kurds had not the slightest belief in or respect for those verses and their Owner. For them those verses were nothing more than a discourse of brotherhood rhetoric to be used and thrown away.

In fact those people did not believe that Kurds and Turks were truly brothers either. Those who reminded Kurds of brotherhood in the name of nationalism, most likely not accepting even Kurds as a separate element, could only have perceived the rhetoric of brotherhood as the brotherhood of Turks with Turks who imagined themselves Kurds.

Yet the fact that some people abuse the rhetoric of brotherhood in this way does not require discrediting brotherhood as a value. On the contrary, it requires disabling the counterfeit and putting the genuine into operation.

My words are addressed to a discourse that is being voiced in one way or another among devout Kurds these days. Certain comments or statements that devout people are disgusted by the rhetoric of brotherhood evidently delight certain people very much. I cannot imagine a Kurdish Muslim who knows himself being disgusted by brotherhood as a value or rejecting it. For before it became a fraudulent discourse in the hands of some racists, brotherhood is a Quranic principle.

We can understand that people who have nothing to do with Islam do not recognize brotherhood, and we are in no position to force anyone. The value of brotherhood too is, in the final analysis, a bond or value adopted voluntarily. We are in no position to forcibly make brothers of those who do not share our faith. With them too we can seek another ground for living together. But brotherhood is a blessing, a miracle, a verse that God has granted to Muslims. God Himself decrees that the believers are brothers to one another.

"Remember God's favor upon you, that you were enemies and became brothers," it is said in the Surah of Al-i Imran. As I wrote before, "it is an experience that one who has truly tasted the flavor of faith is never a stranger to. Indeed, becoming brothers with people we regarded as enemies is a hard-to-believe event in a culture where people being wolves to one another is accepted as a norm, but Islam is exactly the name of this experience. A miracle from real life, which everyone can easily live and witness."

There is nothing to say to Kurds who share the same cultural community with the secularists who oppressed the Kurds, but it must be recalled that it is not possible to pass over the principle of brotherhood without passing over Islam. Moreover, those who are truly brothers of the Kurds are returning the rights and dignity that were once usurped from them. No one with a sense of fairness can claim today that the talk of brotherhood is nothing but dry rhetoric. Under the AK Parti government, brotherhood is being kept alive with all its requirements, its law, its sincerity.

Beyond this, there is nothing to say to those who reject the bond of brotherhood. Is there supposedly a path beyond the blessing God has bestowed that would lead a person to salvation?