In the context of liberalism and the Left: the balance of criticism and justice

Looking at the forces that aim at democracy in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey, indeed almost everywhere in the Islamic world, we see that groups calling themselves liberal, leftist, or committed to Western values emerge as groups. Yet it is also a fact that the Islamists, whose relationship with democracy has been questioned for years, form the real dynamic of democratization across this entire geography.

This situation may in fact require that the question of the "incompatibility of Islam and democracy," pronounced for years regarding the Islamic world, be asked again exclusively for this world, substituting for Islam concepts such as the left, socialism, liberalism, or Westernism, secularism. That all these groups can take a common stance against democratic developments in the Islamic world raises serious questions about the legitimacy of all these concepts.

Indeed, when criticizing someone's stance, attitude or words, criticizing them by placing them in a more general category than themselves and attributing them to that category can always have an aspect that touches on, or exceeds, fairness or justice. After all, we have a warning that "our anger at a people should not lead us to injustice toward that people." That is why, even though all the leftists we have met so far have, by displaying similar tendencies in Kemalism, nationalism, coup-mongering and glorifying violence, poured acid on the very root of the left, I have always thought that one should avoid generalizing out of respect for the minority of leftist exceptions whom I see as far from these errors. I have always thought the same about liberalism.

For example, when criticizing the Turkish left, Ömer Laçiner or Tanıl Bora always sticks in a corner of my mind, and I always try to draw a framework that takes their existence into account too. Or when criticizing liberals, I take care not to do injustice to names such as Atilla Yayla, Mustafa Erdoğan and Bekir Berat Özipek, who I think have deeply enriched liberal thought and, through it, Turkish political thought. Of course this does not mean that we have no disagreements whatsoever with all these names. On the contrary, it means that I think a debate worth the name on the left or liberalism can only be had with these names.

Although I hope that the revolutionary excitement that both Bora and Laçiner were seized by after the Gezi events, which takes the mind away, is temporary. I would of course not want them to be carried away by the atmosphere of the special issue they published on Gezi having "sold so much that it went to two printings," and to give the depth of their analyses and the leftist sensibility of their approaches, whose flavor we could never get enough of in what we have read from them until now, to a broader left-communitarian wind. I too have always wanted Birikim Magazine to sell a lot. To be read, to be understood, to be discussed in wide circles. I have even dreamed of its going through a few printings, but that there is nothing in this increase being driven by the force of the same wind that raises the circulation of the newspapers Aydınlık or Sözcü that gives them pause is itself thought-provoking.

I am saying all this in fact on account of Atilla Yayla's article titled "The boomerang effect of baseless criticisms of liberalism and liberals," which is full of quite apt warnings. How much those who call themselves liberal in Turkey or in the Islamic world have to do with liberalism is far from a secret. It only takes a little discernment to see that they have nothing to do with it.

Liberalism has a reputation, as a philosophy or cultural capital, in certain circles, and for many people adherence to liberalism is nothing other than appropriating that cultural capital. When you want to discuss liberalism as a philosophy, you will certainly not find a better interlocutor in Turkey than Atilla Yayla. Moreover, you will do it savoring the debate, plunging with excitement into all the paths that exuberant thought opens before you.

That is certain. He is also entirely right, to the fullest extent, in his warnings about the misdirected address of the criticisms of liberalism. But one still cannot help being struck by this: how much can Yayla alone save the image or reputation of liberalism? In an environment where the daily Hürriyet, with all its columnists, is regarded as liberal, how will we convince people that liberalism is in fact represented not by them but by Yayla, Özipek or Erdoğan?

Liberal symbolic capital is being usurped in Egypt too, with similar motives. As Yayla also aptly notes: "The coup plotters in Egypt and their supporters in the world think that the use of force against an elected political power can be legitimized for the purpose of protecting liberal rights and freedoms. That is why they try to convince the world that nonexistent liberals also support the coup. They do this by labeling secular, Westernized segments as liberal."

In this way, the coup plotters in Egypt think they have hooked the liberals in the West, and the interesting part is that those in the West who give credit to liberalism are so prone to falling for such a simple trick, one that would fool a fool. Should the absence of a proper reaction from the world regarded as liberal to the military coup in Egypt be attributed to their all having simply been deceived by the coup plotters who sell themselves in Egypt as liberal through lies? Are Western liberals so naive that they cannot see that a coup is a coup? If so, what kind of politics can come out of this naivety? Or is it that, in fact, for Western liberals too, liberalism or liberal democracy is only in the West and for Westerners?

However consistent a philosophy liberalism is with representatives like Yayla, can we speak of a problem that it cannot produce a code of behavior of the same consistency among those who adopt it?

On this occasion, I would like to convey my belated "congratulations, welcome" message to Atilla Yayla, whose beginning to write in the same newspaper excites me.