Turkishness as a race

Yesterday, while I was on the high-speed train from Konya to Ankara, my phone rang. A friend informed me that I had become the target of a full-blown lynching campaign over a supposed outburst on national channels that "There is no such thing as a Turkish race!" My first reaction, of course, was a sentence of astonishment mixed with curiosity: "Good heavens, when did I say it, and to whom?" My astonishment, of course, stems from not considering such a simple and shallow statement befitting me.

As we talked a little more, the content of the talk I gave a few days earlier at Bayburt University, at the invitation of the Düşünce Akademisi Student Society, came to my mind. The talk was neither about Turkishness nor about nationalism. On the contrary, the talk was about Turkey's role in the Middle East and about the recent developments in Syria and Egypt. After listening to the views and the question of one of the students on nationalism, views that verged on racism, one of the sentences I formed in a dialogue between us in reply to him was torn from its context and attributed to me.

Among all my years of experience as a writer and academic, one of the things I have least enjoyed has been complaining about being misunderstood. I have never complained about being misunderstood, because I think that being misunderstood is a fate that clings to our mortal existence anyway. If even the book of God is misunderstood at every moment, who are we to be able to establish a perfect language of communication free of every kind of misunderstanding? Of course, we are not in a position to say, "Since we will not be understood correctly anyway, let us speak as we please." Everyone who opens his mouth to speak, who takes up a pen to write, still aims at being understood correctly; he must aim at it.

But you speak for an hour, and just as you rejoice that you have conveyed your message so nicely, you may encounter such a question or such an "I agree with you" reaction that you can lose all hope of understanding and agreement. Yet there is a problem with our dreams of understanding and agreement. In the end, everyone understands according to his own level, world of meaning, dreams and feelings. Realizing this sometimes leads to deep disappointments, while for those who have a share of wisdom it merely opens a new chapter on the truth of the human being and his Lord.

In an environment where my interlocutors were entirely students and academics, I had explained, in response to an off-topic question, what I have been saying and writing for years on nation, nationalism, Turkishness and being of Turkey (Türkiyelilik). A few days later, only a 1.5-minute portion of that two-hour talk was broadcast, and without regard to the whole of that talk, only the sentence "There is no such thing as a Turkish race" was torn out. And supposedly the students reacted to these words and left the hall.

I would say, where do we even begin to correct it; the speed with which this news spread on websites and the campaign launched on social media over these words already sufficiently explain how and for what purpose the news was produced. The overly eager entrepreneurship of those who embraced the news in fact fills in the content of the news as well.

But first, I did not make such an outburst out of the blue. Nor is this an outburst. These are words said in dialogue in response to a student's question.

Second, it is an utter lie, as stated in the news, that the hall was abandoned by the students over my words. On the contrary, my words continued to be followed with intense interest to the very end.

Third, my words were said in response to the words of a student who stated that "the Turkish nation includes the 55 million Turks living in Turkey," words that I found exclusionary. I explained that Turkishness cannot be reduced to a race, and that, on the contrary, it has been adopted as an umbrella identity that historically also accommodates different races. I tried to explain that when one attempts to reduce it to a race, the cultural soul of Turkishness is wholly killed off, and, in this form, its integrating quality in Turkey is destroyed.

When we confront the question of why the Hungarians, although descended from the Turkish race, are not considered Turks, while, by contrast, the Bosnians, the Albanians, or a great many elements living in the Balkans and Anatolia who are not of the Turkish race, can consider themselves Turks and why and how, we enter a broad field concerning the nature of the Turkish race and identity. And in this field, what I have been saying and writing for years is out there for all to see.

In fact, to draw a different meaning even from the short video in the news is nothing but reckless slander.

That this slander spread so quickly and was found so credible is, for its part, a situation from which one should take a lesson only about the level of morality.

I wonder whether I have managed to explain myself.