The difficulty of arguing with those who neither know nor know that they do not know

First of all, I apologize in advance to my readers for what they will have to read today. Because those familiar with my writing know that I do not easily enter into personal polemics. Even when I criticize someone's view, they also know that I try, if possible, to take the matter out of the personal and treat it at the level of discussing a view. I do not build a critique on people's factual errors or slips of the tongue. We are all servants of God, and factual errors and slips of the tongue are natural consequences of this nature of ours. My readers are not accustomed, on my part, to debates with people at the level of Fatih Altaylı and his like, and I would not want them to become accustomed. There are also very good pens that give such types the answers they deserve, may God be pleased with them; in this way they lift a great burden off those who do not wish to soil themselves with mud, and what they do is no small work.

For that reason, please let them take today's piece as an exception. For I also do not think that any good comes of polemics entered into with such types.

Altaylı has penned a piece about what I said at Bayburt University on Turkishness, under the headline "The Effort to Educate a Professor Who Says 'There Is No Turk'." Once again, the headline of the piece begins with a slander that singles one out as a target and incites feelings of hatred. From the context only two seconds before in my remarks, in the sense that "Turkishness cannot be reduced to a race; Turkishness is something beyond race," I had said, "Turkishness is a synthesis; there is no such thing as a Turkish race," but he immediately turned that into "there is no Turk."

For the moment I did not say anything about the officiousness of trying to educate a professor. After all, the most distinctive quality of professorship is not claiming to know everything but, on the contrary, humility, knowing what one does not know, being open at all times to learning what one does not know, being ready at all times to learn new things. What I always pray to God for is that He not make me one of those insolent people who think they know everything.

I took a look to see what Altaylı would teach us. He recommended a few books, and each of the books he recommended actually confirms me, not him. In particular, I quoted from Jean-Paul Roux's famous book known as "The History of the Turks" and showed that this book said things going much further than what I had said. Moreover, to tell the truth, I did not even need to do very extensive research to find that quotation. I presented it by quoting from Ertuğrul Özkök's piece of February 23, 2007. The simple conclusion: Altaylı has either not read the books he recommended to me, or has read them without understanding, or has not understood me, or has not been able to make the connections.

As someone whose ignorance and insolence have been thrown in his face, I can understand that he has become very angry. But Altaylı always does this anyway. A scene that never leaves my mind is his reaction, toward a group of worshippers coming out of Van, to the police asking about the number of rak'ahs in order to identify the protesters: "Hey brother, are you really that ignorant, Mr. Policeman? The number of rak'ahs differs in every school of law, brother. In the Shafi'i school it is 4, in the Hanafi school it is 5..."

Is this a slip of the tongue? Honestly, whoever wishes may download that video from YouTube and watch it over and over; does it have anything resembling a slip of the tongue?

That is Altaylı. He neither knows, nor knows that he does not know, and is extremely sure of his wrong information. On the day he published his insult-filled piece, when I came to my office, my assistant told me that he had invited me to Altaylı's program. Of course I declined. And not for this reason alone. First, Altaylı had resolved from the very start to declare me an enemy of the Turks and would whip this issue up in that direction. I am not so naive as to become a tool for that.

Second, and more importantly, even if there were an attack or an insult, is it up to Altaylı to defend Turkishness? Was it not he who for years went on insulting the headscarf, a value of Islam, the most important element of Turkishness, and women who wear the headscarf?

It is so obvious that he wants to concoct a lie of an attack on Turkishness and seize the title of hero standing against it. By assuming that Turks are naive enough to fall for this, is he not in fact insulting Turkishness itself most gravely?

Yes, I went on Cüneyt Özdemir's 5N1K program, and then on the 2 Görüş program of Oral Çalışlar and Mehmet Ocaktan on Skytürk360, and explained what I meant on the subject. I am glad I did. At the same hours on Habertürk, Altaylı, to whip up the issue, tried until late at night, together with Murat Bardakçı and the geologist Celal Şengör, to prove the "existence of the Turk." As if I were denying the Turk. How far would you expect Şengör, who is known to be a Darwinist, to take the origin of Turkishness? Thank God it stopped short of "we are all actually Byzantines!" Even that would have been more tolerable, of course.

Let me repeat. I did not say there is no Turkishness; I said that Turkishness exists and cannot be reduced to a race. And the most important backbone of the existing Turkishness is Islam. Whoever has a problem with Islam has a problem with Turkishness too. Whoever has a problem with the headscarf has, all the more, a problem with Turkishness. No Turk who knows himself will swallow Altaylı, who has uttered unspeakable words about women who wear the headscarf, standing before me as a defender of Turkishness. And I have no business with those who do not know themselves.

Moreover, throughout the program they tried, like adolescents, to catch my factual errors constantly. Murat Bardakçı said that on my Twitter account I wrote my surname incorrectly in Ottoman. First of all, I did not write it in Ottoman but in Arabic, and the spelling is correct. I would of course not claim to know Ottoman as well as Bardakçı, but the Ottoman spelling is not different either. In this case, Bardakçı seemed to me to have fallen into the pettiness of misusing his knowledge in debates.

A good deal of talk also went around my having pronounced Roux's name as Rox. The same kind of pettiness... I do not know French, nor have I claimed anywhere to know it. I pronounced that word through the English I know. It turns out it is read not Rox but Ru. Fine, daa, rather than pretending to have pronounced and read the name correctly, without resorting to any such pretense, I prefer to understand just a quotation of his correctly and pronounce his name wrongly.

In the end, the fact remains that Altaylı either never read the book he recommended to me or did not understand at all what he read.

And what does this fact make of Altaylı, who set out on the officiousness of proving the existence of Turkishness against me? I leave the judgment to our readers, to whom I must apologize once more.