The difference of a society with books

The figures we gave on our reading rates seem to have surprised some people. For some reason it did not seem credible to some that the rates at which people in Türkiye read books are ahead of France, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Romania. Yet more and more people say that their observations drawn from the very midst of life quite confirm these figures.

Of course, there are understandable reasons for being surprised that these figures are high; we expressed them in our earlier article. On many subjects we have adopted backwardness as a kind of fate, or in the popular expression of recent times, in a way that produces "learned helplessness." We cannot think good things suited to ourselves. We love the literature of lament and grumbling very much, and if one were to ask what we gain from this, of course the answer is nothing. People do not hope to make a profit from such negative discourse anyway. It is a general attitude toward life that harms itself.

Yet whoever has a claim, has something to say, and wants to change the environment and world he lives in also believes he can do it, and must believe it. Otherwise he would have no strength to change anything.

Discourses of backwardness, or of "nothing good will come of us," also produce their own ethical codes, and the most dangerous side of that is exactly this. It puts a brake on the whole positive will of an entire society to aspire to what is good, giving it its due, paying its price, deservedly and with competence.

In the famous words of Malek Bennabi, "Colonialism does not come about solely through the skill of the colonizers; there must also be a mind ready for this exploitation." A mind that believes it deserves the exploitation it is subjected to, and thinks it cannot resist it or display a different character.

Yet Türkiye, which sits atop the Ottoman legacy even though for a period there was a vandalic attempt to deny and destroy it, is a nation already very familiar with the book. A nation that sanctifies the book, puts it at the center of life, and even if it does not read itself, never cuts off contact with those who read. Even when evaluating people who are not of its own, the common bond it establishes with them is that they are "people of the Book" (kitap ehli). That is, this nation places at the center of its assessment of friend and foe not only reading books but even the bond one has with the book.

One of the greatest curses one can utter against a person is to call him "bookless" (kitapsız). This society somehow understands everyone, but it cannot stomach the bookless. Because the bookless is a person who is not restricted by any moral norm that could bind him in society, a person of whom it is not even possible to predict what might come. He can do anything: kill, steal, betray, set his eyes on another's honor. For he has no book that restricts him. The People of the Book, even if they are Jews and Christians, have rules that bind them; what they can and cannot do can be predicted in advance.

Since we have opened the subject, let us once again touch on the attitude of Paludan, who burned the Holy Qur'an, and of those like him. His act is not only against the Qur'an but against the book in general. By burning the Qur'an he does not raise the esteem of the Torah and the Gospel. He displays, in general, a "bookless" act. From one who does this, every kind of harm to humanity can be expected.

That reading rates in Türkiye are very high is of course nothing to be surprised at. In a society whose bond with the book is this deep, we could say that even the recorded reading rates are low. Other things can be added to the figures on reading rates that we relayed in my last article from Ali Odabaş, the General Director of Libraries and Publications. For example, the books that have become the daily routine of an important segment of society and that are read and taught together in conversation gatherings: readings of the Qur'an, hadith, tafsir or the risale.

A friend of mine, perhaps surprised by these figures, responded in a different way. "Do these reading rates also tell us anything about the quality of the books read? For as far as I can see, there are, for instance, popular books that are widely read, books so empty, so factory-made, that I think more harm than benefit may come from reading such books. Because they spread bad, utterly shallow and harmful ideologies through books."

I admit that this is a matter that must be considered entirely outside the optimistic picture on reading rates. A similar question, though about a different genre, was put to Ali Odabaş in the aforementioned gathering of friends. Truth be told, in countries where reading rates are very high, this does not run very differently either. Indeed, there a completely industrial mechanism operates in producing content for books. The culture industry produces whatever subject it wants, even whatever message it wants, sometimes beyond the literary skill of the author, within an entirely professional framework, and puts it before the reader. Most of the books you see on bestseller lists are produced, with their sub- and super-messages meticulously worked out, by a technical team that advises the author more than the author himself.

Perhaps such industrial productions are not so developed among us. There is still, to a large extent, a favor depending on the author's skill, originality and distinctiveness. The likelihood that books are, so to speak, more organic is higher. Even so, the question of what kinds of effects utterly empty books may have must also be noted down.

In the rise in the number of books read in recent years, of course, we must see the great effect of raising the compulsory education period to 12 years and of raising the number of universities to 210, spread across the whole country. Still, there is an obvious difference we hold over those societies that have more universities and raised their compulsory education to this level long ago.

Can we not attribute that, too, to our reverting to our essence as a society of the book?