In trying to Westernize, becoming even more Eastern and unable to escape the fight with oneself

Awakening the truth within a person is the result of a long, step-by-step, rational chain of reasoning. Yet to awaken the ignorance within him, it is enough for someone right beside him to tempt him, and for that one in turn to nudge the next. Sometimes the fact that people can be rallied and driven as a mob around ignorant ideas is the greatest degradation that befalls the human being whom we would rather credit with acting on reason and conscience. If he thought for just a moment, if he consulted his conscience and his reason even a little, he would see what a disaster the end of this path would be for himself; yet a person can readily trail after someone else down a road he would never take on his own. At that moment he forgets that he carries a head on his shoulders, that he can think with it, that he ought to think. The one who forgets his thinking there forgets his conscience too, and suspends such virtues as manliness, compassion and moral custom.

It is mass psychology, it is lynch culture; it turns people into a herd. The herd goes wherever the one leading the crowd takes it. The lynching attempt that some 50 people launched the other day, entering a housing complex against a Yemeni boy of about 15 after a quarrel between two children, long since over and done with, is the result of just such a mass psychology. There is no reason there, no conscience, no manliness, not the slightest sense of proportion. The poor child, in the midst of fifty people, runs this way and that for his life, not understanding what has hit him. A terrifying sight...

That scenes of this kind have recently been occurring more often, in various forms, is a dangerous course that we must stop and think about. For this lynching mentality, the object of the lynching ceases at some point to matter much. Today it moves against the refugee, the foreigner, and it becomes a habit; once there are no foreigners left, it turns to lynching its own people, its own brother.

Because I said, "Do not suppose that a country made uneasy in this way over the Syrians will become a country in which its own citizens can live more comfortably and more safely," that same lynching mentality, stripped of humanity, turns around and, kicking up a clamor that I am "threatening the Turkish nation," points to a new target for lynching. Proving precisely what I meant. Yet the threat is precisely this lynching mentality: the mentality that tries to extract political gain through slander and provocation, by inciting one part of the people against another and making them hate one another. The threat after the foreigner is that those who have seen inhuman treatment of the foreigner will go about among us with the cheap, even unjust, privilege of a victory, and become still more reckless.

STRUGGLING AGAINST ARABIC TO PROTECT THE TURKISH LANGUAGE

One target of the lynching mentality, emboldened by this provocative clamor, has been Arabic signs. The war that some municipalities waged against Arabic signs the other day, unfortunately, created a disgraceful, scandalous spectacle that makes us, as a country, a laughingstock before the whole world. Harun Arslan, who has written for years in Mersin Medya, one of the places where the incident took place, stresses, rightly, "the tragicomedy of its being done, moreover, allegedly in order to protect our Turkish," and draws attention to the untouchability of the Russian, English and French signs right next to the Arabic signs that were taken down. The Arabic signs were a manifestation of the race among Mersin's businessmen, before the Syrian war began, to attract Syrian Arab tourists.

Those who say they are acting to protect Turkish have no connection to Turkish at all; and no language is protected this way. As you will appreciate, in the United States, which is far more developed than we are, there are almost no English signs in the Chinese neighborhoods, and no one has ever seen or heard of Chinese, Spanish or Arabic signs being fought, either in those neighborhoods or elsewhere in the country, in the name of protecting the English language. Likewise, in some neighborhoods in Germany where Turks live there are very dense Turkish signs. The Turks make their presence felt to the Germans through cultural habits and signs that look far stranger to them than the hookah looks to us. Not once have we seen the Germans fight Turkish signs in the name of protecting German. Of course they have a separate sensitivity and separate policies for teaching German.

Our friend Yusuf Kaplan has also laid this subject out very well, in full. It is a great absurdity to conduct these policies in the name of protecting Turkish. Against whom are you protecting Turkish? Do you know how many Arabic words there are in Turkish? 7,000 words of the Turkish we actually use today were taken from Arabic. If, as was once attempted, you removed all the Arabic words in the name of protecting the language, you could not even form a "sentence" (cümle). And "cümle" is, after all, an Arabic word.

Moreover, in Yusuf Kaplan's words: "Turkish suckled at the breast of Qur'anic Arabic and became the voice of truth. Because they were Muslims, and because they rebuilt Turkish as a language of civilization with Arabic, the civilizational language of Islam, with Qur'anic Arabic, the Turks made not only Islamic history but world history for a thousand years.

Because Turkish knew how to drink its fill from Qur'anic Arabic, it was able to turn into a language of poetry and of the heart, singing the song of the soul. From there they cultivated and presented to humanity a magnificent, universal experience of civilization, an emblem of justice, equity and brotherhood; one that grants everyone the right to life; one that, unlike the Westerners, never set out to uproot any civilization; one that has not been surpassed, has not been understood, and whose not having been surpassed, because it has not been understood, has itself not been understood, waiting to be discovered..."

Kaplan also points to an ignorance that takes the Latin alphabet for the genuine Turkish alphabet. Unfortunately, it is wanted that this ignorance continue, because politics built on mass psychology is possible only by reinforcing and teaching ignorance.

THE CONTRADICTION OF BECOMING MORE ORIENTAL WHILE WESTERNIZING

Some people do not see that Turkey's process of nationalization took place together with an exaggerated "Westernization" movement. They do not see that the national character they are so proud of was realized, paradoxically, by ceasing to be themselves. And yet it is not something that can go unseen. The national identity they claim for Turkey required at the same time moving away from its thousand-year-old deep-rooted identity and resembling the West more. To such an extent that we were left with no original value to offer humanity. It is exactly the condition Arnold Toynbee described: the Turkey that imitates the West, in this state, has neither managed to resemble the West nor remained itself, and has been left with no original claim.

The sociologist Salman Sayyid, known for his work on Turkish modernization, also expresses the paradox in Turkey's Westernization efforts as follows: In order to resemble the West, Turkey waged a very exaggerated and emphatic struggle against its Oriental origins. The excessive emphasis on Orientalness in this struggle paradoxically made it even more Oriental.

This is our situation. In fact, we have covered considerable scientific, technological, political and social distance in order to overcome this. Today we have the sociological and political power to overcome this contradiction, but we keep going around and getting caught in that contradiction.

Arabic signs remind us of our origin, our essence, which some are ashamed of and try to get rid of and move away from.