The Middle East and the Palestinian question through the eyes of Erol Güngör

We are commemorating Prof. Dr. Erol Güngör, whom we lost at a young age and who is indisputably one of modern Türkiye's most valuable thinkers and intellectuals, on the 40th anniversary of his passing. We commemorated him with a panel organized by the Conservative Thought Journal at Selçuk University, of which he was serving as rector when he died on November 15. At the meeting, which opened with a speech by Prof. Dr. Vedat Bilgin, who had been Güngör's assistant, I took part with Prof. Dr. Mustafa Aydın and Prof. Kurtuluş Kayalı in an opening panel.

Yesterday, in Ankara, in cooperation between Hacı Bayram University and the Sociology Department of Yıldırım Beyazıt University, we discussed Erol Güngör in a panel in terms of his contributions to Turkish thought, culture and sociology. The panel took place under the moderation of Ramazan Yelken, with the participation of Murat Yılmaz, Erdal Aksoy and Neslihan Akbulut.

The title of my talk at the panel promised to take up Erol Güngör as a sociologist and an intellectual. Truth be told, since October 7, both in my newspaper columns and in my entire academic and intellectual agenda, I have been occupied with Gaza and Palestine, so I wanted to address Erol Güngör too in his dimensions relating to this subject. In continuity with the considerations I made in my recent writings on the intellectual Edward Said, the Palestinian, there are many reasons that require us to regard Güngör, by Said's definition too, as a genuine, even exceptional-quality intellectual.

First of all, while never severing his organic relation with the community from which he came, Güngör was an intellectual who, when the occasion arose, did not refrain from thinking differently within that community and from making real contributions to it in this way. With the distinction he made between culture and civilization, he brought a serious criticism to Ziya Gökalp's famous approach on the principles and values we should not give up and should preserve in cultural change. Although he was subjected to serious reservations by the community from which he came because of these criticisms, it cannot be said that he was excluded. Indeed, the book in which these criticisms appear would for a long time not be published by the publishing house that published his books, but later it would take its place in his collected works. His criticisms of Ziya Gökalp in fact concern an area that Turkish nationalism must sooner or later settle accounts with.

After all, Gökalp's views are in harmony with the later political programs that wanted to build Turkish nationalism on anti-Arab sentiment, and in fact Güngör has his concerns precisely about this program. The distinction between hars and civilization is the formula of Gökalp's answer to the famous debate that took place among all Ottoman intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While Westernist intellectuals advocated total surrender in culture, values and lifestyle, Islamist intellectuals argued that in the face of the technical expansionism of Western civilization they could very well practice selectivity. This is not something that never happened in Islamic history. Western civilization is not the first civilization Muslims have encountered throughout history. For the community of a prophet who commanded going and acquiring knowledge even if it be in China, no problem was seen in adopting Western technologies.

In fact, with the culture and civilization distinction Gökalp too was at first after a formula that made this selectivity possible. However, the political movement of which he later became the ideologue cannot be said to have acted in accordance with his views either. Before technique and civilization, and more importantly, they took culture, lifestyle and wardrobe, and did not even care about taking civilization. In fact, the concerns that some Islamists have voiced that technique and culture cannot be separated, looking at the picture that emerged at the end of the day, have no basis at all. Culture and lifestyle were transferred to this country not through the door that technique opened but through the compulsion of politics, from top to bottom.

The last chapter of Güngör's book "Türk Kültürü ve Milliyetçilik" (Turkish Culture and Nationalism) is titled "Koptuğumuz Dünya" (The World We Were Torn From). Under this title there are two articles titled "Ortadoğu ve Türkiye" (The Middle East and Türkiye) and "Türkiye'den Ortadoğu'ya Bakış" (A Look at the Middle East from Türkiye). Güngör makes it very clear that what we have lived through since the First World War is a "rupture" in the worst meanings and connotations of the word. Against those who say "What does Palestine have to do with us today, the Arabs stabbed us in the back anyway," he explains that the mindset trying to tear us from the Middle East serves nowhere other than the imperialism that has been hostile to the Turkish national existence from the outset.

The Middle East, as a political term, emerged rather after the collapse of the Turkish empire, because previously this region, with the exception of Iran, was counted as Turkish land, and it is above all a bloc of Muslim states. A bloc of Muslim states in which Türkiye is the essential element. This description will require a very important recollection in historical and identity consciousness, and Güngör indeed tried to awaken this consciousness by drawing attention to all of the operations to which Muslims were subjected after the First World War. In doing so he also explains that each of those who try to sow anti-Arab sentiment into Turkish nationalism or hostility to Turks into Arab nationalism has nothing to do with either Arabness or Turkishness. His words gain more meaning given where he speaks from and the tradition he comes from. Let us give him the floor:

"In the meantime, it is essential to establish and increase cultural contacts between Türkiye and the other Middle Eastern countries. Let us not forget that the seeds of discord that the Western states sowed in the Middle East after the First World War have affected us very much too. When Arab is said, what always comes to the minds of the new Turkish generations is the Bedouin tribes, tools of the British, who stabbed the Turkish armies in the back; and when Turk is said, what Arabs remember most is what the Unionist Cemal Pasha did in Syria. Both notions are wrong; they were invented by the British to make the two sides enemies of each other. If we want the Arabs to be rid of this wrong notion, we too must erase all traces of the Arab hostility that the Western-puppet intellectuals in our country are trying to implant systematically. Let us not forget that at the foundation of the propaganda of Arab hostility lies hostility to Islam; there is an effort to make enemies of the two great masses of the Islamic world living side by side and thus to enslave each of them one by one to the Westerners. Relations of knowledge, culture and art among the Middle Eastern states will help all of us distinguish friend from enemy. In this field too, Türkiye's taking the initiative should be regarded as a requirement of a sound foreign policy.

Shall we be the tail of the European Common Market, or the head of the Middle East? Shall we perform the garbage-collection service of a civilization that is and will remain hostile to us, or shall we lead our own civilization? The Turkish intellectual must make a decision on this immediately."