Another sociologist in the prayer ground… In memory of Vehbi Başer

I knew about his condition. He had been under treatment for a long time, his condition occasionally worsening; he had been on my mind for ages, and I kept saying, today or tomorrow, now or in a little while, let me call him, ask how he is, and if we have any claims on each other, let us forgive them, when the news came. My first reaction when I heard it, my reaction to myself, was "ah, one must not be late; in every case the caravan moves on; with our burdens that we regard as so important, with our preoccupations, with our worldly acquisitions, none of which we see with certain sight to be of any use at all, we are left on the mountaintops."

Our valued friend Prof. Dr. Vehbi Başer, whom I had known since the early nineties, with whom whenever we met we spoke well, cutting to the heart of the matter, and got along well, whom I knew "as good," has completed his sorrowful journey in this world and departed to the abode of permanence.

A human being, as long as he lives, is an unfinished text. This text is not completed before the person dies, because new things are always being added to it, and its end, that is, what its outcome will be, is determined in part by the moment of death. A full stop is put there, and from that point the earlier life takes shape as a whole. Some people, in the period they live, can determine their own text without leaving much room for the intervention of those who came before them.

On the other hand, there are those who say that a person's text goes on being written after he dies. There are people whose legacy is reevaluated every day after death and does more work than their influence while alive. If he himself wrote texts, if he produced a work, the different interpretations of this work at different times can turn a person after his death too into a living figure, subject to change.

In the latest edition of my book "Türk Sosyoloji Tarihine Eleştirel Katkı" I added a section on some sociologists, with assessments I made precisely looking from the musalla after their deaths. It is a list built up, in part, over the years. From the sum of the assessments I made for Ulus Baker, Hasan Ünal Nalbantoğlu, Mübeccel B. Kıray, Şerif Mardin, Hüsamettin Arslan, Fuat Sezgin and Mehmet Genç, who passed away in the 15-16 years after the first edition of the book was published, an interesting file had formed. In these pieces, which I gathered under "Reading Sociology from the Musalla," I tried to assess them in the state in which, after their deaths, their ledgers of deeds, thought and science had been closed. Of course the ledger of deeds is not something easy to close for a writer, a thinker. Ongoing charity is a far more meaningful quality for a writer, a scientist, a thinker, because of the works he has produced.

Now there is a sociologist at the musalla again, but not only a sociologist: there is also a friend, an intellectual, a man of a cause, an academic whose work is visible in the students he raised.

Our first acquaintance, if I remember correctly, took place in the early nineties, in 1992, during a visit to his home in Bahçelievler with Ercan Şen, with whom we published the journal Tezkire at our Vadi Yayınları. There were others too, Alev Erkilet of course. In a deep first conversation, partly about the content and planning of Tezkire, but above all about the course of Türkiye and the world, and later quite a lot about the ontological possibilities of correctly understanding the Qur'an in our age, and about modernism and postmodernism, I remember saying "exactly, my kind of head," declaring my intention of a friendship that would continue with him.

At one point in that conversation he turned to all of us and asked a vital question: "How are things between you and God these days?" In the context of the conversation it had struck me as very meaningful. Indeed, when do we turn back and check on ourselves by asking ourselves this question? Yet the whole of life depended on keeping things good with God, to whom we belong, from whom we came, and to whom we will return at the end of the road. Are we talking with Him? That is, do we read the Qur'an as if speaking with Him, do we feel Him as the guide of our life? To live with God, to feel His companionship constantly, to be in constant communication with Him. It was a question with which, in his own way, Vehbi Hoca invited people in his conversations to self-confrontation, and which he himself constantly confronted. Later I have thought that this question probably gave considerable direction to his theoretical or empirical sociological work on secularization.

At the meeting we held as a kind of reckoning up to that point on the 12th issue of the Tezkire Journal, he asked the same question again in different words. We could take the projections drawn about being worldly and Turkish as a kind of answer we gave to "the coming of the world to us," but according to him, "there is also the coming of God. This coming is concealed within every coming, above every coming, and a coming toward us with every coming. As Muslims turn increasingly to a more worldly and mundane perspective, they are forced to grapple with the coming of tyrants or barbarians instead of the coming of God."

An attentiveness that constantly checks the relationship with God, a heart and mind constantly open to God's coming, His verses, His warnings, His messages, formed a field of concern about where one should look for what has been lost, both in the Qur'an and in the world we live in.

Vehbi Hoca's sociological practice could mostly find a way of expressing itself in oral settings of conversation. His lessons and the theses he supervised, his long conversations with the students he advised, were among his characteristic features. By never remaining at an official teacher-student distance with them, by opening his home, he at the same time turned academic production into a family production. By greatly nourishing his students' horizons through these conversations, and by the adventures of thought he undertook to bring out the truths within them, he came closer to the Socratic tradition of the academy. From another angle, as he himself described it in one of his writings on some occasion, he was a person kneaded with the warmth of a "familiar world," in a small provincial town, made up of familiar faces.

Writing, within this familiarity, was an environment that postponed and deferred speech more than necessary. For Vehbi Hoca speech was the sharing of a truth captured sincerely here and now. Thus both because of his conversation-centered personality and because of his scrupulousness, known to be excessively perfectionist, he wrote very little. Indeed, the unceasing troubles and tensions in his professional life, from the 28 February process that took place after he moved from Hacettepe University to Kırıkkale University under Beşir Atalay's rectorship, were also quite decisive in the formation of his own text.

In an article on the employment of sociologists he had said, "This is Türkiye, and academics regard as academic autonomy the privilege of occupying themselves only with what their own aristocratic rank requires and of spending, in this pursuit, the social resources provided to them as much as their own lives. Let us then ask in Durkheim's words: 'Which society has the luxury of founding institutions to finance forever human activities that produce no social benefit?'" and I had thought that he had thereby opened the doors to the best self-criticism that could come from inside the academic world in Türkiye.

A considerable number of his articles were published on the Fikir Coğrafyası site. Quite a lot could be said about his contributions to sociology through these articles and his other works. Compiling and collecting these words, and doing after him the task he was too lazy to do himself, would be an achievement that should not be left missing for sociology.

I wish Vehbi Hoca God's mercy, and offer condolences to his family and all who loved him. May his abode be paradise and his station be exalted.