Is my country a property to be left in the hands of whoever seizes it?

"My country" has lately become a thoroughly overused expression. It is a weapon we reach for whenever we voice all our negative feelings toward politics, the government, the opposition, or someone else (in the trendy phrase, the "other"). It is a lap we throw ourselves into in the face of every situation that disturbs us, robs us of sleep, irritates us. It is a phrase over which we lament, grieve or snap whenever we dislike something: my country. Of course, an "oh" is then attached in front of it: "oh, my country." Look what has become of it in the hands of the ungrateful. In the hands of incompetent administrators and governments who have ruined the country. Or "oh, my country, does this opposition befit you?"

A secularist lady, for instance, is plunged into deep sorrow when she sees headscarved women who have taken the KPSS exam and reacts like this: "Oh, my beautiful country... What a pity... We could not protect our country and our state from this darkness!" Here there is the additional matter of the country's beauty, but there are others, the "others," who spoil this beauty: there are headscarved women, there is their invasion, even their occupation. When, for example, did this secularist auntie shut the whole country up for herself, when did this country become exclusively "hers"?

Another person, in an argument, reacts like this to someone who is a citizen of the Republic of Turkey like himself, whom he has, probably because of his piety, written off out of hand as a "misogynist": "Isn't it forbidden for you to wander around here? This place is a suicide bomber's den, it's my country, the place for woman-haters like you is the place of the Arabs. Go on, go save Gaza with your prayers, recite a hatim or whatever!"

Someone who says "my country" can have the audacity to see people in this country who have a sensitivity toward Gaza, who pray, as strangers to this country. He does not see that Gaza was officially a part of this land 107 years ago, and that the war its people are waging heroically today makes it in a real sense the owner of this country, this homeland. Nor that the resistance the people of Gaza display is a national-resistance movement, a Kuvayımilliye, being waged in order to leave this homeland truly as "our country." Perhaps he does see it, and is in fact on the other side of precisely this war.

And there is the notion of "my country" in the head of the person who, in recent weeks in Istanbul, knife in hand, threatened high-level investor Arab customers eating in a restaurant, shouting and bellowing: "This is my country, damn it, let your tough guy come, I'm a Turk, a Turk. I don't know any Arab-marab." It is the dense smoke of the "my country" he has made his property and shut up in his head. He really does love his country, but he loves it with hatred, with hostility, with selfishness. This must be what an obsessive love is. A love that, by what he did, inflicts on the country he loves a harm that the occupying Greek and the Englishman could not inflict in the years of war.

A love of country that kills the country, consumes it, turns it barren, makes it a hell for others. He does not know that at least 5-6 million people in this country are already Arabs, and that if we had not withdrawn from the Palestine front, today, together with all their Arab populations, Syria and Palestine too would be owners of this country. As we said, my country is smoke over my head. In a rush of love and excitement, with scheming and trickery, Turkey is once again being whipped up and dragged toward a point where it will harm itself. At this speed, whoever is in front of him, whatever comes to his mouth, he shouts in the language of social media: Get out of my country! I don't want you in my country! I don't want Syrians in my country! I don't want refugees in my country!

Who are you? Who gives you the right to speak as a subject on behalf of a great country in which 85 million live and which has been entrusted by our ancestors with its philosophy, its faith, its traditions? What if the person you are addressing can claim a greater right than you to speak on behalf of this country?

And the funniest part is that those who came to this country as refugees a hundred years ago, especially those who have shown this country and its people nothing but harm and hostility, play the "my country" card against those who came to this country 1400 years ago with conquests on the path of i'lâ-yi kelimetullah, is it not?

My country is mine, not someone else's. It belongs to no one, it belongs to me, and it is a place where everyone other than me must know their place and mind their step. Sometimes this "me" can be a broader imagined type of person. A race, a form of community, a social circle, an ideological group.

In fact, does the person who begins to speak with "my country" in order to drive others out, to bear grudges against others, know what he is saying, whom he is speaking of when he says "I"? Is the one who says "I," let alone "my," aware of himself? What do we really have in this world that we can call "mine"? What is it a sign of when those who are unaware that everything has been entrusted to us, given by God as provision, as a trust and as a test, who do not know that even their own breath does not belong to them, who are not sure that they can exhale the breath they have taken in or inhale the breath they have exhaled, with great pretension claim such a spiritual being as their property and say "mine," let alone try to close themselves over it in order to shield it from others?

How aware, for instance, is the person who says "mine" of this country, of how this country was made into a homeland? What price has an outlook that sees this country as nothing but a piece of land paid to this country that it should have come to own it? Does merely having been born on this soil give one the right to say "mine" to this country in such an exclusionary and appropriating way?

Do we belong to a country, do we own a country? If we own a country, what price have we paid for it? When Mehmet Akif says in the Independence March, "Do not pass over the places you tread, calling them mere soil; recognize them / Think of the thousands lying beneath you without shrouds / You are the son of a martyr; do not hurt him, it is a pity for your forefather / Do not give away this paradise of a homeland, even if you were to gain the whole world," he uses the concept of "homeland" (vatan) rather than "country." In fact, the shift from homeland to country also expresses a shift that has led, to some extent, to the loss of the concept's spiritual meaning. For a human being it does not matter whether this or that place is a country, but the homeland matters.

This country is nobody's father's property. This country is not something that, for us, can be swapped with other countries. It is a homeland, a native land, a dar al-Islam. Its foundation is its call to prayer, moaning with the testimonies of faith from its minarets. All the meaning contained in those calls to prayer is trust, security and responsibility. One always feels indebted to this country. Today, those who go around terrorizing with "my country" can, at the slightest problem, count themselves among the blessed by saying, "You can't live in this country anymore, this country has lost me, Europe has won." For those who say "my country" without feeling any responsibility, any debt, without expending any labor, thinking only of their rights, of what they will gain, what they will take, what they understand by country is only a piece of land that they exploit as parasites. Yet this country, before and beyond being a piece of land, is a homeland watered with the blood of martyrs, a refuge for the oppressed throughout history, a seat in the struggle for i'lâ-yi kelimetullah, in the struggle against servitude to fellow human beings.