"Our" newspaper: Yeni Şafak

30years ago the newspaper Yeni Şafak came into our lives like a dawn whose birth I had been eagerly awaiting in the twilight days of Türkiye. The mid-nineties were a period in which Muslims in Türkiye had built up a considerable intellectual, urban and political accumulation and were looking for every opportunity to express themselves. Publishing houses were publishing books feverishly, translating and publishing books from Arabic, English and French; journals stood out as schools of thought, as very lively addresses of publishing life with quite high circulations, and very brilliant names were growing up in all these media, coming to terms with 70 years of heedlessness and error, even treason, and opening a wide space for the possibility of a new world and a new Türkiye. These spaces opened up extended into the spaces of others in Türkiye, differences were discovered, dialogues took place, and from these dialogues sails were set toward very different thoughts and hopes. In all this picture, a daily newspaper was almost awaited as a voice in which all that accumulation would be gathered, nourished and expressed, or which would translate its expressions. Had we had a newspaper of our own, everything would have been very different. In fact, old experiences, somewhat relegated to the realm of nostalgia, also created a demand for a daily newspaper looking to the future. The newspaper Yenidevir, launched in addition to Milli Gazete, which was far from adequately expressing the Muslim intellectual accumulation of Türkiye, had done a very effective job toward the end of the seventies. That newspaper, in which I first encountered the names of İsmet Özel, Rasim Özdenören, Cahit Zarifoğlu and Erdem Bayazıt, was for me more than a newspaper.

In the years I was studying in the middle section of the Siirt Imam-Hatip High School, whatever motivation we had been given, we would go to the newsagent every day with our few pennies of pocket money and wait for and buy the day's paper. We waited because in those years the newspaper reached the city only around the afternoon prayer time. We waited because the paper that arrived would pull us together that day, would relieve our loneliness, would gather us in one place. I remember the years when I took that newspaper and read it as if drinking water. Cahit Zarifoğlu's column, in which he published readers' letters and made comments on poems, and the other columns, and Cemil Meriç's full-page pieces, on Ali Shariati, on Edward Said's Orientalism: The Discovery Arm of Colonialism, and on Ibn Khaldun, the sole star in his own sky, which would later enter Kırk Ambar, even if they were somewhat beyond us, came to us like a signal flare pointing to the direction in which we should proceed. Above all the writings of İsmet Özel, who had found in this medium the way of Speaking in a Difficult Time. For a few friends and me they fell like a light on the dark years leading toward the coup or just after the coup, and kept us within a belonging.

After September 12, like many other things, Yenidevir ceased publication after a while. Its ceasing publication felt as if a friend of serious weight in our lives was leaving us to our loneliness. We had returned to books and journals. But the place of a daily newspaper was entirely different. A year or two later, when we suddenly saw that atmosphere recaptured in Milli Gazete, which Fehmi Koru had taken over the management of, we clung to it, but it did not last very long. It was as though we had been deprived of the strong, hopeful voice that spoke to us in the hard times of September 12, that we could listen to, that represented us and gathered us. When, in my first year studying Sociology at METU, more or less the same team began publishing the newspaper Zaman, we felt we were pulling together again. It did not last long: six months later, when the newspaper was seized by the Gülenists through an internal coup, the paper's language, harmony and spirit changed all at once. 1995 was a time when a great deal of water had passed under the bridge, when Türkiye's accumulation no longer fit within its container, and in terms of this accumulation the matter of a daily newspaper had become a matter of longing. But there was still no capital to take on the financing of such a newspaper, and those that existed either could not organize well enough or the discipline to carry out this work could not be secured. But the longing and the expectation continued. Turgut Özal had died, and under the July 2 Sivas massacre and the accusations of reactionism, the Islamic segment was deprived of the means to express itself. There was a rising Islamic movement in civil society, a Welfare Party marching step by step toward power in democratic politics, and, against all of this, the rule-defying, bigoted resistance of a status quo trying to preserve its 70 years of acquisitions. Yeni Şafak was a spokesman of the society's demand for freedom, which had been restricted since 1950, but at the same time the herald of the by-now inevitable birth of this movement. The dawn was breaking, and this new dawn would be the herald of this nation's deliverance from the contempt, the restriction and the oppression it had been subjected to for 70 years, and it was. But at the same time, through a daily newspaper, this social movement in a sense also fed a shared perception of the world, a sense of identity and belonging. Perhaps not in a very rigid and harsh way, but somehow this feeling formed among those who read Yeni Şafak.

In between came the February 28 process. The oppression of the headscarf, the oppression of the coefficient took place. Against all these coup-making Kemalist waves, Yeni Şafak stood like a shelter, a medium that, beyond consolation, inspired and represented resistance. In fact, in those years it opened its doors to many libertarian writers who had been fired from their newspapers. These opened a completely different horizon to the paper's readers, broadened the paper's intellectual horizon and enriched its thought. While in opposition it also saw oppression, but Yeni Şafak represented the noblest, most dignified form of resistance and opposition. Then, when the movement it belonged to and represented came to power, Yeni Şafak took on an entirely different responsibility. Though, even with this movement in power, it continued for at least another 15 years to be in opposition to the system and the deep state. This always gave it an entirely different merit.

In 2005, almost ten years ago, I began writing for Yeni Şafak, of which I had been, from its very beginning, a never-failing reader. From that day to this I have written, and am writing, without ever missing a day and without ever taking leave. In my own home, in my own medium. Yeni Şafak was never for me one among many places where one could write. I have always felt myself part of a family with its management, its writers, all its veterans and its readers, first of all the Albayrak brothers, who owned this newspaper at the hardest time and who continue to publish it by selflessly shouldering all its material burden. In this sense Yeni Şafak is not just any newspaper, but "our" newspaper, which truly represents a certain accumulation with its mission, its vision and its belonging.

From the revival of the past toward the building of the future, in line with its mission toward a better understanding and living of that Book, I wish all the members of my family many more 30 years.