If only Ziya Gökalp of Diyarbakır had been listened to…

In these days when the 101st year of the Republic is being marked, it may be possible for the debates conducted on the relationship between Kurds and Turks, with references also to Ziya Gökalp, to release many questions that have for 101 years been clogged in "unthought" domains. One of the suspicions or perceptions that, frequently repeated amid advertising, media and celebration excitement during the Republic celebrations, has become something that can never be "thought" about and can no longer be questioned, is that the history of this nation supposedly began 101 years ago. The truth is that the Republic did not found this nation; rather, a Republic page was opened within this nation's history of more than a thousand years.

Yes, the Republic is 101 years old, but this nation has a history much more deeply rooted than 101 years, and a far broader and more universal identity. A second matter related to this: with the Republic this nation did not grow or develop beyond what it was before; on the contrary, when considered together with what came before, it is a matter of retreating, having been made to settle for a part of Anatolia even smaller than the National Pact borders, from a great world state spread over three continents.

Of course, this great withdrawal is a great retreat, the result of being defeated at the end of a great world war. With this defeat, in a homeland saved as the result of a struggle waged in desperation in the name of protecting what was left in hand, the meaning of constantly building a joy and exultation of victory upon what could be saved, without ever dwelling on the losses, was never examined. As Muhammed Arkoun put it, this too has been delimited as an "unthinkable" domain. This too has ensured that there was never any dwelling on why and how, and through whose negligence, heedlessness, guidance and even betrayal, what was lost was lost.

The religious and political brotherhood of Kurds and Turks also did not begin with the Republic. On the contrary, a problem began to arise soon after the proclamation of the Republic, indeed soon after the death of Ziya Gökalp, who spoke of the religious and historical dimensions of this brotherhood, following the new definition of nation that was entered into.

Although it has always been debated whether there was Kurdishness in Ziya Gökalp's lineage, this is not important at all. Even if he were Kurdish, the meaning he attributed to Turkishness is a meaning beyond race, and he was trying to work out the mortar that would hold this country together. That mortar could in no way be race. As Taha Akyol also pointed out in his article on "Commemorating Ziya Gökalp," for him race is a subject of "fenn-i mevaşi" (animal science). Within the new definition of nation he envisioned for Turkey, Turks, Kurds, and people of other peoples could very well form a meaningful nation within the integrity of a political body. With this proposal he could in fact not be considered to have moved very far from the Ottoman way of thinking and conception of the nation, and Islam was still able to fulfill its function as a unifying, fusing mortar for this nation.

He was someone who could have sounded the alarm about the sociological consequences of the road entered into around the time of his death (the abolition of the Caliphate, subsequently the declaration that the state has no religion and is secular, the change of alphabet, the banning of the Ottoman alphabet and Arabic script). For these practices considerably hindered the formation of a healthy integrity of the social and political body in Turkey. They created distances that are hard to close not only between the religious and the state but also between Turks and Kurds.

As Akyol also rightly points out, with Gökalp's death the sociological reason in the founding of the Republic of Turkey vanished, and the Anthropological reason came into play instead, which sought to find the lost mortar in race, in blood, in the skull. Afet İnan's anthropological studies at the Faculty of Language, History and Geography set out to seek Turkishness in skull measurements. Thousands of skulls were exhumed from graves, and through measurements, attempts were made to determine the characteristics of the Turkish race. Even Mimar Sinan, who had exalted Turkishness incomparably with the masterpieces he produced throughout history, had his skull taken from his grave to have his racial origin questioned, studies were carried out on it, and it was never put back.

This reason could not arrive at the scientific characteristics of the Turkish race from those skull studies. For Anatolia has been a community of peoples fused together for thousands of years, and race was not something so easily made a subject of science. It is quite clear that we were living in the age of races invented by the craze blowing from Europe, and that people would be occupied with it for a while.

Later, they gave up basing Turkishness on race and began to base it on citizenship, but something had by now been broken. What would suffer was the brotherhood of Turks and Kurds, which found its most beautiful expression in the very discourse of Ziya Gökalp. The tragic side of the matter is that the great majority of those who interpreted Turkishness in a way that created distance with the Kurds were not Turks. One of those who did the theorizing of Turkism through writings and activities under the name Tekin Alp, for instance, was the Jew Moiz Kohen. What expectations could Moiz Kohen, who was also a Zionist Jew and who gave his full support after the founding of Israel, and others, most of them Zionist Jews like himself, have had of a Turkism that would drive such a wedge between Turks and Kurds?

This too is yet another "unthought" subject of our Republican history and its theo-politics.

At the point we have reached today, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his death, remembering the religious and political approach of brotherhood of Ziya Gökalp of Diyarbakır, later suspended, is, from whichever side one looks at it, very beneficial.