"Say: Do not consider your becoming Muslim a favour to me! Rather…"

On the day the 11-year revolutionary process that would end 54 years of Assad oppression in Syria began, the 7th Religious Council was meeting in Ankara. Judging by its content, falling on the same day is a great and meaningful coincidence. One of the subjects President Erdoğan raised in the Council's opening speech was those who try to produce a Turkishness without Islam. "For a thousand years on this land we have been living together, side by side, in peace, under the universal banner of Islamic brotherhood, in the cool shade of the same call to prayer. Those who want to disrupt the unity and peace in our geography are attacking directly this center of faith, this cement, that is, our belief. We are witnessing that attacks on Islam and Muslims hide themselves behind masks such as atheism, deism, shamanism. Whatever the aim of the campaigns once run through the sedition of 'Alawism without Ali', the same imperialist aspirations lie behind the frenzy of 'Turkishness without Islam' brought up recently... Everyone with an atom of faith in their breast is obliged to be vigilant against the enemies of Islam under the mask of racism and to struggle against this scourge. What keeps the individual, the family, our nation and our homeland standing is, as also expressed in our National Anthem, the understanding of 'I have a frontier like my faith-filled breast,'" said Erdoğan, and at this very point of his words he uttered his decisive sentences, saying: "If there is Islam, there is the Turk. If there is Islam, there is the Kurd, there is the Arab. If there is Islam, there is family, there is morality, there is decency and modesty. If there is Islam, there is the flag, there is the homeland, there is freedom. Above all, if there is Islam, there is Türkiye."

Of course, as might be expected, these words disturbed quite a bit precisely those who pursue the cause of Turkishness without Islam. They immediately set about proving how Turkishness has existed on the stage of history without Islam and how great its glory is. Contrary to what Erdoğan said, they tried to prove that without the Turks Islam could not have existed. Fatih Altaylı immediately called the "sheikh of history" İlber Ortaylı to duty and set about having him say how much the Turks have served Islam. As if Erdoğan were denying the unique services the Turks have rendered to Islam. Unable to restrain himself, he also had him repeat the opposite rote line: "On the contrary, we cannot know what would have become of Islam without the Turks."

It is truly not easy to deal with those who define Turkishness as they like through their own anxieties and pretend to defend it. To discuss how much Turkishness, what kind of Turkishness, what relation to the real identity and history of the Turks remains in what they defend, especially once it is separated and abstracted from Islam, you need to know, besides history as much as you do, a little about language, discourse and political philosophy as well. Because one must also know how history is constructed today under the influence of politics, through ordinary or official ideological discourses. And the dimensions of this business in terms of history and social engineering. Though to whom are we saying this, is it not to those very engineers themselves?

Turkishness without Islam is in fact not a new project. Beginning at the end of the 19th century and accelerating in the early 20th century, there have been those who tried to conceive of Turkishness as separate from Islam, to define Turkishness as a pure race and as a lead actor that has shaped world history in this form. Accordingly, as a result of a political movement that worked to tear the whole Ottoman state away from the Middle Eastern geography and squeeze it into Anatolia, it also succeeded. None of the leading names of the movement were Turks, and the project did not aim to serve the Turks in the first place. One of the most important names of Turkism, for example, is Moiz Kohen; you can work out the rest yourselves. He is a Zionist Jew and, together with Kemalism, tried to structure Turkishness as a separate religion alternative to Islam. He tried to invent a host of identity traits that the Turks had never known or recognized up to that time, to produce a new Turkishness, and to teach their Muslim children how to be Turks. Don't we see better today that the project served Zionism entirely by creating distances between Turks and Arabs?

Those who are disturbed by Erdoğan's saying at the Religious Council that there can be no Turkishness without Islam and who set about listing the services the Turks have rendered to Islam need not bother. Neither Erdoğan denies this, nor does anyone with a sense of fairness. Arabs and other peoples today appreciate it abundantly. Let me repeat here, if you like, a dialogue I once had with a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family. At one point in the long conversation we had with the person in question in Riyadh, the prince said: "After serving Islam for a long time, the Arabs were subjected to the sluggishness and heaviness that come with sedentarization, but God sent, just in time, the Turks, who carried the advantages of nomadic dynamism and sacrifice, and from that moment the Turks truly bore the banner of Islam. After the First World War the two turned their backs on each other. Turkey appeared to the Arabs as a country that had made its choice in favor of Europe, yet the 'return of Turkey to the region' under the administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over the last ten years is being met with tremendous excitement and great goodwill among the Arab peoples, especially among the Saudi people. Against many of the troubles the Arab world is exposed to today, Turkey can lead a recovery in the whole Islamic world, and indeed it is doing so..."

This anecdote, which I experienced 13 years ago, is an ordinary perception for the whole Arab world. In the time that has passed, we can say that this perception has been reinforced still further by Turkey's many initiatives under Erdoğan's leadership, by its service to Muslims, and especially by the revolution taking place in Syria these days. Is Erdoğan, who has led this entry onto the stage of the Turks, whose very name had been forgotten by nearly a century of the politics of Turkishness without Islam, doing all this with the identity of a Turkishness without Islam, or precisely as a Muslim Turk?

The Turks served Islam throughout history and carried it somewhere, but they earned great honor by this and they themselves came to exist by this means. The same goes for the Arabs and for the Kurds. The existence that these three peoples have shown throughout history in the name of civilization, humanity and history has been possible only with Islam. A Turk without Islam is not nonexistent, but just try to find him on the stage of civilization. An Arab without Islam is not nonexistent either, but try to find him too on the stage of humanity and civilization. A Kurd is not nonexistent either, but try to find him too in terms of his contribution to humanity.

None of the historical examples that Ortaylı tries to put forward in the name of Turkishness without Islam has the slightest value. What is the Turkishness of those in those examples, what are their contributions to history and humanity, let alone to our present existence? He seems either to have entirely missed, or deliberately not understood, the larger context in which Erdoğan said these words. As he persists in this thesis, his state is no different from that of the Arab Bedouins in Surat al-Hujurat who claimed to have given strength and dignity to Muslims, to the Prophet, because they had become Muslim. "They count it as a favor to you that they have accepted Islam. Say: Do not count your Islam as a favor to me. Rather, it is Allah who has conferred a favor upon you by guiding you to the faith."

History is not the chronicler's transmission of a series of events. To read historical events correctly, one needs a separate eye of conscience as well.