Turkey's Magazines of Ideas

"Journals are like schools of ideas," the late Cemil Meriç had said, but not without adding: "They are schools that train their writers before their readers, media in which ideas truly flourish most freely, and, with their readers, like independent personalities who meet at a certain appointment. They have to appear when the time comes, because they have an appointment, to a greater or lesser degree, with a certain readership. Between the group of readers and writers who meet at this appointment there is also a tacit contract about what will be written and what will be read. Two-sided loyalty to this contract is among the important factors that determine the lifespan of journals."

To see what idea journals have contributed to Türkiye, it is worth looking at the journals in which everyone who has come to the fore in politics, academia, or the media in some way wrote, contributed, or was nourished in the past. Journals train people, but they appear as if an overflow of what is inside people who have somehow already matured, whose thoughts, ideas, excitements, and feelings have ripened up to a point. They appear in just this way when their time comes, they have to appear, as if trying to make an appointment with their readers.

The "Symposium on Türkiye's Idea Journals: Historical, Current, and Future Perspectives," organized in Ankara by Muhafazakâr Düşünce (Conservative Thought) Journal, offered a very fine tour of the horizon of what functions idea journalism has had in thought and politics in Türkiye. The symposium, held in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and the International Academics Association, was organized by Serhat Buhari Aytekin with extremely professional care and approach. Those who attended the symposium had the chance to tour a fine exhibition featuring the first issues and introductions of idea journals that have appeared over Türkiye's last eighty years. At the same time, many journals still being published had the chance to meet participants with stands they set up in the hall.

In Bu Ülke, Cemil Meriç also describes journals as "the fortresses of free thought" and continues as follows: "The book was too serious, the newspaper too irresponsible. The book is like excitement in a tuxedo, like mummified reflection. The book is outside time, while the newspaper is the moment itself. The book lives together with you, grows together with you. The newspaper is finished once read. The journal is perhaps vagabond but fresh and warm reflection. The book is often the work of a single person, the echo of a single thought; the journal is that of a community of minds. A journal is a generation's testament; its testament, or rather its message. A journal that shuts down is a lost war, a rout, or suicide... The fate of journals is a sad one... Most live a season, like flowers. The luckiest address a generation. Old journals are a cemetery that has no visitors. A drawer whose key is lost. No one wonders what memories have permeated its pages, what hopes, what excitements are hidden there."

The finest descriptions ever made of journals. I had quoted these sentences before on the occasion of the Journals Fair(s) organized in Istanbul by the late Asım Gültekin, and I have quoted them again as the occasion arose. Compared with the book fairs we are quite familiar with, that fair undoubtedly saw an existing gap and filled it very nicely. I hope it continues.

In the opening speech of the symposium, the first-hand anecdotes and assessments of Prof. Dr. Vedat Bilgin and Prof. Dr. Kurtuluş Kayalı about the relationship between journals, intellectual life, and politics were among the symposium's finest presentations in their own right. While touring the exhibition, Bilgin gave a complete display of memory and journal history, naming every journal he came across with its dates and the names who had contributed to it.

It is in the nature of idea journals to form circles and milieus of friends in thought. How far do those milieus today fulfill their old functions within our new sociology? It is not hard to see that they have not remained in the same activity and the same nature. For one thing, there is no longer forming a membership around a journal and gathering around it as before. The new digital publishing world allows people not to remain tied to a single source of nourishment. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Kurtuluş Kayalı voiced something that everyone who has long worked in this field suffers from. Idea journals have evolved toward becoming academic refereed journals. This too is, of course, a development that makes us ask whether it is good or bad. The fact is that Türkiye is living through times very different from those in which idea journals of great impact were published. This is, of course, a development not limited to Türkiye. But with universities that have reached 208 and a university student population approaching 10 percent of society, society's cultural and intellectual sociology has been changed wholesale. With more than 100 sociology departments, nearly 100 philosophy departments, as many faculties of theology, psychology, history, political science, and communication, and the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students they train, a very great expansion and growth is indicated. Tens of thousands of academics today produce articles, even if with the motivation of academic promotion. No one can claim, of course, that there is no relationship between academia and ideas. Intellectual stances and differences are reflected in academic interest in some way, so that political tendencies manifest themselves in these interests.

Can we say that the function of journals in their aspects of forming an intellectual milieu, circle, even community, has come to a complete end? Without doubt, despite all scientific advances, despite their education, do we not see that instead of drawing closer to one another people have on the contrary drawn further apart? What are the distances of academics who never speak to one another, if not the very feelings and ideological attitudes they feed on, which are not scientific at all or are, in a sense, pre-scientific? And why does the rising and developing academic level not reduce these ideological attitudes? Where we arrive starting from this question is the unchanging side of human nature.

At the symposium, we gave a presentation titled "Islamism as Tezkire" about Tezkire journal, which has been published since 1991. Tezkire conveys that the origin of Islamism, as a remembered truth, a universal stance, cannot be limited to this country or this time. Its story is told in a summarizing and quite knowledgeable manner by Dr. M. Veysel Karataş of Siirt University in the latest issue of Muhafazakâr Düşünce.

At the symposium, the presentations by Zeynep Çağlayan İçener, Şule Perinçek, Fahri Atasoy, Alim Yılmaz, Ahmet Yıldız, Hediyetullah Aydeniz, Hamit Emrah Beriş, Mahmut H. Akın, Metin Uçar, and Mustafa Altunoğlu, some about the journals they contributed to and some about Turkish journalism, were illuminating.