"Only what was lived and written" over 70 years

Beşir Atalay, one of the founders of the AK Party, a former Minister of the Interior, State Minister and Deputy Prime Minister who has held an important place in recent Turkish politics, recently published his memoirs "Dünden Bugüne Anılar" (Memories from Yesterday to Today) under the title "Sadece Yaşayıp Yazdıklarım" (Only What I Lived and Wrote).

I had actually heard that Beşir Hoca was writing his memoirs and was impatiently waiting to read them as soon as possible. Born in 1947, the Hoca's life story, even before politics and from the day it began, passed through the channels in which Turkey's most important political, cultural and intellectual veins flow; he is a figure who witnessed important events and developments and was himself an actor in those very events and developments.

Indeed, Beşir Hoca's life is a résumé in which the movement that would later emerge as the AK Party and evolve to a certain point can best be summarized. His memoirs are a genuine documentary that lays out this résumé with all its examples, its intellectual and political figures, and its attitudes. That is why the Hoca cannot be considered to have displayed modesty by putting the prefix "only" before what he lived and wrote. That "only" is someone who has lived right in the middle of the whole story Turkey has lived through for 70 years.

In two articles I wrote in recent days about our recent history, I made an observation that the most recent history is the darkest history. Interestingly, we can say that today, with regard to a much more recent history, we face exactly the opposite advantage. Perhaps in the early years of the Republic, people could not set out their memories so freely. The state itself, the law and the Takrir-i Sükun (Law on the Maintenance of Order) could put obstacles in the way of setting them out. That is why hard-to-believe measures could be taken to ensure that only a single narration, a single account, was valid regarding events that had happened only yesterday. Yet it need not be so. On the contrary, history can be subjected to somewhat sounder evaluations precisely when the sum of the different testimonies of people who lived an event in that period about the same event is available.

Beşir Hoca's testimony is very important not merely for the tabloid-like side of his experiences in the founding of the AK Party or within the party administrations and governments, but chiefly because it can show the historical, political and sociological conditions that gave birth to this party and where it came from and where it has been evolving. What he recounts about the party's founding is in itself of the value of a separate historical documentary.

In the founding of the AK Party, in its philosophy and in its first programs and practices, the adoption as a style of politics of social research and sociological assessments that closely and deeply follow the pulse of the people undoubtedly owes a great deal to Erdoğan's great sensitivity and open ear, as well as to Beşir Hoca, who was at the heart of the process. His work at the State Planning Organization (DPT), which required him to work with Turgut Özal, and his long years of experience in sociological field research played a very important role in this process. Through the work he did at ANAR, which he himself founded, he not only followed the pulse of public opinion but also presented a visionary view of Turkey's sociological change and transformation, and this view was always directly supported by field data. The political processes that led to the closure of the Welfare Party and then of the Virtue Party founded after it, and their effects on the political demands and expectations of the people, were followed coolly and with scientific analyses through ANAR. As a result of these processes, ANAR, acting as a think tank, served virtually as the kitchen of the AK Party's founding.

The work he did in this founding, in his "Dünden Bugüne Anılar," is enough on its own to show how important sociological analyses and social research are for the success of a political movement.

Here I would like to pause the account of Beşir Atalay's memoirs and include a memory of my own with him. In 2010, when he was Minister of the Interior and I was President of the Strategic Thinking Institute, we invited him to the Arab-Turkish Congress of Social Sciences (ATCOSS) that we organized. Actually, not because of his post as "Minister of the Interior," but entirely because of his social science formation and the position of an elder brother that he represents for Muslim social scientists in Turkey. The astonishment of the social scientists, most of whom had come from places dominated by mukhabarat regimes such as Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, was worth seeing. The astonishment was generally at seeing, in a social science congress, giving a quite intellectual speech, the profile of an Interior Minister whom they were used to seeing as the boss of police headquarters notorious for their torture, unsolved murders and every kind of human rights violation. Thank God, Beşir Hoca attended not only the ATCOSS congress in Ankara but also its later meetings in Cairo, Jordan, Istanbul and Morocco, making very valuable contributions. I can readily say that even those meetings played a very important role in the rapprochement between Turkish and Arab intellectuals that would develop later, and in the construction of a common mental world.

Of course, we can also readily say that the initiatives Beşir Hoca put forward at the head of his post as Interior Minister displayed the level closest to, and most ideal for, the AK Party's founding philosophy. Most of the initiatives that distinguished the AK Party from previous parties, or later, in terms of human rights, democratization, good treatment of citizens, transparent police stations and citizen-centered service, certainly bear Beşir Hoca's signature as well as Erdoğan's.

These are cross-sections from the later parts of Beşir Hoca's life story, which he has not yet included in his memoirs. But from the lines and cross-sections he did include in his memoirs, one can also readily and at first hand see in particular where Islamic thought and movement in Turkey passed through and where it evolved to. His comradeship, from the early sixties, with all the leading actors of the movement in which he took part from one edge, passes before our eyes like a nostalgic film strip. Of course, it is not only nostalgic feelings that remain after reading. In the accounts one can also find all the data and examples for an ideal or realpolitik reckoning of the distances between what Islamist thought in Turkey imagined from the beginning and what it has reached.

The first time I heard Beşir Hoca's name as an Islamist social scientist was in the late eighties. He was the author of the articles and interviews published in Mavera under the pseudonym Mehmet Çağlar, and he was a good sociologist. In his academic post in Erzurum, in his duties at the DPT, and during his Rectorship of Kırıkkale University, which coincided with the February 28 period, he put forward practices in keeping with his principled acquis of that time. After the February 28 coup-makers removed him from the rectorship, in ANAR, which he founded, and in the politics in which he took part within the AK Party, we always saw a continuous manifestation of this indivisible personality.

This account has actually turned from being Beşir Hoca's account through his own memoirs into the memories of someone who knows him about him. But Beşir Hoca's first-hand account does not form a very big gap with what we have seen.

With his beautiful and fluent narration and good literary skill, Beşir Hoca has not merely produced a documentary but also a good literary work, and it is good that he wrote his memoirs. We await the sequel too.