The problem of the over-knowledgeable historian

Once again the question of refugees or migrants, once again the question of Turkishness, and once again our highly knowledgeable, excessively knowledgeable and, to the same degree, excessively authoritarian popular historian İlber Ortaylı. In fact the subject had dropped off the agenda for some time. Especially with the sudden change in Syria, with the overthrow by the Syrian people of the 54-year Assad, 60-year Baath dictatorship, and with Syrians in Turkey beginning to return rapidly to their country, the migrant issue too quickly began to lose its quality of being a political livelihood for certain people. However, even shortly before this change took place in Syria, İlber Ortaylı had made a statement so scandalous that we are ashamed today, on Turkey's behalf, to recall it: "I think the refugees should be sent back. Why should I make a mass of people who cannot defend their own homeland into a mass of citizens? This is not a bed of roses either. In that case, one day tomorrow I will take these men into the army. Will I be able to?" These statements were careless, and above all too ignorant, coming from someone who is himself of migrant origin and whose family once took refuge in Turkey.

Yet here ignorance is not about a lack of knowledge but about attitude and manner of approach. Otherwise, in knowledge and erudition, truly, probably no one can compete with İlber Ortaylı. But unfortunately we must say that the way he uses this extraordinary treasury of knowledge is very ignorant, misguided and very irresponsible. If he only wrote history, we would never speak of his authority; but when, relying on that treasury of knowledge, he attempts to exercise excessive authority on subjects he does not understand at all, the result is a very unbearable, irritable, gloomy situation in which nothing can be discussed with him and in which he smothers every subject by pronouncing a verdict in two words.

Where the refugees whom Ortaylı was thinking of sending back exactly one year ago would go, the whole world saw in the most striking way, after the Syrian revolution that took place only 4 months later, through the prisons of Sednaya, Palmyra, Aleppo and others. The stories of what befell those who returned to Syria by chance also became known to the whole world. Not a single story was encountered of anyone who returned and remained safe and sound, but many who, after returning, were driven to death under those heavy tortures in Sednaya. A policy that followed and obeyed a scholar with so much information would, God forbid, have ended in genocide. Thank God our country did not fall for this provocation, and in the end it was Turkey that won.

While the glorious resistance that has emerged in Gaza is shaking the political and mental balances throughout the world, perhaps what a historian should have reminded us in the meantime was that the people of Gaza had displayed similar heroism in the past as well. For example, the people of Gaza twice repelled the British attacks in the First World War with heroic resistance; how then did the British manage to capture Gaza on the third? Light could perhaps have been shed on this, which could have been very useful for us to understand better what is going on today. The contribution of our authoritarian historian to the subject could not go beyond saying "The Palestinians sold land; in any case the Palestinian is known as one who sells land." Everyone has seen what a slander this statement is against the Palestinian people, who for two years have been showing an epic resistance so as not to give Israel a single span of their land; and how, I wonder, did such vast knowledge of history fail to show (or make) Ortaylı see it?

I had written these things, and the occasion for reminding them again is the improper and insolent jibe he aimed at me yesterday in his column. I say improper, but in a polemic he entered with Orhan Miroğlu, however he found a pretext, he came and took a jab at me. By God, not only at me; once his mouth was open, he took jabs at many people in turn: Orhan Miroğlu, Muhsin Kızılkaya, Yıldıray Oğur...

Orhan Miroğlu and Sırrı Sakık have connected the proposal of bringing Uyghurs to some emptied villages and settling them there as a solution to our agricultural problems with some of their earlier positions. I will not go into that, but what is the pretext, in the middle of this debate, for referring in a half-baked and openly distorting way to what I said in a speech exactly 12 years ago about Turkishness?

"In the past too, Yasin Aktay had descended, in an article of his, to the cheapness and insolence of saying that 'Turkishness' means nothing, that it is an indeterminate definition."

Fine, then let us ask right away: when a great historian who knows an excessive amount about history distorts my words so gravely in quoting them, on which of his knowledge about history can we rely? I did not say anywhere or in any way that "Turkishness means nothing, it is an indeterminate definition," and I never would, for instance. Even if you leave other factors aside, this is a statement diametrically opposed to my sociological, historical and philosophical body of knowledge accumulated over so many years.

What he referred to is in fact my famous speech of 12 years ago, which he himself discussed with Celal Şengör, who said on Fatih Altaylı's program that people descended from monkeys, in which I said that Turkishness is not a race but a national and ethnic identity, a synthesis. I remind of Şengör in particular because, for him, the Byzantine identity is loftier than the Turkish identity, but more importantly, at the origin of all races there is a monkey; and they had sat down and run me down together with him. As for me, I in no way denied Turkishness in that statement. Turkishness exists; it is a historical and contemporary reality, but its reality today requires us to understand it as an identity beyond race. Moreover, not only Turkishness, but even Kurdishness, Arabness, Frenchness and Germanness are not a race, and there is no such race as Arab, Kurd or French. Anthropology in general rejects the concept of race for human beings. This statement of mine is a scientific fact that anyone who knows a little anthropology accepts immediately. In saying it there, my intention was not to deny Turkish existence and identity but, on the contrary, to set it on more scientific, authentic foundations, as the famous Turkish nationalists Ziya Gökalp, Remzi Oğuz Arık and Erol Güngör also said the same words.

Ortaylı and the other participants of the program knowingly distorted what this statement of mine meant even then, and today he goes to even greater lengths of distortion, and, as if that were not enough, falls into the wretchedness of falsely denouncing me to the AK Party and TÜBA leadership. Moreover, in the same program 12 years ago, Altaylı had put forward Jean-Paul Roux's book "History of the Turks" as evidence for Turkish existence against me, and I had answered: how can they show me as evidence a book they have not read? Because on pages 29 and 30 of that very book Roux was saying exactly what I said (Kabalcı Publications). Here, too, Roux said those words not to deny Turks or Turkishness but, on the contrary, to set Turkishness on a firmer and scientific foundation.

If, as a historian, Ortaylı narrates even the history of these days with such distortion, under the influence of the nonsensical squabbles he has entered into, seized by the lust of speech, how, with what prejudices and what feelings, does he narrate past events to us?

Let me finish by repeating what I said about him earlier:

"I think no one doubts that he is excessively knowledgeable. But it is also very clear that he badly abuses the authoritarianism he has gained with this excessive knowledge and his own peculiar style. If he told what he knows truly honestly and courageously, he would certainly tell a very different history from the one he tells today or presents on the market according to his customer. But he never took that risk. He did not tell what he knew; he always represented the hot air of the adolescent heads in the halls that host him, and the power that blows from those winds. Even the power that the authority gained through his knowledge afforded him, he did not take the trouble to use to wake those adolescents.

His words that the Palestinians sold land are not words reflecting the history he knows; they were only a simple peddler's answer to the daily demands of that adolescent market."