Code name Reaction-906: our National Poet's exile in his own homeland

I am not parted from my homeland, yet in longing for it

I wander like an exile, weeping, in my own land

....

This land, the one whose owners, you say, are the jinn,

The one whose owners, it says, come this time from the mountain opposite.

The developments that put our national poet into the state of mind of an exile in his own homeland unfolded within a very short time. In the end, in order to escape the terrible constriction that the spies trailing behind him in 1925 had produced in his inner world, he would go to Egypt to endure a homesickness for his country that would last 11 years. Yet only a few years earlier he himself had opened the National Anthem he presented to this nation with the promise: "Fear not! The crimson banner that ripples in this twilight shall not fade, before the last hearth that smokes above my homeland is extinguished!"

The hearths smoking above his homeland were of course not extinguished, and would not be; but somehow the poet who made this promise had fallen into the condition of an exile in this very land.

Moreover, the conditions that made Turkey unlivable for Mehmet Akif in those days were growing ever heavier. Would it have been better had he stayed, had he not gone, had he chosen the path of struggling inside the country?

There are those who say so. Said Nursi did not flee, for instance; he was shoved and pushed around, dragged from exile to prison and from prison to courtrooms.

Elmalılı Hamdi Yazır did not flee either, and he even wrote a tafsir. True, when he finished the tafsir that had been requested of him in the early years of the Republic, the book was printed in very limited numbers and was hardly distributed or read at all. But he did find the opportunity to write that tafsir. So to speak, he shut himself up at home and never went outside. Perhaps he saw the hat that would have to be put on his head once he went out as a harassment, an act of violence, an occupation of the body.

Of course not everyone was as fortunate as these two. İskilipli Atıf Hoca was hanged by the Independence Tribunal on the pretext of a treatise he had written before the "Hat Revolution" (Frenk Mukallitliği ve Şapka, "Imitation of the Franks and the Hat").

Mustafa Kemal's comrades-in-arms went to the gallows at the Independence Tribunals. As the saying goes, "had it not been for him, it would not have happened"; the first name of whom it can truly be said that without him the War of Independence could not have been fought, Kazım Karabekir, barely escaped the gallows. In the Nutuk, accusations were piled up against him at length, and he could not even exercise his right of reply at the time. When he finally tried to do so five years later, the book he published was seized from the printing house by the police and burned before it reached readers. It was Kazım Karabekir who, by taking the initiative in Erzurum, had Mustafa Kemal's duties and powers restored after he had been dismissed from all his posts, and so brought him back onto the stage.

If you say that Mehmet Akif, had he not gone, had he stayed, would perhaps have had some privilege as the poet of the National Anthem, then what kind of privilege could he possibly have had beyond that of Kazım Karabekir, for instance? Had he stayed, perhaps something close to what befell Kazım Karabekir, or İskilipli, or Said Nursi would have befallen him. Then today we would perhaps, God forbid, have had to cope in addition with the trauma of being a country that had tried, executed, imprisoned, or in one way or another dragged through the mud its own National Poet, the poet of the National Anthem.

When conditions in Turkey narrowed around him and spies were set on his trail, Mehmet Akif chose to go to Egypt. In the circumstances of that day, Egypt was in fact not a place that could be thought of as separate from Turkey. That is, the Poet did not emigrate outside the Ottoman homeland. He did not emigrate to Europe or America, but to Egypt, which was still an Ottoman land. But the age had by then become the age of nation-states. Egypt is a place where Akif feels at home, in his own land, but his own homeland is undoubtedly another. Here, even if the poet still counts Egypt as a homeland as well, the place he yearns for is the homeland, Istanbul. So deep is that longing that although he stayed 11 years, he could not bear to stay even 10 days more. The 3-4 day voyage by ship by which he came felt to him like years. As one draws closer to reunion, the longing only grows, after all.

The surprise that awaited him on arriving in Istanbul shows how right he had been to stay away from the homeland until then. Spies were again set on his trail. He had really come to die; he made it known to everyone that the days of his fatal illness were numbered, yet despite this all his steps were watched and he was filed under the code "İrtica-906" (Reaction-906).

Upon Âkif's return to Istanbul, the Ministry of the Interior, the General Directorate of Security, Intelligence, the General Staff and the Istanbul Governorate went on full alert; each separately or together, by communicating and corresponding, they kept his presence under control until his death. Whom is he meeting, what is he discussing, does he have any criticisms, demands, claims or talk concerning the caliphate or the sultanate?

The esteemed journalist Muharrem Coşkun gathered all the documents on these correspondences, files and codings in a book titled "Kod Adı: İrtica-906" (Code Name: İrtica-906) (2014, Zeytinburnu Municipality). Murat Bardakçı had also written about it earlier. This was how great Mehmet Akif was perceived by the state of that day: "İrtica-906".

We now know what happened in the meantime. Mehmed Âkif, who had set out the manifesto and the spiritual map of meaning of the National Struggle, of course did not deviate from that map. But the politics that prevailed in the country deviated from that map of meaning and left Akif outside it.

While Akif lived in Egypt too he was kept under surveillance, and reports about him were sent to Ankara. Just like Rauf Orbay, Abdülmecid, Şeyhülislam Mustafa Sabri, and others who in those years likewise had to leave Turkey.

From the documents that later emerged about Orbay too, it appears that he was tracked step by step to determine whether he was engaged in activities in favor of the sultanate and the caliphate. What can be understood from the ongoing surveillance is that in those days not the slightest dissenting movement could escape the radar, and therefore that, for those who knew this, some of the statements were often perhaps not their sincere statements. So to speak, in a communication environment that had been falsified, how much can the words spoken then be taken into account in history?

Now, if we were to ask the question: where would Ziya Gökalp, who died in October 1924, have been had he lived?

Who can guess what might have happened to Gökalp, none of whose books were printed after his death until 1940, on account of views that were not at all in harmony with the politics pursued in precisely this period?