What we can never understand within the limits of mentality readings

Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic through the mental worlds of the actors who took part in these processes is, of course, one way. After all, it is a necessity to connect the intentions and worlds of meaning of those who took part in these processes with what they did. Why did they do what? What were the motives and motivations that directed their actions? Understanding these is now a necessary step of a minimal sociological perspective. A Weberian sociology, which foregrounds the definitions and meanings that the actors themselves give to their own actions, requires this, instead of an explanatory sociology that attributes and pastes certain externally derived theoretical assumptions onto people's actions.

Şerif Mardin's analyses of the mental worlds of the Young Turks and the New Ottomans, of the segments that would later turn into the Committee of Union and Progress, took up a field long neglected in Turkey. Şükrü Hanioğlu's earlier study of Abdullah Cevdet is also an important work along this path. And now his study of Atatürk's intellectual world is undoubtedly important because it is a work on Atatürk's mental world that had not been done sufficiently.

The studies of Taha Parla, who recently passed away, Vamık Volkan's study, again on Atatürk, and Mohammed Arkoun's short analyses are works that have attempted to shed light on both Atatürk's mental world and his psychological world. All of these are undoubtedly very important, but I need to unpack the note of objection I made on this subject at the end of my last article. Although Nuray Mert finds Hanioğlu's biography of Atatürk in particular insufficient in this regard, I am saying that if we remain within the limits of such studies there are things we will never be able to understand. I am even saying that among such analyses we miss both the logic and the realities of the actual international partition that was going on amid the turmoil of that period. After all, the First World War had concluded, and we see that no one has properly evaluated the manner in which this war concluded, the international partition, the agreements and the new international order that emerged as a result of this war, what they took from and gave to Turkey and at what price, and who the real actors were in this exchange. And this exchange makes mental worlds a very secondary, even tertiary, subject. Who has been able to enter into the colonial logic within the event so far? Who has been able to get beyond the heroism of "a sun rose from Samsun and illuminated the darkness that had settled over the country"?

Right at this point, should we not ask history different questions, outside the rote? For example, is there, or is there not, a weak or strong correlation between the mental definition of the lands that had been written off as "lands not ours" as early as 1908 and the resolution of the Palestine front for the British in this period as easily as drawing a hair out of butter? When, in the end, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic against the powers we fought

were made not against them but by agreement with them, what difference can the mental worlds of the actors involved in this event make? A whole host of questions like that...

One point on which Nuray Mert criticizes Hanioğlu is that, "conforming to the spirit of the age for a new official history," he devoted a large part of his book to the religion and secularism section. I looked: this section makes up 110 pages of the 1000-page book in total. Is it really too much? Was not the real great struggle of the Republican regime over religion, over the cause of establishing the conception of secularism? Did the Republic's economic, land reform, transport or development issues constitute a much more important cause? Was not the matter of taking the country out of being an Islamic country and turning it into a Western country, above all and far more than anything else, about religion, about the understanding of religion or the place religion holds in this society?

In my view it is a field deserving far more attention. When you do this, only then do you get a little closer to the essence of the matter, to Atatürk's intellectual world. In his book Türkiye'de Çağdaşlaşma (The Development of Secularism in Turkey), when describing Atatürk and his revolution, does not Niyazi Berkes place religion and secularization at the very center of the matter? But does he not do it from precisely the opposite angle, in order to present it as an achievement of the Kemalist narrative, a revolutionary character of it?

Westernization and modernization in Turkey were not a self-operating process, were they? Do we think that society decided by itself to abolish the Caliphate, to change the alphabet, to close religious education institutions, to Turkify the call to prayer and the language of worship? Were all of these natural steps of a modernization process of Turkey's own making, or were they hard and forced interventions?

Nuray Mert says that the ideas on both the matter of "writing off the Arab lands" and the matter of religion were not peculiar to Atatürk but were ideas shared among the officers and intellectuals of that period. Undoubtedly there were those who shared these ideas, but they were not ideas accepted among all Ottoman officers and intellectuals, as is supposed. So much so that Abdullah Cevdet is known to have been ostracized in society because of some of the views he defended. Atatürk, on the other hand, expressed many of his views only in gatherings of friends, while in more public spheres he voiced Caliphist, Islamist and Ottomanist views.

Yes, these views of Atatürk were widespread among Westernist intellectuals and military and civilian bureaucrats, but these people were not the majority. Second, and more importantly, saying that Atatürk had no originality or difference among all of these would mean, from the opposite direction, belittling him and his leadership. This is a contradiction into which some Kemalists who try to present Atatürk's reforms as a necessary step of history fall. It is both a contradiction and contrary to the facts of history. A contradiction because Atatürk's views on religion differ in a truly original degree according to his entourage, his time and his setting. That is why entering the mental world individually is very important. Second, they were not shared by that many people at that time. Indeed, the first people to whom he opened up his ideas, his own friends, found them extreme and objectionable. On this, as Nuray Mert also accepts and as is of course by now well known, Atatürk is a radical positivist in the Comtean line, and his understanding of religion is consistent with this. Comte thinks that every kind of religion is a superstition invented by human beings and will disappear with the development of science. A positivist politics consists in taking steps that will facilitate the withdrawal of religion from history.

Dwelling on these things does not, in itself, amount to saying things very contrary to the official history told so far. Indeed, official history works all these narratives like a heroic tale, as if displaying courage. At this point, what Atatürk did was undoubtedly very closely related to his own personal characteristics; it was not a historical necessity but a choice. They were not things already shared among Ottoman officers and which someone else would have done spontaneously had he not. Or even if they were to be done in any case, undoubtedly bearing the traces of another signature. In this case one must not belittle Atatürk's originality, and did I really have to be the one to say this?