Another star has slipped from this sky, and Kemal Kelleci has died

In the film Eşkıya (The Bandit), when Keje sees a star falling in the sky, he says, without having received any news, "The bandit has died." Who "the bandit" is is in fact clear, both in Keje's innocent world and to those who watch the film. In a place where criminal powers, in their neckties, bow ties, elegant clothes and felt hats, have seized the world, no question remains about who the real bandit is. The bandit who dies is in fact someone who remained outside this order, someone this world branded a bandit. The star has fallen and the bandit has died, or the other way around. His death is not merely a void opened in the lives of his loved ones; it is as if a loss had occurred in the order of the heavens. A star falls, an era closes, a kind of human being who will not easily be raised again withdraws from the earth. But everyone who carries in his heart a longing for freedom, a crumb of resistance, now volunteers to fill the void left by that dead bandit.

I had felt something similar on the day I set out for Uzbekistan, when I received the news of the death of Kemal Kelleci ağabey, the esteemed man of the cause, servant of the Qur'an, a world in himself. I grieved separately over his passing, and separately over not being able to attend his funeral and offer condolences. That day I promised myself that after my impressions of Uzbekistan, I would write a testimony (shahada) about him. It would be a piece that, through the testimony about his person, tries to shed a little light on one side of the story of the Islamic movement. Now the time has come for that promise.

I met Kemal Kelleci in 1986 or 1987, during the years when I was studying for my undergraduate degree in sociology at METU (Middle East Technical University). I knew him as the older brother of many friends who studied in the same department, and I too called him abi. From the days I first knew him, we would meet and chat in Ankara's bookshops, in student houses, and later in the nineties at symposiums and panels on the Qur'an, where I had by then become a regular. The portrait that remains in my mind from those days largely coincides with all the testimonies told about him today: an extraordinary personality, an unbridled will, a dervishhood that could not be reined in... He had his own words, his sharp judgments, his interventions that appeared at the most unexpected moments. His energy struck you before his thought, his sincerity before his knowledge, his devotion before his program. What he did had no reasonable working hours, no calculated return, no personal interest.

To me he was a mad Muslim of the revival generation that came after the ruthless, purging policies the single-party era carried out against Islam. What he did was a legend that circulated from mouth to mouth, through anecdotes and stories told by others even beyond his own accounts. But a legend of flesh and bone, living among us, in its most ordinary, simplest and most accessible form, or accessible to those who could reach him, one who might turn up among us at any moment. He had a struggle, which made this river of revival surge and gave it color. One against a secular-colonial regime, and another against the enişteler.

The enişteler, that is, the girls who had come from the heart of Anatolia and found their identity in the Qur'an, in Islam, in the headscarf, were always "our dear girls" to him. The men from the same sociology who would marry them were "the enişteler." There was nothing negative in any of his characterizations; his words were a kind of sermon jargon of his own, reminding people of a responsibility.

I have often compared him in these struggles to Don Quixote. Provided, of course, that we do not see Don Quixote as a ridiculous dreamer who mistakes windmills for giants. With the wisdom of a Nasreddin Hoca. In that aspect of him that always carried a wise approach behind behavior that seemed absurd. The real tragedy of Cervantes' hero is that although he goes on believing in the ethics of chivalry, the world he lives in no longer takes virtues such as justice, loyalty, self-sacrifice and protection of the oppressed seriously. That is why, as the novel proceeds, this question falls into one's mind: Is it really Don Quixote who is mad, or is it a world that has no measure left other than its own interests?

Kemal Kelleci too was one of those men who ask for a new round at a time when everyone has accepted defeat. He did this, always with the same excitement, starting over again, until the last days of his 92-year life.

It cannot be said that he always knew how to prepare technically for that round. But he knew that a person must keep walking on the path he believes in, even if he is left alone. The Don Quixote comparison is not a key that explains his whole life; it is a mirror that shows his sincerity, his naivety, his ability to name the enemies before him in his own words and to build his own language with those words, and, more importantly, his side that did not accept defeat. And with one important difference: while the chivalric romances he read drew Don Quixote away from reality, the Qur'an and In the Shade of the Qur'an (Fî Zılâli'l-Kur'an) drew Kelleci into the most burning realities of life.

Kemal Kelleci was one of the forlorn soldiers of an Islamic sensibility that was suppressed, isolated, marginalized and sought to be erased from public life after the Republic. He belonged to the generation that "The Man Who Grew Roses" represents. He was a loyal son of a defeated civilization; yet he did not accept the defeat of his civilization. Where everything was said to be over, he believed that new people could be raised, and that a generation reunited with the Qur'an could change the course of history.

Some have called him "the Qur'an dervish," "the Qur'an porter," "the man who carried commentary to Anatolia," "the long-distance marathon runner" and "the last devotee on earth." There is a measure of truth in all these expressions. Nuri Pakdil's describing him as "one of the exemplary human beings whose line is dying out" is not in vain either. For the type of person Kelleci represented was not content merely to believe in an idea; he gave his whole life, like one possessed, to the service of the truth he believed in and, beyond believing, had fallen in love with.

Kelleci was not a great scholar, a system-building theorist or the leader of a hierarchical organization. Nor can it be said that he had a well-rounded intellectual system with firmly drawn boundaries. For that reason, within the circle he belonged to, he stood outside the theological debates (over the emphasis placed on the Qur'an, and over whether this neglected the Prophet and his sunna in one way or another). Such debates could not be held with him. From where he looked and saw, he always had a plain rightness. For his cause was so basic and so simple that no one could object to it, as simple and basic as the necessities of religion (zarurat-ı diniye).

He had grasped early a very basic and very simple truth: the construction of a new Islamic subject was not possible without turning to the Qur'an. Muslims had to learn their religion not from hearsay, superstitions and frozen habits, but directly from its source. The Qur'an had to be taken out of being a book that is merely recited, dedicated to the dead, or kept on high shelves; it had to be understood and lived.

This simplicity and this basic level of Kelleci's understanding of Islam and the Qur'an were decisive in his encounter with Fî Zılâl al-Qur'an and in his choosing to meet it and take shelter together beneath its shade.

Let us continue from here, but we have strained our space too much. So we will continue.