Where is Turkish thought? In the metaphysical waters of the Sun Language Theory?

"Where Is Turkish Thought?"

This is the dossier title of issue 171 of Türkiye Günlüğü magazine, prepared on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Ziya Gökalp's birth. For as long as I can remember, with all my Islamist concerns, I have also made the fate of Turkish thought my own concern. In one study I tried to find the missing links of Turkish thought through the factors that chain it. If there is a chain made of links, I tried to understand and explain what chains Turkish thought, or how Turkish thought could at some stage become a restrictive chain.

Without doubt, Turkish thought would find its missing links in the Muslim presence. When this link is missing, nothing remains but a chain that binds the human being to his own ethnocentrism.

The same holds for Arab thought and for Persian thought.

Where Turkish thought stands today is of course a very valuable question; to ask where it stands, which problems it deals with, what it says to the world, with which concepts it thinks and what it contributes to humanity's common intellectual heritage is a matter that all of us should reflect on. Especially in the context of the epistemological dependencies produced by our long attempt to understand ourselves with the concepts of Western thought, and of the self-colonial effects of Orientalism and the colonial order of knowledge on our intellectual world, it is impossible for a dossier with this title not to create an expectation.

Is it too much to expect a horizon that does not shut Turkish thought into itself but opens it to the world; that does not chain and is not chained, but explores ways of joining universal thought starting from its own historical accumulation?

I expected it nonetheless, but frankly, while reading the long interview titled "The Turkish Essence Is Fit to Be Leavened with Divine Truth," conducted by Öner Buçukçu with Yalçın Koç, the issue's most ambitious piece, I felt an atmosphere blowing very far from such an opening. For before me was not a philosophical quest exploring the universal possibilities of Turkish thought, but a highly essentialist and at times chauvinist discourse attributing to Turkish and to Turkishness metaphysical privileges that no other language or culture possesses.

I have tried for years to follow Yalçın Koç, who has a critical line of his own toward philosophy, the academy and the West. He arouses interest as someone who believes what he says, who tries to do justice to thought, and who lives it as a requirement of his being rather than as a profession or a means of earning. That he lives in seclusion in his own corner, minding his own business, not even feeling a need to present or debate what he says, added a distinct quality to his words. That is why it is noteworthy that he has appeared before us with an interview for the first time in years. The articulation, in an interview, of the views for which he built his theory called Anatolian Yeast is valuable in part because it explains his rather ambiguous and allusive (müteşabih) discourse. But this value does not make what he says true. Let us look at these words, for example:

"...You cannot open up the Word of our Prophet, the divine truth, that is, the Word that is Seal in the Ancient Moment, in Arabic; you cannot be reborn through Arabic. That is, to speak of the Word by means of Arabic is not to open up the Word. Look, one must pay great attention to this. Arabic is not enough to open up that truth, and Persian is not enough either."

"The Turks have a tamga-letter alphabet and a tamga script peculiar to Turkish. There is nothing like it anywhere else. The Arabic language has no alphabet peculiar to itself. The Persians have no alphabets peculiar to themselves."

He goes on, saying that Turkish is "a perfect language without any deficiency," and that "there is nothing like its logical structure and principles of construction in any other language." A person's love and admiration for his own language is nothing to be frowned upon; it is natural, and were it to stay there it would not be a problem. But to go further and say that Arabic, Persian, indeed no language other than Turkish is sufficient to open up the Ancient Word, that is, the Word of God, and that only Turkish is capable of this, is another matter.

These are claims of a magnitude that cannot be accounted for from any angle. You may of course wonder what comparative linguistic research they rest on, but what you will face is nothing other than questions that will leave you helpless: What is the measure of a language's perfection? How does an alphabet's being distinctive make that language's capacity to produce thought superior?

First of all, Koç's claim that the basis of the Arabic alphabet is the Hebrew alphabet is not historically true at all. The Arabic script developed essentially from the Nabataean-Aramaic writing tradition. It shares common historical roots with the Hebrew script, but no one can say that it is the same as it or derived from it.

That the Göktürk (Old Turkic) script has distinctive features is also beyond dispute. But this does not mean that all its letters depict sounds directly, or that no other writing system in the world has similar features. To produce a great privilege for oneself from this is a very great stretch.

More importantly, what kind of relationship can be established between the origin of an alphabet and a language's power to express truth? This expressive power was thought of by Heidegger, as logos, for ancient Greek too, but today we can say more easily that he, not knowing Arabic, fell into this error without making a comparison, captivated by the magic of the first language he learned.

Truly, on reading this meaning that Koç attributes to Turkish, it is impossible not to recall the Sun-Language Theory of the 1930s. Of course the two approaches are not identical. The Sun-Language Theory rested on the claim that Turkish was the first language of humanity and that Turkish lay at the origin of the other languages. Koç, for his part, does not say that Turkish is the mother of all languages. His claim is more philosophical, even metaphysical: Turkish is distinctive and privileged with respect to the opening up of divine truth in the heart, and possesses an essence that even Arabic and Persian lack.

But where the two approaches meet is in attributing to Turkish a presupposed superiority over other languages that cannot be shown scientifically.

The Sun-Language Theory of the 1930s emerged in the Republic's process of building a new nation. This theory, which asserted that Turkish lay at the origin of human languages, was less a linguistic discovery than a product of the nationalist identity quests of the period. Although it enjoyed official patronage for a time, indeed although it was made compulsory throughout the entire educational process, let alone patronage, it won acceptance neither in national nor in international comparative linguistics, and as it had been presented, it quietly withdrew from the agenda. It withdrew quietly because it had no scientific value whatsoever, was entirely a Turk's propaganda to the Turk, and had produced no result other than to humiliate Turkishness.

Somewhere in the theory there was also the claim that Turkish was the mother of all languages and that the Turks were the ancestors of Europe's Aryan race. This was a way of rescuing our national pride vis-à-vis the West, which we had been belittling ourselves by blindly imitating. To keep our Westernization from bruising our national pride, it had seemed a good invention that the West was Turkish too, to begin with. But alas, if only three or five people had believed it!

Today, reading what Koç says, one cannot help getting the impression that this old claim is being reconstructed in a much heavier philosophical language, with the concepts of ontology, epistemology, essence, yeast, heart and truth.

Our question still stands, of course: how can the claim be grounded that Turkish, which at the Sun-Language level was declared the mother of all languages, has a special predisposition, found in no other language, for the unfolding of divine truth?

Would they not ask: what language of the heart, what spiritual current and which representatives of it have so far attained this truth and made the truth they attained known to the world? Yunus Emre? Ahmet Yesevi? And after them? Today? You, we? What do we, as Turks, offer the world with our Turkish?

Leave that aside too: have we now, with this language, proved the greatness of Turkish to the world, or have we led the Turk into the shallow metaphysical waters of the Sun-Language?

One aim of the Sun-Language was also to produce a Turkish identity through anti-Arabism. With its language, its culture, even its religion. As they say, a theory that has become impossible to show one's face with confronts us thus, in a showy discourse.

We have strained our place a great deal, but it is not finished, so let us continue later.