A life with the flavour of conversation among books: in memory of Cevat Özkaya

My acquaintance with Cevat abi goes back to 1983. It couldn't be said that we met very often, though. At one point we did not meet at all for quite a long time. I was in Ankara, then in Konya; whenever my travels brought me to Istanbul I would go to Pınar Yayınları hoping to see him too, and more often than not I found him there and we met. Perhaps the closing of the Beyaz Saray Booksellers' Bazaar broke up a habitat in which we had all breathed together and considerably narrowed the conditions for meeting many people, but Cevat abi and I always had other occasions to meet in one way or another. Occasions at AKV, the Bosnia Solidarity activities, the Eastern Conference, Mazlum-Der, Palestine and so on. Even if we met little, he was like one of those elders of a family who inspire trust, whom you know to be watching over you and looking out for you from afar. Compassionate, attentive, proud of your achievements, someone you felt beside you in your bad days, courteous, graceful, a gentleman.

Our acquaintance actually goes back to 1982, the year I was a fifth-year student at an imam-hatip high school. Together with a group of friends we had decided to open a small bookshop, both to meet our own need for books and to create a book-minded environment in Siirt. But we had no capital, and we knew nothing at all about the commercial side of the business. I wrote a letter to Pınar Yayınları explaining our situation. A week later a crate full of books arrived. Besides the seven or eight books that the newly founded Pınar had published up to that date, there were books from other publishers too. They had trusted young people they did not know at all, sending the books without asking for any guarantee. Beyan Yayınları, to which we had made the same request, had answered with similar generosity.

Today I understand better how important a contribution those gestures made to the intellectual milieu that was beginning to take shape in Siirt, to our own intellectual mortar. At the end of that school year, when I went to Istanbul to work during the summer holiday, the first places I stopped by were Beyan and Pınar Yayınları. At Pınar I met Şemsettin Özdemir and Cevat Özkaya face to face. We were seeing each other for the first time, but I was welcomed as if we had known each other for a long time, like one of the family. I had met Ali Kemal Temizer of Beyan Yayınları in the same way on the same days.

On my first visit to Pınar Yayınları (June 1983), Cevat abi had in his hand Garaudy's newly published book, The Promises of Islam, and, as I would always see later, he was telling the students visiting the bookshop passionate things about that book. The excitement, sincerity and gift for conversation in that telling became a scene that lodged itself in my memory about him afterwards. He was a man of conversation; he loved conversation more than writing. Though when I was talking with Asım Öz about this side of him, we also noted that his articles published in the journal Umran today make up a corpus of several volumes.

Throughout that summer these publishing houses, which I visited at every opportunity, formed a very important stage of my education in knowledge for me. As much as what I learned from the books, I was certainly deeply affected by the lives of those people, by their humility, and by their devotion to publishing, to thought and to their ideals.

I have always thought that the pedagogical awareness they displayed, without ever making us feel the gap of age and experience between us, played a very important role in the upbringing of a great many young people in those schools. In this way they were disclosing the most important secret of pedagogical awareness to whoever could grasp it: to approach a human being trusting in the potentials that even he himself has not yet discovered.

SEEING PUBLISHING AS MORE THAN A PROFESSION

What affected me most, and inspired great respect, when I followed the later lives of Cevat abi and of publishers like Şemsettin Özdemir and Ali Kemal Temizer was their own respect, care and constancy toward the work they did. For example, they never saw publishing as a stepping stone to other professions, offices or opportunities. None of the zigzags that we see when we look at the history of Islamism from other cross-sections is present in these lives. You can trace the consistency and continuity of the line from here. From here you can keep a record of testimony concerning Islamists who made their way in other (political, social or economic) arenas. They saw the work they undertook as a responsibility. They did it because they loved it, believed in it, and became convinced that it was necessary.

Later I too tried, in my own way, to do the same work at Vadi Yayınları and at Tezkire Journal and Publications. In the course of it I came to know thoroughly that book publishing is not a business for someone who wants to make money. This work has to be done with faith, with a devoted ethic.

At the end of 2017, Cevat abi heard that I was preparing for publication, at Tezkire Yayınları, the book Seyyid Kutup: Siyasal Teoloji, Fıkıh ve Tarihsellik (Sayyid Qutb: Political Theology, Fiqh and Historicity). When I received his greetings along with the message that it would be more fitting for that book to come out from Pınar Yayınları, I gave it to them without any hesitation, out of respect. Pınar had also earlier published my books Tarihbozumu and Korku ve İktidar.

Of course publishing, especially under the conditions of the 1980s, was not merely printing and selling books. It meant building a world of thought, broadening the intellectual horizon of a generation, and bringing ideas from different geographies to Turkey.

In this respect Pınar Yayınları's bringing the works of figures such as Roger Garaudy, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said into Turkish was extremely meaningful. These books made an important contribution to Islamist intellectual circles in Turkey, enabling them not to close in on their own problems alone but to think about colonialism, modernity, Eurocentrism and the common problems of humanity.

Recognizing early the value of Edward Said's Orientalism was one of the important indications of Cevat abi's intellectual intuition. He could see not only what a book said but also which debates it would open the door to.

His closeness to Cemil Meriç, his bringing young people together with him, his labor in the journals Pınar and Umran, his sensitivity to the questions of Bosnia and Palestine, and his activities in the field of human rights were different manifestations of the same understanding of responsibility. He was one of those people who do not separate thought from action.

In fact, those who will write the history of Islamist thought in Turkey over the last half century need to do justice not only to the men of ideas but also to the publishers, bookshops and journals that enabled those ideas to circulate. For the history of a thought is the history not only of those who produced it but also of those who delivered it to people.

THE LAST MEMORY OF A MAN WHO DID NOT CHANGE

I last saw Cevat abi this past November at the opening of the Fatih Municipality's book bazaar in Cağaloğlu. I knew about his illness, and it was obvious from his whole condition anyway. Even so, he had come to the opening. Afterwards, while we toured the booksellers one by one together, we talked a good deal. We never spoke of his illness. Again we talked about current affairs, about thought, about the state of the ummah, about historical figures. He also slipped in a few jokes. Despite all the weight of the illness, he was the same Cevat abi. Among books, within thought, together with people.

Now when I think of that last meeting, I see that the crate of books sent to Siirt in 1982 and our last conversation in Cağaloğlu are two scenes of the same life. Over the intervening years the world had changed, Turkey had changed, we had changed. But the essence of his approach to people, to books and to the responsibility he had taken on had not changed.

After Cevat abi, everyone has a story to tell, and in everyone's story there is a different Cevat abi, but in all of them the same trustworthiness, the same humility, the same devotion is felt. What it means to believe in a cause, to remain loyal to it, to trust people, and to carry thought as a responsibility of life...

May God have mercy on you, Cevat abi. May your abode be paradise and your station be exalted.