Imprisoning God's truth, open to all languages, in one language

Some of the reactions to my piece on the excessive privilege that Yalçın Koç attributes to Turkish in the opening of the Word in the heart give me an opportunity both to elaborate my words a little further and to complete what remained incomplete. In both pieces I had said that the metaphysical privilege the philosopher Yalçın Koç attributes to Turkish recalls the 1930s Sun-Language Theory reproduced with heavy philosophical terminology. In one, Turkish was placed at the origin of all languages; in the other, divine truth…

Today I want to touch on a far more important dimension of the matter: what does such a claim of linguistic privilege mean in the face of Islam's universal conception of truth?

At first glance it is an impressive sentence, even one laden with Sufi connotations. But what about the people born into other languages? What is their fault? Does this not pose a problem in terms of divine justice? Let it not be understood that we thereby ignore a quality attributed to Turkish. On the contrary, God's speech can be understood in Turkish, but what does it mean to regard it as impossible for it to be understood in other languages as well? If it means that divine truth can find a response in the hearts of Turkish-speaking people, there is no need for much effort of persuasion to prove it. Of course it is so. The poems of Yunus Emre, Turkish Sufi literature, and the religious experiences of Turkish-speaking Muslims over centuries are the most beautiful examples of this.

But in the face of the claim that Turkish possesses an essence, different and privileged compared with other languages, with respect to the unfolding of divine truth, we need to stop and ask very serious questions. First of all, what does the Qur'an's conception of language say to this?

The Qur'an presents people's speaking different languages as a sign of divine creation (Rūm, 30/22). It does not place one language above another. It shows linguistic difference not as a deficiency to be overcome but as a meaningful manifestation of creation.

More importantly, it says, "We did not send any messenger except in the language of his people, so that he might make clear to them" (Sūrat Ibrāhīm). For the understanding of the divine message, the peoples' own languages are taken as the basis. The language of every society is accepted as a suitable means for understanding God's address.

Moreover, Islam's final revelation was sent down in Arabic. The Qur'an emphasizes this especially: "In a clear Arabic tongue" (Shu'arā', 26/195), and its rationale is added in many places as well: so that it may be understood more clearly.

Arabic is the original language of the Qur'an. It has an indispensable place with respect to the Qur'an's wording, its recitation, the subtleties of its meaning and the tradition of exegesis. But not even from this does it follow that Arabs are superior to other nations or that divine truth cannot be understood outside Arabic.

In fact, at one point in the interview the expressions Koç uses frame everything that follows, because they evoke even more strongly the ethnocentric motivation behind the Sun-Language. "Professor Öner, it is Arab theology that has ruined us. The Anatolian leaven is the divine truth of our Prophet that opened in Turkish in the heart of Ahmad Yasawi."

Here, beyond the privilege attributed to Turkish, an attempt has been made to create a serious Arab otherness. What is meant by "ruined us"? Who has been ruined, where, how, in what way? What is Arab theology, for instance? How far have Yunus, Ahmad Yasawi or any other man of the heart kneaded in the Turkish leaven remained exempt from that clichéd theology? Did Maturidi not write in Arabic? Did Bukhari not write and speak in Arabic? Is Abu Hanifa not among the founders of the said and supposed Arab theology? None of them is Arab, moreover, and none of them claimed for his own people a superiority over the Arabs. Precisely in obedience to the Prophet's principle that an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab.

One motivation behind the Sun-Language is also to sever Turkish from the influence of Arabic and the Turks from the Arabs. Let us not recall the real concern about whom this severance serves, if you like. When the Turk was cut off from the Arab and the Arab from the Turk, the Turks did not gain. The Arabs gained nothing either. The only winner was the colonial order that seized all the wealth of these regions and governed them.

M. Alper Ertaş, who joined the discussion on the X platform with refined criticism, likened my pieces to counting the stones at the foot of a mountain: "The stones are counted correctly but the mountain is not mentioned." The simile is impressive; but the mountain I discuss in my pieces is not the poetic and intellectual possibilities of Turkish. It is whether, starting from those possibilities, a metaphysical privilege not found in other languages can be loaded onto Turkish.

Ertaş said "an inventory is not philosophy," which, taken on its own, is true. We cannot explain a language by dictionary entries; a word list is no substitute for philosophy of language. But the examples I gave from Arabic, Persian, Greek and Sanskrit surely were not meant to open a dictionary contest. While acknowledging the depth of the word gönül in Turkish, I was reminding that other languages too have built rich worlds of thought around words like qalb, fu'ād, ṣadr, lubb, dil, sūz and dard. The matter is not which language has more words; it is whether the conclusion can be drawn from these different possibilities that only one language reaches truth in a privileged way.

The "Mountain of the Heart" point is the objection that looks strongest in his critique. I drew a poetic association in Turkish between "dağ" (mountain) and the "dağlanan gönül" (the cauterized heart). Ertaş says this bears witness to Koç's thesis: if a language unfolds, within its own sound texture, a meaning not found in the same form in another language, that is what Koç says.

Here there are two things that must be separated. For a language to produce its own peculiar associations in a poem, a folk song or a word is one thing; to claim that that language unfolds divine truth in a way other languages cannot is another. I accept the first and ask for evidence for the second. Indeed, in my piece, right after saying "the sound and meaning possibilities of Turkish offer us this association," I wrote that there is no need to attribute metaphysical superiority to Turkish for it. The critique correctly diagnoses the poetic possibility; but it regards it as the same thing as the metaphysical privilege I object to.

The relation of the word dağ in "dağlamak" to Persian dāğ does not remove this poetic association either. Etymological knowledge illuminates the history of a word; it does not destroy the relation of sound and meaning it has acquired in Turkish. It even supports my thesis that Turkish was enriched by encountering other languages. A language's reworking in its own literary world of elements it took from other languages shows not the poverty of the language but the contacts it has formed within history.

Ertaş's "leaven" metaphor does not settle the discussion either. That the experiences of Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Arabs and Turks have kneaded one another through history is a fitting depiction of the richness of Anatolia. My question is through what historical processes this sharing took place and what the thing called "leaven" explains. If the leaven describes the historical mechanism of encounter, it needs to be made concrete. If it means an unchanging essence standing above history, another claim emerges that now needs to be proved. The word "leaven" does not by itself distinguish between these two possibilities.

The objection "language is learned, race is not" is also important; but on its own it is not sufficient. That a language is open to all and learnable does not show that an essentialist claim of superiority cannot be made in that language's name. My objection, I will repeat, is not to the love of Turkish or to the openness of Yunus Emre's language to everyone; it is to the claim that Turkish does something other languages cannot, namely, that it unfolds divine truth in a privileged way. In my second piece I conducted the discussion on these claims: I reported the statements that Arabic and Persian are not sufficient to unfold truth, that Turkish is perfect and that the tamga script has no equal. Whether these are true needs to be discussed by linguistic, historical and theological standards.

That the Qur'an informs us that every prophet was sent in the language of his people does not imply that all languages have the same breadth of expressive capacity. I made no such claim of equality. The more limited but important point the verse shows here is this: the divine message is not the monopoly of a single human language. Imam al-Shāfiʿī's special regard for Arabic does not invalidate this discussion either; his approach concerns the Arabic of the Qur'an and the Sunna and the understanding of these texts. That Arabic is the language of revelation does not prevent saying that Turkish has possibilities peculiar to it; likewise, the possibilities of Turkish do not make it the privileged key to divine truth that other languages lack.

In the end, to love Turkish, to develop its intellectual possibilities and to produce philosophy, science and art with it, we do not need to believe that it is superior to other languages. We certainly have no need to attribute to Turkish a divine election. The great horizon that Islam opens to humanity does not allow any nation or language to establish a monopoly over truth.

Truth is the property neither of Greek, nor of Latin, nor of Arabic, nor of Turkish. Reserving the special religious status of the original Arabic wording of the Qur'an, the meaning of the divine message is open to all humanity.

What makes Yunus Emre great is not only that he spoke Turkish. It is that he expressed in Turkish a truth that could address all of humanity.

If Turkish has a miracle, this miracle lies not in its monopolizing truth but in its being able to join, with its own voice, the common search for truth of all humanity.

The greatness of truth lies in its being too vast to fit into any language.

Ultimately, to turn the truth that God has opened to all humanity into an essence peculiar to one nation's language diminishes the universality of truth more than it exalts that language.