Rasim Özdenören, beauty, authorship

We live in times when anyone who has a keyboard, even a mobile phone, in front of them can write, and can easily announce what they write to everyone. Among the endless examples these times present, there is a need to refresh a debate that took place long ago among postmodern philosophers and sociologists on the meanings of being a "writer," that is, an "author."

At some point in those debates the "death of the author" was proclaimed.

In classical, but more especially in modern times, a kind of messianic role was attributed to the writer; yet it was said that this role had already ended even in periods when virtual media and the internet had not yet entered our lives, and thus the writer's messianic role was withdrawn.

It was said that through what he says the writer can at most reflect a kind of social and historical consciousness, and that apart from this he has no role of announcing things to humanity from afar. The writer is no longer a person, an author, an authority whose every word is accepted as true and whose knowledge and speech are far more special than those of other people. He has no authority to have the last word and to end the discussion.

The death of the author contradicts, of course, the fact that those who write have multiplied enormously, but the indicator of this death is not the increase in the number of writers but the loss of the writer's position as an authority. Whether this is good or bad certainly needs to be assessed separately.

However, no matter how much the authority dimension has diminished, the notion of the writer in pursuit of an original thought, style and manner has still not been entirely abandoned, nor does it seem it can be. This is partly to do with readers' expectations. People's search for guidance on many subjects has not been abandoned even in postmodern times. This undoubtedly gives operation to an ideology, an ideology of authorship, that affects the reader and the writer at the same time and assigns reciprocal roles to both.

While watching the premiere of the documentary on Rasim Özdenören prepared by TRT, on the occasion of the 50th year of his writing career, I reconsidered what I had written, as a writer, for him in Kitap Postası.

Undoubtedly, to see Özdenören as nothing more than a writer would require positioning him within this ideology of authorship. Yet Özdenören is not merely a writer, or is not a writer in the usual sense. He appears as a writer with a humility that generally stems from Islamic edep (literature), with the awareness that what he produces in knowledge, or the language he speaks, cannot be attributed an "semantic presence," in the postmodernists' phrase. That is, even before the death of the author was proclaimed, he speaks while feeling, and making others feel, the truth that the author too is a mortal.

He writes as though he has found his own special readers and is carrying on a private intimate conversation with them. Rasim abi writes as though he knows that his word can have presence only through this special dialogue. Yet, knowing that the real presence of meaning can never be realized with the reader to the very end, he writes with a kind of resignation to God.

Rasim abi has read many of the existentialist writers deeply. In fact, his references led to a great interest in them among an important part of the Islamist youth. Despite this, he did not fall into the pessimism that any of those writers possessed. The awareness that man is a tragic being did not drag him into a cynical indifference and bohemianism. Those who read Özdenören's texts do not feel stuck in a swamp or lost on a tangled road. The Writer advances lighting his own way.

Özdenören possesses a little more than most of some qualities carried by many Muslim intellectuals of his generation. He is one of the most important names of the generation of literary figures, social scientists and intellectuals who carried out the duty of opinion leadership on behalf of the ulema for Muslims who had been deprived of their ulema. With his novel The Man Who Grew Roses, he both encouraged and played with the child who had taken over important knowledge from the ulema forced to withdraw into their corners during the republican era.

His book Essays on Muslim Thinking, written in the mid-eighties, became an important reference book that drew a framework for Islamic thought and for the youth's view on many subjects.

In the essays he wrote later, which became a rich corpus, dialogical responses given by a Muslim mind to the tests of daily life are exemplified very beautifully. This corpus and the author of this corpus is the first writer to be looked at in any kind of study that can be done on Islamic thought or thinkers in Turkey.

When I was asked what the most important meaning of Yeni Şafak newspaper's starting Arabic publication would be, I answered without hesitation that Arabs too have the right to read Rasim Özdenören.

As of next year, the Turkish reader will have been reading Rasim Özdenören for sixty years, partaking of his knowledge, his wisdom, his beauty, his literature. What we have lived finds life and meaning anew in the words he strings together, arranges and expresses. Rasim abi explains his having written for so long by his still not having been understood. Undoubtedly understanding is an entirely different problem, but as long as Rasim abi keeps writing, it is also certain that our share and fortune in his beauty remain open. This is a beauty for which thanks must be given.

I wish this beautiful man a longer and more blessed life, congratulate everyone who contributed to the preparation of the documentary, and offer my thanks.