Responsibility, punishment and the slaughter of death

A grief too great to be any one person's gain. Perhaps a pain that, even if it does not vanish when shared, will lighten.

Pain itself is the most effective event from which we can draw the deepest lessons about our existence in this world. Although there are those who manage to stop their ears to this lesson despite all its effectiveness, for those who know how to take it, the meaning of life, the meaning of humanity, the meaning of the world all find their clearest form together.

There are social ways of sharing this pain, which is no one's gain. Mourning is a way of easing such pains, which are occasionally inevitable in the life of a society.

But mourning is not only a way of easing pains; it is also an inescapable way of rebuilding the shattered life stories of a society. In a sense, those who do not know how to mourn, who fail to socialize mourning, live the greatest apocalypse in their own hearts, in their own minds. Moreover, this is a devastation that is not easy to recover from.

When it is time for mourning, one mourns. After the mourning has passed, whatever needs to be done is done.

Unfortunately, one indicator of our social disarray is that we cannot even manage to mourn. Our mournings are like our holidays. Both are treated as an opportunity for division or for dividing.

A true mourner works to widen the field of mourning. Because his pain is real, and he feels in practice the real effect of sharing.

Those who truly grieve over deaths, who truly feel their pain in the depths of their hearts, wish with all their might for this circle of sharing to widen.

The rebellious laments and cries of those who feel the pain deeply are a natural consequence of the pain and mourning they have lived through. One does not argue with it, one cannot argue with it. Respecting that person's experience of mourning is everyone's duty, everyone's obligation.

Yet there are also morbid situations in which deaths are treated merely as a technical necessity for political opposition. Just as there are mining disasters that confront us as a result of the way we have internalized technology, there are instrumental deaths that confront us as a result of the way we have recklessly internalized modern political techniques. Deaths useful for the opposition. Deaths necessary, and only as necessary, for certain political manipulations. Slaughtered deaths. The funerals of martyrs that came for years from the Southeast, and all the other appropriated, expropriated deaths, are an expression of how deep a problem of ignorance (jahiliyya) we have in the face of death.

And yet, is not death the only thing in common among those who have nothing in common? Even if we resemble one another in nothing at all, we are partners before the reality of death. That is why mourning is a lesson like a verse, reminding everyone to stop and recall that commonality at which all the spheres of life that divide us will finally arrive.

Yet deaths have been packaged, and in each death the departure of a spirit from God's spirit has been neglected. This is the picture of how the slaughter of death, and the inclusion even of that most common thing between us among the accursed occasions that divide us.

Deaths have turned into numbers, and are assessed only by how good a subject for opposition they can make. Which death can be entered into our column of political profit? Which is someone else's corpse? Elhakümüttekâsür, indeed zürtumul meqâbir (rivalry in worldly increase distracted you, until you even counted the dead, until you made even them a display of your strength).

Even to recall it on this occasion is shameful, but there are situations in which a few deaths that might set the streets in motion are not at all badly received. I wonder how many deaths could produce the desired effect? How many more people have to die in order to get the streets thoroughly stirred up?

In the face of the massacre-like death of the Soma martyrs, whose survivors are displaying wonderful examples of nobility, a heavy debt, a responsibility, even a guilt, naturally falls to the share of all of us. No one can regard himself as innocent of this heavy burden.

Above all accounts is His account, above everything is His destiny, of course; but if this belief of ours leads us to even the slightest complacency about taking measures from now on, it must be known that no one has the right to cast responsibility onto God.

The belief in destiny is certainly not like that. Had it been so, it would be impossible to hold anyone responsible for any event, and thus there would be no crime and punishment. Yet if there is a wrong, there is someone responsible for it, and where there is no responsibility there is no justice.