The Historical Society and citizenship

The speech by Prof. Yusuf Halaçoğlu, President of the Turkish Historical Society—replete with references to Kurds, Alevis, Armenians, and 'dönme's (crypto-converts)—reignited debates on how issues such as race, nation, and citizenship are perceived in Turkey, even though he stated that he was misunderstood. At a time when a complete overhaul of the Constitution is on the agenda, such a debate may be unfortunate, but hopefully beneficial in terms of addressing these matters. Perhaps due solely to this timing, some may have suspected yet another grand design. Truth be told, there might indeed be such a grand plan—we cannot know—but ultimately, one must not indulge in paranoia that prevents developing a healthy approach to this discussion.

The phenomenon of history becoming something written by the state is largely a result of the nation-state era. Prior to that, historians and the histories they wrote could naturally be considered flawed because they overwhelmingly recorded the stories of the victors; however, this flaw was somewhat unwitting. There was deemed to be nothing worth writing in the stories of the vanquished, and everyone unconsciously wrote about where power lay—that is, whoever emerged triumphant from wars or through the selectivity of history.

In the era of nation-states, however, states systematically established an institutional activity to deliberately write whichever history they needed while obscuring or neglecting the rest. The fact that history also served as a means to construct a new national identity heightened the importance of the discipline of history in the modern era. Mustafa Kemal, well aware of this, was prompted to establish the Historical Society by his famous thought, "Writing history is as important as making history, if not far more important," pointing precisely to this instrumental dimension of historical science.

Likewise, the entire burden of Mustafa Kemal's concept of citizenship, expressed as "How happy is the one who says 'I am a Turk!'", was to be placed on the shoulders of history. In other words, it was not important whether people were ethnically Turkish, but whether they felt that way. This maxim, which could be reasonable as a baseline for citizenship, could only function if a non-racial meaning were ascribed to 'Turkishness' and if this meaning were embraced by the participants. However, the expected support from the Historical Society on this matter was constantly thwarted by simplistic and shallow theses that reduced Turkishness to a phrenological type while attempting to prove that everyone living in Turkey possessed derivatives of this skull type.

For this reason, the Turkish History Thesis never possessed a proper philosophy or self-awareness. What emerged in Prof. Halaçoğlu's speech is nothing other than the dysfunctional operation of this historical institution, with which we are all too familiar. Much like the concept of citizenship in Turkey, the Historical Society has failed to create a historical consciousness capable of uniting all citizens living in Turkey into a single nation. On the contrary, all activities of the Historical Society assumed Turkey not as a whole with its state and nation, but as a country inhabited "mostly by traitors." This secret of the system, which is never officially articulated and indeed stated quite to the contrary, occasionally gets exposed through such incautious speeches.

According to official discourse, "How happy is the one who says 'I am a Turk!'". But the reality of the matter is that no matter what some people do, they will never attain the bliss of "being a Turk." Because what is actually understood by the concept of Turkishness is plain and simple race, and this is impossible to change.

Pay no mind to the nature of the concept of 'dönme' being ultimately associated with 'religious conversion.' In Islam, from the moment a person pronounces the Shahada (declaration of faith), no one has the right to question their past or future. One must not forget that all the Companions of the Prophet were 'converts' in this sense of the word, and it must be added that a derogatory term like 'dönmelik' (convert-ness) can never fit into an Islamic understanding. Therefore, the unattainable Turkishness intended here has no relation whatsoever to Islam.

Perhaps one of the most crucial issues that the new constitution must overcome is bridging the gap between the state's official discourse and its actual discourse, which gets exposed on such occasions. This constitution, which ought to be realized as a social contract through a debate in which all elements of society participate equally, must ultimately be a document that everyone can refer to without any complex.