A Fatiha: A Letter to the Soul of My Friend Ahmet Aşık*

Note: The article below was originally published on 30 July 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the 15 July coup attempt, and offers a devout perspective on July 15 from the pen of a leftist writer. As this article, first published on the Serbestiyet website, has remained relevant, we are republishing it with the gracious permission of Mr. Ertuğrul Başer.

Kritik Bakış

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When I last saw you—it was about a year before your passing—you told me what you had said to your doctor. Do you remember? “Please, doctor, I need to live a little longer. I need to live just long enough to see that man named Kenan Evren stand trial for the coup, and, if possible, to see him die. Whatever it takes, don’t let me die before he does.”

Thank God, you lived to see him stand trial; to see him convicted for the coup, sentenced to life imprisonment, and stripped of his military ranks.

But I know you left this world with a broken heart and an aching soul; you did not live to see him die. Thank God, thank God, we witnessed that too.

But that is not why I am writing this letter to you. I bring even greater glad tidings—tidings that will heal every fracture in your heart and every ache in your soul: for the first time in the history of the peoples of the geography of Türkiye, Turkish society rose as one against a military coup. It stood against bullets, bombs, tanks, aircraft, armored units, colonels, and generals; cried, “The coup shall not pass!”; and took control of its own destiny… Those in the front ranks fell, yet they did not retreat; those behind them fell, yet they did not retreat. They did not abandon the streets or the public squares, and they have not abandoned them still. Let me put it in those old terms we were so fond of: today is the eleventh day of the Turkish Revolution—wait, don’t be surprised, yes, today (27 July 2016)—the eleventh day of the Turkish Revolution, plain and simple, free of embellishment or exaggeration, delivered whole and complete (its accelerated final phase). And when I say “eleventh,” Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach immediately comes to mind—you know the one, don’t you? The thesis that, roughly speaking, says that the point is no longer to interpret the world, but to transform it. Yes, exactly as I say. Believe your ears. Let every fracture in your heart now be healed, let every ache within you subside, and rest in peace.

But make a note of it somewhere: when I come, I’ll expect my good news as well.

To all the broken hearts of Turkish society; to all who feel like strangers in their own land; to all who cannot find a reason for the ache within them; to all who, unable to give it a name, have no choice but to call it sorrow; to all the peoples who make up the natural habitat of this land—I bring yet another piece of good news (I know this one, too, will fill your eyes and your heart with joy): it was the devout Muslims who rose to the forefront. They did not allow the slow-moving, yet intense and arduous, revolution of the children of the people—a revolution they themselves had nurtured and brought to maturity since the early 2000s—to be crushed.

They stood against a coup openly backed by the United States (and most likely the European Union); moreover, a coup spearheaded by an Islamic community with whom they had lived side by side, intertwined, and whom they had, in places, even regarded as brothers—I do not know whether to call it fate or sheer coincidence. They resisted this disgraceful coup attempt, one that amounted, at the very least, to civil war. We have 246 martyrs and 2,186 wounded. But we won, Ahmet—we won! We altered the fate of the steppes, of the sorrowful riverways, of the crippled and gaunt horse standing motionless in the midst of infinity, of the cities, and of the land itself.

What, you want more still? Give me a moment to catch my breath.

In the blink of an eye that is a lifetime, in the final season of our lives, we came to know our brothers.

From every mosque came the salā: Es Salatu Ve’s-Selamu Aleyke Ya Rasulallah!

“Awaken!” they cried from the minarets, and the pigeons took flight. “Awaken—the homeland is in danger! Take to the streets. Stand shoulder to shoulder. The rights and freedoms we have won through tooth and nail over the past fifteen or twenty years, the gardens of coexistence, our right to speak and laugh freely, the wings we have spread over our destiny, our democracy—they are all in danger. Awaken!”

In the blink of an eye, in the final season of our lives, we came to know our brothers.

I do not know exactly what they were saying—Allahu Akbar Kabīrā—but, like heroes who had stepped out of the pages of ancient epics, they marched upon the oppressor without so much as blinking. I was there. I saw it. And I bear witness.

From the very moment the coup began to unfold, they took to the streets—and do not mistake this for some random outpouring. As though they were an orchestra moved by divine inspiration, wherever there was need—in whichever city, district, village, town, or street—they rose in that very place and flowed into the streets that needed them. First to the bridge (the 15 July Martyrs Bridge), then to the airports, then to the armored unit headquarters, then to the air force bases, then to the media centers, then to Parliament, then to the Presidential Complex, and finally to the General Staff Headquarters… In Cizre, Istanbul, Malatya, Ankara, Kazan, Denizli—in short, throughout the entire homeland—they cleared the occupied places of the occupiers; they took the soldiers into custody; they stopped the tanks; they brought down the helicopters and aircraft that had taken off and were raining bombs upon them; they prevented the soldiers and tanks attempting to leave their bases in support of the coup from doing so; they rendered them immobile with trucks, tractor-trailers, garbage trucks, and private cars; they kept the aircraft and helicopters grounded at their bases and airports… They restored the elected President, the elected government, and Parliament—the very heart of democracy—to their full authority and functioning. “We won’t let them have him!” they kept saying; and they kept their word—hats off to them, and by all that is sacred—they did not let them have Erdoğan. Thanks be to God. They pulled the country back from the brink of a bloody civil war with an uncertain outcome; they restored their country as a functioning, sovereign homeland.

Ahmet, I think our estrangement from our own people, our own culture, our own land begins with words. Do you remember how distant, how overly patriotic the word homeland used to sound to us? Now I know that these lands are our homeland; this language is our homeland. Now I know that beneath the soil, the geography, and the language lie seventy-two billion knots, seventy-two billion roots, seventy-two billion lives, seventy-two billion dreams, hopes, and voices, tied by nameless people from seventy-two nations and seventy-two cultures who sustain us—the living. It turns out that they are the ones who made this country, this geography, a homeland; that is what I have learned over these past ten days. All right, you’ll tell me to leave the literature aside and get on with what happened. Fair enough—but let me say it three times: hats off, hats off, hats off to these simple, humble Muslim “masses.” Let me say it in their own words: May God be pleased with them.

Let me also say this: if I should ever forget what I owe them, may my hands wither, may my tongue rot, and may my mother’s milk be forever forbidden to me.

You’ll say, “Enough—tell me this: how did they do it? With what?”

With their hands, their faith, and their hearts. Whoever stood against the coup, whoever marched toward the tanks—whether the meaning was one layer deep or thirty, whether it conformed to hermeneutics or to deconstruction—first cried, Ya Allah, then Bismillah, then Allahu Akbar. Yes, they also cried, “No Passage for the Coup,” “Soldiers Back to the Barracks,” and “Long Live Democracy,” but before all else there was Allah, and Allahu Akbar. I did not fully understand what they were saying, yet above everything else there seemed to hover, like the faint movement of lips, Wa’l-hamdu lillāhi Rabbi’l-‘ālamīn.

It turns out that a person grows, learns, creates, and acts only through their own words; through the words, meanings, and values that fill the eternity and infinity of their own heart, their own imagination, and their own capacity to bring into being, to act, and to create—and it is only for these that one dies. Only then do one’s deeds fit one as though they were made for no one else; only then can one build, with the labor of one’s hands and the light of one’s eyes, a world of justice, freedom, and brotherhood; only then can one truly become a society—whether modern, postmodern, or even pompostmodern—that is what these past ten days have taught me. All right, enough of my rambling.

But I am sure that, like the living leftists and socialists of today, you must have thought I had either passed over the word hands in my answer to the question, “How did they do it, and with what?”—“With their hands, their faith, and their hearts”—or simply thrown it in as a figure of speech.

Ahmet, I swear to you, they did all of this with their own hands. They had no Kalashnikovs, no hunting rifles, no heirloom firearms, no crudely made Black Sea pistols, no Molotov cocktails, no homemade gas-cylinder bombs, nothing of the sort. Not because they lacked them. Not because they could not have obtained them. Because they did not want them. Do you hear me, Ahmet? Because they did not want to be the ones who resorted to weapons. On the seventh or eighth day of the Revolution’s accelerated final phase—I cannot remember exactly—when signs of a second coup attempt were beginning to emerge, they immediately branded anyone among them who called out, “Grab your weapons and come,” as a provocateur, without the slightest hesitation. Declaring, “There is no power greater than the power of the people. Our greatest weapon is our just cause and our own hands. We are the owners of this country,” they refused to arm themselves.

We had known, more or less, that nearly all the incidents attributed over the course of their roughly century-long struggle for survival to Muslims and/or Islamists—such as the Sivas Madımak massacre—were in fact deep-state operations; that this movement had never resorted to arms; and that it had exercised extraordinary restraint in remaining outside violence and within the bounds of legitimate politics. But in circumstances where every limit of patience had been surpassed—where all manner of assassination teams, whether from the MAK or the SAT or elsewhere, had been deployed to eliminate the country’s elected President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whom they had sworn they would never allow to be hanged, just as Menderes (Ah, Menderes… Ah, if only you too were here, Menderes!), like those young saplings whose fate had been sealed “one from the right, one from the left”; where Erdoğan and those closest to him had escaped death by the narrowest of margins—Muslims could easily have said, “Enough. We bear no more responsibility”; they could have exercised their legitimate right of self-defense, taken up arms against the coup plotters, and resorted to violence. And what is more, with every passing hour we understand more clearly that this was precisely what the coup plotters had wanted and anticipated.

They did not. Hats off to them, and by all that is sacred, they did not. They refused to stoop to weapons or violence. From Hakkâri to Cizre, from Van to Elazığ, from Adana to Istanbul, millions of people who kept vigil for democracy until dawn across the length and breadth of the homeland did not smash a single ATM, did not shatter a single bank window, did not set fire to a single municipal vehicle, bus, or party headquarters, and not a single one of them concealed their face like a criminal.

Against every instrument of the coup stood a simple, unadorned, open-faced resolve: you shall not pass unless you trample over our dead. That is all.

And when I say every instrument of the coup, I mean, for example, one of the oldest and most serviceable of them all: the narrative that “Sunnis attacked Alevi neighborhoods.” That mechanism, too, was set in motion. Yet from the very top to the very bottom came an immediate, unequivocal, open-faced response: “The honor of the Alevis is entrusted to the Sunnis, and the honor of the Sunnis is entrusted to the Alevis.” They stood guard around Alevi neighborhoods against any possible provocation. Thanks be to God.

And against every instrument of the coup—whether dialogical, phenomenological, economic, political, or even “dialogical-phenomenological-economic-political”—there stood an argument as solid as rock, one that could not be refuted: you cannot turn the weapons bought with our taxes against us. That is all.

Ahmet, in the midst of all this, many signs appeared, and many false majesties faded away. They had seen Syrian refugees fleeing war drown along the eastern shores of the West while trying to reach the West. There was neither cursing, nor wholesale rejection, nor demonization: the West remained the West, and the East remained the East. And so they renewed the networks of roots and destiny that bound their mortal bodies, the meaning reflected in their eyes, and the lanterns of reason, wisdom, patience, gratitude, and memory to the nature, history, and geography in which they lived. They reopened rusted valves, restored the moss-covered and clogged channels through which flowed meaning, riverways, lifeblood, words, concepts, symbols, and the sap of life. You’re going to say I’m drifting back into literature again. Just wait a little—we have plenty of time. Let us indulge in a little literature too; what harm could it do?

For example, they transformed not only the meanings of “bigot,” “Muslim,” and “Islam,” but also the meanings of “fascist”—the label upon which, during the 1970s and 1980s, when we forged our identities as revolutionaries and socialists, we poured every imaginable evil—of “nationalism,” or “fascist nationalism,” which we despised with all our being, and, by contrast, of “leftism,” “socialism,” and “revolutionary politics,” from which we never once parted.

For example—and I know this will not surprise you, but it must be recorded—among the hundreds of thousands who stood against the coup, alongside hundreds of thousands of Muslims, there was not a single revolutionary or socialist (I cannot even bring myself to say, “hardly any,” Ahmet); yet there were quite a few “fascists,” and the MHP—the so-called “party of the fascists”—openly opposed the coup from the very first moment.

As you yourself witnessed while you were alive, this “fascist” party had long since—drawing lessons from the 1970s and 1980s, from the September 12 coup, and under the transformative influence of the new political landscape opened up by the AK Party—persisted, despite every attempt to manipulate it, in resisting what it called “taking to the streets.” It had refused to become the convenient instrument of violence and covert operations that it had been during the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, in this life-and-death moment for Türkiye, its stance against the coup demonstrated that this was by no means merely a conjunctural or realpolitik position.

For example, as the chauvinistic and operational dimensions of “nationalism”—those rooted in race and blood—began to recede, those dimensions emphasizing a community’s distinctiveness, self-confidence, and the horizontal, vertical, genealogical, sociological, and cultural sources from which it draws its existence and vitality began to come to the fore. Right beside it was born a new child called yerlilik (rootedness in the local), whose ultimate meaning and direction have yet to become clear. Beside it stood, like its shadow, the faint outline of an “Anatolian wisdom.”

For example, I saw “independence” and “shared destiny,” perhaps always present within the symbolism of the flag, rise during these ten days like a second flag.

For example, only recently have I realized just how shallow and one-dimensional the term people is—how it scarcely conveys anything beyond the words mass and herd—and yet, despite this, it has for decades been employed as an astonishingly explanatory, almost indispensable concept.

Over these ten days, I learned that the immortal stars that guide mortal humanity through this world—justice, equality, freedom, and brotherhood, perhaps handed down from one generation to the next as though by genetic inheritance—belong exclusively to no theory, no faith, no civilization, and no movement. They are capable of shining in every possible world, every intellectual system, and every structure of belief and faith.

Over these ten days, I learned that the true icebreaking force of this country (you see, I still cannot comfortably bring myself to call it a homeland), the truly “revolutionary,” “left,” and “destiny-owning” force—the true owners of this country—are the children of the people who live in this land, above all its Muslims. I learned that, for the first time in our history, a genuinely democratic political sphere has been established in this geography, and that Muslims have now become, at every level, both its safeguard and its compass.

So, you’re asking what the socialists did?

Who could have restrained the socialists, who had for quite some time stood at the very heart of the campaign to demonize Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the AK Party, and—perhaps most grievously of all—Islam and Muslims in general? They continued their demonization at full throttle.

Not even the mechanics of a coup—unfolding before their eyes like a Turkish film they had seen countless times, with familiar actors and a plot whose beginning, middle, and end were already known—managed to awaken them. Virtually the same script that had played out in the quintessentially Turkish, standardized, concentrated, and painfully obvious coup processes leading to the executions of the Mendereses on 27 May, of Deniz Gezmiş and his comrades on 12 March, and of both the Mendereses and the Gezmişes on 12 September was once again unfolding before their eyes. Yet not only did they fail to awaken to it; they justified it and manufactured fresh ammunition to sustain it.

I know your heart aches, that it pains you, and yet I also know you are not in the least surprised, Ahmet. Let me continue, and let me add this as well:

Not a single one of them—not one—stood up one evening, just as they themselves had dreamed of for decades, to the sound of the salā and prayers, rising from the edge of the darkness with their heavy hands pressed against the earth, and went out into the streets alongside those plain, “ordinary” people who changed the destiny of this barren steppe called Türkiye, of that crippled, scrawny horse standing motionless in the midst of infinity, of this land called Türkiye—the very “people” whose name they never ceased to invoke. I was there. I am a witness.

Because they were bigots, conservatives, reactionaries, Muslims; because they proclaimed the call to prayer at the top of their lungs; because they were said to fear enlightenment, to stand against the Enlightenment, to lag behind the age; because they were dismissed as narrow-minded, benighted; because they were branded ISIS sympathizers, crude, uncultured, ill-mannered, uncouth Anatolian bumpkins, hairy, belly-scratchers, pasta-eaters. It was supposedly in their very nature to be incapable of being democratic or of defending democracy.

Not a single one of them—not one—could write a straightforward article declaring, “No Passage for the Coup”; distribute a straightforward leaflet saying, “No to the Coup”; or put up a clean, striking No Pasarán poster. I am a witness.

Because they were socialists, modernists, champions of the Enlightenment. They were hardly going to learn how to oppose a coup from Muslims. Besides, they did not wish to become instruments of Erdoğan’s so-called civilian coup either. Erdoğan, the AK Party, and the Muslims had, in their view, established an autocratic, despotic, Islamofascist, theofascist order. They could no longer breathe; they could no longer speak. What business did they have among this AKP crowd? Could Erdoğan guarantee that this crowd would not turn on them?

Not one of them shuddered at the thought of the inferno of civil war into which the country would have been plunged had the coup succeeded. Not one of them recognized that a coup backed by the United States was an assault upon the country’s independence and said, “Hold on—that goes too far.” They could not. I am a witness.

Not one of them uttered a word about an organization—the Fetullahist Terrorist Organization (FETÖ)—fortified by the United States; cloaked in the suppressors of “moderate Islam,” “dialogue,” “civil society,” and “tolerance”; an organization that had succeeded in constructing a semantic universe in which every conceivable form of depravity could flourish (indeed, these very qualities had drawn the attention and favor of the United States); an organization obsessed with power, illegitimate, seeking power through undemocratic means, fully prepared for armed struggle, violence, civil war, killing, dying, and thoroughly mobilized for all of it. I am a witness.

And yet, if anyone in this entire picture deserved to be called “fascist,” it was this organization more than any other. Moreover, for years this very community and organization—”Fettoş,” as they derisively called it—had itself served as the principal symbol in the Islamophobic rituals that the socialists had inherited from Kemalism.

They said nothing. They behaved as though it did not exist. Because they were socialists, democrats, progressives, enlightened intellectuals. Because repelling the coup would benefit Erdoğan more than anyone else. Because autocracy would become hyper-autocracy, fascism hyper-fascism, and Sharia hyper-Sharia. Because Erdoğan was, in their eyes, an Islamist fascist, bent on dictatorship, willing to use every available means and every organization to achieve the presidency, even committing genocide against the Kurds if necessary.

That is how it is, Ahmet. We are both exhausted. Now that the fractures in our hearts and the ache within our souls have begun to heal, let us get some sleep.

(*) Ertuğrul Başer was born in 1957 in the village of Karasenir, in Nevşehir Province. He graduated from Kuleli Military High School in 1973 and from the Turkish Military Academy in 1976. Following the 12 September military coup, he was dismissed from the armed forces because of his leftist political activities. In 1984, he published a volume of poetry titled Fer. He graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Boğaziçi University in 1990. He subsequently worked as a translator at İGDAŞ until 2002. Various essays and translations of his were published in Birikim magazine. He has translated numerous books for the publishing houses Birikim, İletişim, and Ayrıntı, including works by authors such as Paul Feyerabend, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Ernesto Laclau. He is now retired and lives in Sweden.

*https://serbestiyet.com/yazarlar/bir-fatiha-arkadasim-ahmet-asikin-ruhuna-mektup-24188/