Open Letter: ‘Imam Khomeini’

The open letter below was published in Yarın Magazine in 2004.

 After September 11, the United States and Western powers, with the support of Iran and the Shiites, had occupied Afghanistan and Iraq and were trying to make Türkiye, a partner in this occupation as well. Israel’s 28 Februarist generals and what was then called The Cemaat, later known as FETÖ, had not yet fallen out with each other. While the generals were preparing for another coup against the newly formed and inexperienced AK Party government and holding it under blackmail pressure, FETÖ positioned itself like a pseudo-mafia protecting the AK Party from that coup while simultaneously placing it under its own control. Under these conditions, ambitions to invade Iran as well or to provoke a Türkiye–Iran war were also being brought onto the agenda. In fact, until 2015 this was always one of FETÖ’s most important objectives. In the following years—after the Mavi Marmara massacre—it even attempted to prosecute many politicians and bureaucrats, especially Tayyip Erdoğan, whom it saw as obstacles to such a war, through the fabricated Tevhid-Selam organization case file. Israel, in order to prolong its exhausted lifespan and become a permanent hegemonic power, was constantly provoking tensions in the Middle East: Shiite-Sunni, Turkish-Kurdish, Iranian-Arab, and Türkiye-Iran contradictions. In Iran, the Shiite crescent policy inspired by Sasanian-Safavid ambitions; in the Arab world, the violence of Bedouin nihilism appearing in Salafi form; and in Türkiye, the policies of FETÖ disguised as a false Ottomanism were products of this provocation.

This letter was shaped under these conditions in 2004, blending them with our emotional observations of Iran from 1990 that remain in our memory.

Now, like those of us who were once excited and saw the Islamic Revolution as an opportunity to save oppressed and innocent Muslim peoples from the domination of imperialist-Zionist powers, we are experiencing the disappointment of the Iranian experience, which later turned into a mullahratic regime and became disgraced through sectarian medieval reactionism. We will not mourn the killers of this malignant regime, which for twenty years, while cooperating with the West in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, has shed far more Muslim blood than the United States and Israel. Those vile and dishonorable circles who still act as agents for this regime that has abandoned the spirit and purpose of the revolution, who fabricate and mask it as an anti-US, anti-Zionist resistance axis to justify Iran’s massacres, and who continue to insult the entire Sunni world, the Syrian revolution, and Turkish Muslims who criticize the clerical rule, have written by their shame into the history.

The spirit of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which struck the faces of the United States, Israel, Britain, France, Russia, China, and the other collaborating Arab regimes like a slap, is still waiting for the moment when it will rise again. Just as the oppressed Muslim people of Syria overthrew the tyrannical and sectarian fascist Baathist-Assad killers, like the Iranian people once did, we hope that the Iranian people will once again overthrow the decayed mullahist peacock throne as they did in 1979 and return to the spirit of the revolution. The savage, treacherous, and disgraceful attacks of the United States and Israel, however, unquestionably aim to destroy this revolutionary spirit and turn Iran-like in the days of the peacock throne-into a servant of Western Aryan fascism and Israel. Our only wish is that the suffering the Iranian people have endured for forty years, indeed since the Second World War, will come to an end and that they will attain an honorable order.

Our only hope is the establishment of a regime that will put an end to the human rights violations, oppression, and cruelty perpetrated by mullah oligarchs in the name of Islam, and bring peace and security to Iran. But we hope that this will be achieved not by the so-called Iranian opposition, who have become traitors to their own country, betrayed Islam out of anger at the mullahs, become infidels, and wield the sword of the infidels, but by the true Iranian people who aim for a genuine Muslim order in accordance with the spirit and purpose of a revolution that is non-sectarian and demands justice. Only then will a true axis of resistance against the US, Israel, and other Aryan-Western powers be established, and Türkiye too will play a role within the coordination of this axis that guarantees its own mission, existence, and survival. Perhaps then Iran can emerge from the 500-year sectarian pit into which it was thrown by the ignorant peasant Safavid gang, establish a healthy relationship with the Muslim world, and experience a renaissance of the true Muslim essence that makes Iran what it is, that of Malik-Shah, of Nizam al-Mulk, of Imam Ghazali, of Abu Hanifa, of the glorious Islamic enlightenment extending from Samarkand to Isfahan, then to Baghdad and Damascus, instead of Perso-Aryan Zoroastrianism, Sassanian Magianism, and Safavid hypocrisy. Only then could Iran become a model country that contributes culturally and philosophically to both the Arab world it longs to influence and to the Ottoman legacy. Otherwise, it will continue to swing from one extreme—Shiite Iranian fanaticism—to another—an irreligious, westernized Iran—and remain a pit of discord exporting new troubles to the Muslim world.

Türkiye should support Iran’s return to its genuine Muslim roots and should be cautious against the alternative. Any development or outcome that leads Iran, an exceptional part of the Islamic Ummah and civilization, to continue falling victim to the devils of the US and Israel after descending into a disgraceful sectarian-murderous mullahist peacock throne abyss, is detrimental to Türkiye, the Muslim world, and the entire world. Everyone who has turned their sect into their religion should look at issues not from the medieval perspective of their sects but with the reasonable, possible, and comprehensive foresight of today and the future.

————————————-

 

Open Letter: ‘Imam Khomeini’

 

Esteemed Imam Khomeini,

I think it was a few years ago. One day, a close friend whom I loved very much suddenly turned to me while we were walking on the road and asked, ‘Who do you think has the most dignified face of the 20th century?’ I was surprised. It was an unexpected question, and to be honest, I had not fully understood it either. Instinctively I began searching my memory. He stared at me, waiting for an answer. Sometimes a single answer can reveal a person’s entire identity. For that reason, I quickly but cautiously entered a mode of thinking.

Names passed through my mind: Malcolm X, Alija Izetbegović, Dudayev, Che Guevara… Of course Enver Pasha… No… It had to be a more universal hero… A hero? Yes! We had grown up reading Tex, Tommiks, and Tarkan comics. A leader meant a hero… Someone handsome, capable of governing, and always victorious. But whom should I favor? I had many heroes. If I chose one, I would be unfair to the others. Helplessly, I listed these names. He shook his head and said, ‘Everyone I ask this question misunderstands it.’ ‘I’m not asking who the best, greatest, or most magnificent leader of the 20th century is, I’m asking who has the most dignified face of the 20th century. The most dignified face, gaze, posture…’

Now I understood the question. This time faces began passing across the screen of my memory. But they were still the same names’ faces. Most of all Che’s face, of course. Because, almost like a social engineering project, the most stylish posters and most attractive photographs for years had belonged to Che. We would later learn that this was the product of an anti-American propaganda campaign originating in Europe, particularly France. But those shadowy images of Che looking off into the distance had already been engraved into our minds. Helplessly I said, ‘That’s all!’ ‘These are my heroes. They’re all dignified.’ ‘I think it’s Khomeini,’ he said, indifferently. Then he turned and began to walk. I was shocked. Yes, how had Khomeini not come to my mind? But how could it be? My friend was one of the veterans of the MHP (Nationalist Movement Party). Moreover, he was a close friend of the leader of a major right-wing party. I turned and looked at his face again. He was completely serious. ‘The most dignified face of the 20th century was Khomeini,’ he said.
In ‘his’ posture, his gaze, his majesty, and his demeanor there was dignity from beginning to end. A dignity that bowed to nothing and no power. It was reflected on his face. What he did, what he said, his mistakes and virtues—that’s another matter.

‘I only mean that dignified expression concentrated in a face, that courage and that lofty gaze challenging all the devils of the world. That was most present in Khomeini.’

Yes, he was completely serious. He was not joking and perhaps he was right. Images of Khomeini began passing through my mind. Yes, that incredible composure, standing still while challenging America, the Shah, Shiite dogmatism, everything. Suddenly the familiar headlines of the pro-Israel Masonic press came before my eyes. ‘Black Mullah,’ ‘Watch out for yourself Mullah,’ ‘The Mullah is dead,’ ‘The Mullahs to Iran.’ For years, when Iran was mentioned, only these expressions had been suggested to society. This American-Israeli rhetoric had influenced part of the public; the words Iran, Revolution, and Khomeini had been engraved in memories almost with hatred and disgust.

Had this indoctrination also influenced me, making me forget Khomeini in my subconscious? Then I said no to myself… What influenced me was what I had seen in Iran, and it was Ali Shariati who enabled me to distinguish between Iran’s politics and the revolution itself.

For this reason, Iran and Khomeini, whom the pro-Israel Masonic press attacked, should be considered separately… Even if only out of stubbornness. We know that whatever the oligarchy attacks is usually the truth. But beyond this stubbornness, of course I had my own criticisms.

My friend had taken me back to the past. I thought about it for days. I breathed again the atmosphere of the 1980s. One year after the Imam died, I had gone to Iran as a journalist. They showed us the Shah’s palace. Then they took us to Imam Khomeini’s house. Just as in the photographs we had seen; a modest room with a sofa, a telephone, and a carpet on the floor… The man who had shaken the world lived in this house. But that was not the event that affected me most. After leaving the house, we entered a small grocery shop just around the corner. While trying to speak half in Turkish and half in broken language with the grocer to buy something, the man realized we were Turkish and that we had come to see ‘the Imam’s house.’ He began to cry. With the help of a friend we tried to talk a little. Sobbing, he took out an old notebook from a drawer. Then he opened a page he had marked and showed it to us. His tears were flowing even more now.

Speaking in a mixture of Persian and Azeri while crying, he tried to explain something. One of our friends turned to us and translated what he could understand. The man was an old neighbor of the Khomeini family. He had been running that grocery store in the neighborhood for years. He had known the Imam and his family both during the years of exile before the revolution and after the revolution. The notebook he showed us was a credit ledger, and it contained the debts of the Khomeini family. He kept kissing that page, saying, ‘The Imam died indebted to me. He was such a man. I gave up my receivables; I will not collect these debts but he was such a man.’ He showed us the page. Indeed, it was a page of debts: 7 loaves of bread, 5 eggs, 1 kilogram of sugar, 3 loaves of bread, one pack of tea… So many tomans taken, so much remaining, and so on… We were all shattered. After all, we had come from a country where, in those years, the affairs of nephew Yahya, Semra Özal’s daisies, and the wealth of Özal’s son were being discussed everywhere.

To personally witness that a revolutionary leader, a personality who had challenged the world, lived exactly as he appeared, to see that ledger left us crushed. So the Imam had owed his grocer three loaves of bread and five eggs… So he had challenged not only America and Russia, but life itself, the world itself, saying, I don’t care about worldly life either…

On one side, the eastern splendor of our lands, leaders boasting of millions of dollars in wealth, trillion-lira contracts given to relatives and friends, theft, shamelessness, insatiable greed, grim faces, pharaoh-like ambitions, Croesus-like aristocracy… And now in our hands was Khomeini’s credit ledger.

We awoke from that shock the next day during the Friday prayer. In the largest mosque of Tehran there was a packed crowd. Masses of poor people, women, men, and children wearing summer clothes in the middle of winter… There was snow on the ground, and under their long chadors one could barely notice the bare feet of many women. Yes, bare feet! People either wearing slippers or completely barefoot passed by us as we sat listening to the sermon. Barefoot people walking in the snow, people with patched, torn, old clothes… people, people, people…

Then suddenly sirens, the disgusting sirens of official vehicle escorts shouting ‘Make way, a big man is coming!’ People scattering, paths opening. And brand-new, shiny black jeeps.

Mullahs stepped out of them, with their wives and children. Black sunglasses, gleaming clothes, bodyguards, attendants, flatterers, people pushing each other to be seen by them.

The crowd, accustomed to all these scenes, remained indifferent… We experienced a second shock. Khomeini’s credit ledger… The mullahs’ jeeps… Barefoot women… And the mullahs’ wives with bodyguards, sunglasses, and glamorous airs…

A sentence of Bertrand Russell stuck in my mind: ‘My Lord, aside from the pains of childbirth, what suffering did you endure to obtain such wealth, servants, mansions, and carriages?!’

My God! Is this an Arabian Nights tale?, An oriental epic? What kind of schizophrenia is this? What a terrible contradiction? Years had passed since the revolution, yet it seemed the only one overthrown had been Shah Reza. Now there were even more shahs, turbaned shahs, chador-clad princesses… The red of the martyrs’ blood, the black mourning of Husayni heroes, and red carpets, black jeeps… On one side Ali Shariati, Hussein Mousavi, Khomeini… And on the other Rafsanjani, Khamenei, Larijani…

The ancient Persian aristocracy known as the bazaar had seized the revolution from within and had established a kind of Shiite Umayyadism through the formula ‘Islam for Iran.’ Islam, the revolution, and Khomeini had been turned, at least for the time being, into symbols necessary for Iran and plastered everywhere. If that surface were scraped away, who knows what else would emerge underneath.

In the deep history of Iran, the revolution was like a great but short-lived explosion. The only real change was that the mullahs ceased being the balancing counter-pole to the Persian aristocracy and instead became integrated into it. Iran had now entered a kind of late medieval era in which the clergy were also counted among the upper classes. The mullahs had become the new curtain of Iran’s high society. Behind that curtain, however, the same old forces still stood. And a man who bought groceries on credit from the neighborhood shopkeeper could only be a temporary leader. Once he died, the bazaar, now together with the clergy, seized everything. For me, the Iran chapter closed at that point.

While thinking about all this, I understood why Khomeini had not come to my mind when my friend asked that question. From that time on, I had always kept Khomeini and Iran, Ali Shariati and Iran, and the revolution and Iran separate in my mind. As if those names were heroes of an entirely different, almost mythical epic beyond time and space, while Iran itself was simply a large, old neighboring country beside us. Since making that distinction, I had removed the name Khomeini from Iran in my mind and buried it somewhere else entirely, planting red and white tulips over it. Perhaps that is why my memory could not immediately retrieve this dignified face of the twentieth century.

‘As for our close neighbor Iran’… For a Türkiye facing west, Iran (and of course our other eastern and Arab neighbors) was the place where a past we don’t even want to remember began, a backward East, a conservative world where everything was spoken in the language of religion. With the Republic period, we had turned our backs on that world and behaved with deliberate indifference toward it. Our relations with the East were now conducted through the West, within the borders drawn by those sitting across from us at Lausanne and on their behalf. The Saadabad Pact, the Baghdad Pact, CENTO, and even our memberships in Islamic organizations were all products of adherence to those boundaries. Beyond that, especially for our Westernist elites, the East no longer existed and, if possible, should never exist again.

Our nation, however, remained connected to the East, sometimes through Islamism and sometimes through Turanism. Our oppressed Muslim brothers or captive Turks always concerned some among us. It was as if a collective obligation was being fulfilled, and despite the dramatic rupture imposed by Lausanne, which was a kind of modern-day Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, one part of society always preserved the bonds of brotherhood on behalf of the whole. For the ordinary masses, our neighbors remained distant places known only as much as school history lessons or the press mentioned them, places even more remote than Europe or America. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt… as well as Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, Romania, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Crimea, and the Caucasus, were etched into minds during the Cold War as enemies, foreigners, traitors who had stabbed us in the back, or completely distant lands. They were belittled with stereotypes such as desert Arab, Persian cunning, thieving Bulgarian, tricky Azerbaijani, or gypsy Roman.

Combined with the sides these countries chose in the Cold War, they were always presented with labels such as communist, Baathist, pro-Russian, and similar descriptions. After the Cold War ended, despite all this Western-centered indoctrination, the hidden dynamics preserved by those fulfilling that collective obligation began to move. Especially from the late 1980s and early 1990s onward, a warmer and closer neighborhood policy came onto the agenda. The Bosnian massacre brought the Balkans closer, while Zionist oppression in Palestine made the Middle East feel nearer. Iran remained closed because of its revolutionary export policy, and Syria because of its support for the PKK, but with the rest of our Muslim neighbors new opportunities arose to become acquainted again.

For some of us, Iran still remains a closed country, almost like a plague. The regime issue is actually just an excuse. Those who imposed the ban know very well what a Türkiye-Iran cooperation could accomplish, given that Iran is the region’s second largest state. Then there are, of course, the historical Iran-Rome wars and the Ottoman-Safavid wars, deep geopolitical contradictions. Yet for at least the last three hundred years we have lived in peace with Iran, and apart from recent regime concerns we have had almost no serious problems.

It is not taught in schoolbooks, but when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, Iran too was under occupation. The north was occupied by Russia and the south by the British. Ottoman forces, especially members of the Committee of Union and Progress and the Special Organization, cooperated with Iranian resistance fighters. Enver Pasha sent weapons and money to Mirza Küçük Khan, who organized a major resistance movement in the Jangal region of northern Iran, while some Unionist officers provided military training. Members of the Special Organization such as Rauf Orbay, Ömer Fevzi Mardin, and Ömer Naci traveled repeatedly to Iran to incite popular uprisings against the occupation. In other words, during those years of collapse, the patriots of the two countries supported one another and maintained intense contacts to organize a common resistance front. In the subsequent period, these relations continued between Shah Reza and Mustafa Kemal after the Pahlavi dynasty was brought to power in Iran, whose existence was officially permitted by agreements similar to the Treaty of Lausanne. After the Second World War, the four-state line of Türkiye, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, formed in the politics of protecting oil and containing the Soviet Union, existed in controlled relations as pieces on the chessboard of global politics. Yet the Turkish governing bureaucracy and the Iranian aristocracy always looked at one another with suspicion, jealousy, and distance due to deeper historical reasons.

Sectarian differences added a geo-cultural layer to this geopolitical distance. Shiism had long regarded Türkiye as the capital of Sunnism since Ottoman times. Iranians, whether Azeri or Persian, always preserved a unique nationalism expressed through Shiism, which in the end was identified with Iranian identity. Deep down, this nationalism perceived Iran’s western neighbor, Anatolia and beyond, as Rome, the other. The Iran-Türkiye border was essentially the Persian-Roman frontier. The sectarian difference was merely the religious expression of this ancient geopolitical dialectic. Still, despite these differences, the two rival geographies lived side by side in peace for centuries without forming an active contradiction.

After the revolution, when Iran broke with the Anglo-Saxon world and drew closer to Europe, Russia, and China, the distance between the governing elites of the two countries became broader.

Iran lived through a dense and critical thirty-year period marked by the revolution, the war with Iraq, tensions with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and isolation due to the United States embargo. Most importantly, internally its sociology changed significantly through revolutionary Islam. Externally, however, because of the change of its allies, it became an eastern country detached from its western side. Yet the real East actually began after Iran, and Iran itself had long been a bridge between East and West.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Iran, having been freed from hostile governments in both Afghanistan and Iraq and benefiting from rising oil prices, arguably emerged as the biggest winner of the process. Since abandoning its revolutionary line, Iran has pursued a foreign policy based less on the Islamic world or anti-imperialist alliances and more on a Shiite axis and realpolitik relations and through its famous Persian diplomacy, conducted secretly (through the Aryan Indian upper caste) with the Anglo-Saxons and openly with the Catholic West, Iran has positioned itself almost as a game-setter.  We can observe the same skill in its relations with Russia, India, and China. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Iran is the only country that uses its oil and gas as a geopolitical weapon with such mastery. The only way to properly understand Iran’s current ambition to become a nuclear power, after having maintained its internal integrity through attempts at regime softening throughout this process, is to first identify the internal contradictions between the turbulent 30-year history of Iranian identity and the deep-seated 2500-year-old Persian-Sassanid-Safavid lineage of Iran.

Revolutionary Iran, the line of Ali Shariati and Khomeini, actually represented a parenthesis in Iranian history. Compared with Iran’s earlier attempts at cultural isolation from the region and imperial hegemony over it during the Sasanian era through Zoroastrianism and the Safavid era through Shiism, the 1979 revolution was in fact a critique of that line and even the opposite, an effort at universalization and integration with the region. The revolutionary spirit broke Shiite-Iranian nationalism and achieved universality and the Shariati-Khomeini understanding of Islam, with its concept of Ali’s Shiism and its efforts at rapprochement between sects, Daru’t Taqrib, symbolized reconciliation with the Sunni world. For the first time, thanks to Khomeinism, Iran had raised its sword not against Sunnism but against non-Muslim powers. Today, however, this line, which we may call Khomeinism, contrary to what many think, has been defeated and withdrawn. What dominates Iran now is no longer Khomeinism, but the ancient nationalism of Iranian identity.

After Khomeini, with Khamenei, fanatical mullahs and the Persian aristocracy sabotaged Khomeini’s line from within and redirected the revolution onto another path. They pulled Iran back toward becoming a nationalist, Shiite-axis power seeking patronage in the region and engaging with great powers, aspiring to be a regional and even global force. Iran’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, in cooperation with the US after the US invasion, were carefully observed and noted throughout the Islamic world as a confirmation of this line. In this sense, Iran’s effort to obtain nuclear weapons can be seen not merely as a defense of the Iranian regime or revolutionary Iran, but essentially as an initiative embraced by the Persian aristocracy. Ahmadinejad’s harsh rhetoric therefore appears to function as a convenient cover, almost like a curtain allowing this new Iran to take shape under a justified and legitimate appearance for the Iranian people, the Shiite dynamic in the region, and partly for the anti-Zionist and anti-American world.

Undoubtedly, Ahmadinejad has the face of a sincere revolutionary and a devoted believer coming from Khomeini’s line. He represents the barefoot masses, the streets, and the segments of society in Iran that have remained revolutionary. But the problem lies precisely here. Ahmedinejad, caught between the aristocracy represented by Larijani and the mullahs integrated into the aristocracy represented by Rafsanjani, is a figure sociologically influential but economically, politically, and geopolitically bound to the aristocracy, situated at the point where idealism and realism clash. For this reason, to understand Iran, one must try to look behind the curtain of Ahmadinejad.

We know the reasons behind the aggression of the United States and the global coalition toward Iran. The Anglo-Saxon powers’ desire for revenge because Iran changed sides with the revolution, their effort to bring Iran back into line, the intrigues of the Jewish lobby, the bullying impulse to teach uncontrolled countries a lesson, and a demonstration of power toward the European Union, Russia, and China through Iran… All of these geopolitical reasons are valid. But if we start to read the issue from the opposite perspective by considering the Iran-Contra scandal, indirect cooperation with the US in Bosnia, and how the increase in oil prices and developments in Afghanistan and Iraq have benefited Iran the most, it can also be said that the Iran-US tension is a kind of bargaining chip, via the UK, for offering Iran a new role. As we know from Clausewitz, ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means.’ An attack on Iran could be seen as an attempt to intensify negotiations aimed at reintegrating Iran into the world system.

If one day Iran changes sides and reconciles again with the United States, Britain, and Israel, a more dangerous chapter will open for Türkiye and for the Middle East. At that point, no one should doubt that our media will be filled not with headlines about ‘black mullahs,’ but with stories about Iranian clerics who read Kant and Hegel, use the internet, and are enlightened religious figures; about how Iran was once an ancient Turkish homeland; and about how Persian culture is actually one of the roots of our own culture. Praise for the Aryan race and Aryan culture might appear, and even theories suggesting that Turks, like the Kurds, are in fact a people who branched off from Aryan origins could be raised. Civilization itself might be moved from Greece to Iran as its birthplace. All that would be required is for the Iranians to change sides and join the Anglo-Saxon camp. That is how these things work…

Iran’s integration into the Anglo-Saxon front would, of course, mean having an extremely advantageous and multifaceted opportunity within the emerging US-Russia-China Cold War game: to persuade Iran to reconcile with its old role, to control oil, to blackmail China, and to manipulate the Shiite minority, which is often a contradictory and active minority throughout the region. For this reason, the West seems likely to be even more persistent about Iran than it was about Iraq. Iran, meanwhile, with its diplomatic skill, geopolitical advantages, and energy power, is playing the game well and searching for ways to emerge from the negotiations as the most profitable side. At the end of this process, ambitions for a kind of global Aryan empire could even emerge. From Hasan Sabbah to Shah Ismail, Iran’s recent history demonstrates that complex but highly strategic alliances with the West are possible.

What will Türkiye do in this operation? Türkiye remained on the sidelines during the invasion of Iraq, took part in the mission in Afghanistan, and has managed the Syrian issue mainly through diplomatic mediation. But the Iran matter is far more complex and problematic. First and foremost, Iran, and the Shiites in particular, are seen as the instigators of the sectarian conflict in Iraq, and in return, Türkiye is being offered a role in destabilizing efforts targeting Iranian Azerbaijan via northern Azerbaijan. While some members of the political elite appear eager for this role, others seem to prefer staying away from it under any circumstances. The first group is gathering political and regional instruments suited to this policy, while the second group, for the moment, is buying time by passing the matter to the United Nations.

Undoubtedly, when viewed from the perspective of state interests, the existence of a nuclear power next door-whoever it may be-is unsettling. We are speaking about a country that fought an eight-year war with Iraq, a Muslim country half of whose population is Shiite, even though it believed itself to be in the right. In such circumstances, it is natural that some among us think in more technical and cold-blooded terms beyond religious and historical reasons and develop strategies accordingly. The real issue, however, is to do this from the standpoint of Türkiye, not on behalf of the West or under its impositions…

For this reason, the option of nuclear cooperation and joint nuclear research with Iran should be considered.

It is clear that any policy that brings Türkiye and Iran into confrontation would be a betrayal. Even discussing such a possibility is absurd. During the invasion of Iraq, some of our pro-American figures were exposed. Now, during the operation against Iran, the remaining pro-Americans, pro-Israelis, and pro-British actors will also be exposed. Their ideological masks do not matter. They may wear the mask of Kemalist, liberal, leftist, Turkish nationalist, or even Islamist identities. In newspapers, familiar narratives about the “black mullah regime” may be promoted through references to well-known murders framed under secularist rhetoric; some writers may accelerate their publications with a pro-Israeli Masonic tone; certain nationalist publications may raise louder calls for freedom for Azerbaijanis… Some Islamists may contribute to this wave under the banner of Sunni solidarity by displaying hostility toward Shiites, while some leftists may emphasize human-rights issues of Iranian opposition groups. Through all this, hidden agents will reveal themselves. The opposite could also occur in Iran. Hostility toward Türkiye, sectarian or ideological attacks against Türkiye…, Or refined forms of pressure such as cutting natural gas supplies… Hopefully none of this will happen, but as Western pressure on Iran intensifies, it is likely that such tense confrontations will increase. Despite everything, Turkish–Iranian friendship should remain an indispensable principle guided by the common sense of both sides.

The rational foundation of Turkish–Iranian relations lies in steps that increase mutual interdependence between the two major neighboring states. Within such interdependence, a friendly rivalry and warm cooperation can coexist. But hostility, never!

Whoever sows the seeds of hostility between Türkiye and Iran, whoever speaks with the voice of the United States and Israel, whoever deepens alienation from our neighbors in the name of nationalism or sectarianism, those who do so on either side are traitors to both countries. Because if Iran is forced to its knees, Türkiye will be the next target.

The Iran–Rome wars ended with the emergence of Islam. The Ottoman–Safavid wars were the final move of Iranian geopolitics, and they ended with the decisive victory of the Ottomans. This victory implied a tacit pledge that Iran would no longer pursue an imperial policy toward its western lands. That pledge still continues and should continue. What falls to Türkiye is to convince the Persian aristocracy, the mullahs, and the Iran of the streets represented by Ahmadinejad that this pledge is a guarantee for Iran’s existence and survival. Likewise, Türkiye must also avoid adopting a hostile attitude toward Iran… Because our ancient policy toward the East has always included securing our rear and acting as the fortress of dignity of the East. Even though the Ottoman Empire seemed to have turned its back toward the East, and the Republic appeared to do the same, both in fact followed this ancient policy without deviation. Today there is no reason that would require us to depart from it.

But if one day, for example, Iran were to break this pledge, the ones who should give it a lesson would not be global powers, wars, or fifth-column activities, but the indigenous will of the Muslim world and the shared conscience of the Iranian people’s sociology shaped by the line of Ali Shariati and Khomeini. This conscience should unite the Turkish, Arab, Persian, Kurdish, and other Muslim peoples of our region, as well as Orthodox Christians and non-Zionist Eastern Jewish minorities, as brothers, co-religionists, kin, or companions on the same path, encouraging them to build together a great and peaceful homeland, a shared nation and a shared state. Imperialism will sooner or later withdraw, and this conscience will prevail…

Esteemed Imam Khomeini,

Despite our criticisms of you on many other matters, we will continue to remember you with mercy for that dignity you carried.

Had you lived, I am sure you too would have continued to be one of the voices of this conscience. If other leaders emerge from these lands carrying the expression that was on your dignified face, if they live in a house like yours and buy their groceries on credit from a shopkeeper like yours, then it will mean that the banner of light and well-being, independence and freedom, justice and a true republic has begun to wave over our strange countries, where merchant politicians, thieving oligarchies, status-quo bureaucrats, and a devilish media now rage and dominate.

What falls to us is to keep the voice of this conscience strong and, against malicious plans, to secure the well-being and peace of our peoples through that conscience.

We do not even wish to think of any other possibility.

 

*First publication: May 2004, Yarın Magazine

Source: Ahmet Özcan, Açık Mektuplar, Yarın Yayınları, 2010.