The Scandal of The Kemalist Mind

I, unluckily, made a lot of people upset with my piece in last weekend's edition of the Turkish Daily News, “The gospel according to Atatürk.” A few dozen readers sent fuming emails, which rebuked me for daring to criticize the level of veneration shown in Turkey to its founder.If you have been reading the “Letters to the editor” section, you might have come across two of these reactions, which came from two Turkish readers living in the United States. The one from New Jersey noted that he was “shocked” by my piece, and added, “someone should tell Akyol that he is dead wrong.” The other one, a lady, expressed “anguish” at me and my “very naive look.” I, she also argued, “cannot be a Turk.”In response, I am sincerely thankful to such critics, because they present nice case studies of what I have been talking about. I said that there is a popular “cult of Atatürk” in Turkey, whose followers have a “strict mental blueprint” that leads them to “detachment from reality.” And that's precisely what you can find in these annoyed comments.Cognitive dissonanceLet me show you one example. The first reader, besides bashing me, argued that “dialogue among all people in Turkey should be improved so that no one should be afraid of saying ‘I am proud to be a Turk.'” It is really hard to understand how “dialogue among all people in Turkey” will make everybody proud of being a Turk, but that's the minor issue. The real gem is the presumption that some people in Turkey are afraid of saying, “I am proud to be a Turk.” In fact, in this country, it has never been a problem to say that, and it is in fact an officially sanctioned mantra. The real problem has always been to say that you are proud of being something other than a Turk — such as a Kurd, an Armenian, a Christian, and even a supranational Muslim. (For the record, in 1982, politician Şerafettin Elçi was imprisoned for simply saying, “I am a Kurd and there are Kurds in Turkey.”)So it is really mind-boggling that our Kemalist reader thinks that “Turkishness” is suppressed in Turkey, while the fact is that Turkishness is the only identity which is not suppressed at all.If you would like to see more detachment-from-reality in action then take a look at the second reader. She criticized me for criticizing the “I am watching you” motto put on some Atatürk flags. But she got it totally wrong by writing: “It simply means for anyone that understands English language ‘We are following your steps.'” Because the motto I criticized did not mean that Turks follow Atatürk. It rather meant Atatürk watches over the Turks. It was plain clear for anyone who has a grasp of either the English or the Turkish language.Neither publish nor perishI won't point out every case of cognitive dissonance in the writings of Kemalist readers. For most unbiased observers, it should be obvious that Kemalism has turned into a dogmatic ideology and its adherents present a pitiable intellectual poverty. The latter phenomenon is visible almost in every field. In the Turkish media, for example, die-hard Kemalist commentators are among the least sophisticated ones. Their columns are full of either dry clichés or angry polemics. In the academia, scholars or faculties who are famed to be devout Kemalists hardly produce anything that would get into international academic literature. (Alas, they neither publish nor perish!) Actually the handful of globally acclaimed Turkish scholars are detested by their Kemalist colleagues at home. Şerif Mardin, who is probably the most prominent Turkish sociologist ever, was boycotted by the all-Kemalist Turkish Sciences Academy (TÜBA), simply for that he is too lenient on religion. Actually in the field of social sciences, Turkey seems to be divided among the fruitful and articulate academics, and the rest, which includes almost all Kemalists. In literature, the situation is no different: Turkey's globally successful novelists, such as the recent Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk or Elif Şafak, are the ones who have the ability to think outside of the Kemalist box. No wonder they are abhorred by the Kemalists, who explain their achievements by conspiracy theories. They think Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize, for example, because the “imperialists” decided to promote him for “insulting Turkishness.”For quite some time, I have been pondering what makes the Kemalist mind so shallow. This cannot be related to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, because he was a smart, well-educated and cultured statesman who vigorously promoted science and learning. I believe the problem is in the way he is perceived by his devotees. Since they see him and his period as the source all the wisdom they need, they don't have an urge to understand the world. They think the Supreme Leader already understood it perfectly and all we Turks need to is walk on his righteous path.The evangelical mindThis line of thinking creates intellectual poverty within any paradigm. Religious fundamentalism is the most obvious example. Indeed religion can be a driving force for intellectual enterprise if it is interpreted in a dynamic way — and that's what gave rise to towering figures such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) or Newton. But religion would be a mind stopper if its believers think that all they need to study is the life of a holy man and the scripture he brought.In his famous book "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," American historian Mark Noll suggests that most evangelical Christians in his country suffer from that misconception. He shows that evangelicals have failed to engage in "the whole spectrum of modern learning, including economics and political science, literary criticism and imaginative writing, historical inquiry and philosophical studies, linguistics and the history of science, social theory and the arts." “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he concludes, "is that there is not much of an evangelical mind."I am not an expert on American Christianity, and can't tell whether Noll is right or wrong. But I do know about Kemalism, and this ideology suffers from the same problem he points out. Yes, Kemalism has a “scandal” of its own, too, and it is that that there is not much of a Kemalist mind. Writer : Mustafa Akyol