İHSAN YILMAZ
ihsan.yilmaz@todayszaman.com
When I saw a Bediüzzaman Said Nursi book for the first time in my life, I was a teenager. The first thing I did was to go to my state school’s library and to try to find out who this man was. Was he a good guy or a bad guy? The encyclopedia that I read was unequivocally clear about the man: He was a Kurdist, nationalist villain. Nevertheless, maybe with an adolescent feeling of protest or the knowledge of what the repressively secularist Kemalists have done to practicing Muslims, I decided to read the Nursi book. I thank God with every bone in my body that I made this decision.
In the beginning, my head was full of question marks. I am now ashamed to confess it but before I read the book, despite my cognitive resistance to the Kemalist propaganda, I was still under its negative influence, especially about Nursi’s Kurdish ethnicity. Since every Turk is by default a Turkish nationalist in Turkey because of the education we get, his Kurdishness bothered me a little.
I was told last week that my brother’s 5-year-old son, who goes kindergarten, told his Kurdish mother, while bursting into tears, that he missed Atatürk a lot and he wanted to visit him as soon as possible. My 4-year-son is no different. He tries to convince me that we had nothing and Atatürk gave us everything. Never underestimate the power of education. Similarly, despite my alternative, anti-hegemonic reading list, I was under the toxic influence of my state-given education. To cut a long story short, when I read the book, I had not only started intellectually admiring this clever and wise man but also loved him because of his prose, which was full of life and sincerity. No wonder, he was called Bediüzzaman (The Wonder of the Age) by the Ottoman Islamic scholars.
A few days ago, the minutes of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan’s private meeting with the three Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) members who visited him in prison was leaked to the White Turk newspaper Milliyet, which enthusiastically published it. Yes, it is journalism. I do not deny it. I would also publish it. Yet, the same Milliyet has not published many authentic official documents about the Ergenekon coup attempts in this country. You do not have to be a political scientist or an expert on Turkish politics to know that some Kurdish nationalist BDP politicians and some PKK leaders in both Kandil and Europe do not want a settlement. They want an independent Kurdish state. The White Turk nationalist deep state elements in the army and in the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) also do not want the armed conflict to be resolved for different reasons. Add to this, some nostalgic leftists who would love to see a Kurdish Che Guevara with a Kurdish state.
Anyway, what interests me here is that Öcalan claimed that Nursi was born in a former Armenian village. My first response was: so what? Let us assume that what Öcalan said is correct and Nursi is of Armenian descent and not, as is widely believed, an ethnic Kurd descending from our Prophet (PBUH). What is the difference? Is he still not the man who wrote his magnum opus “Letters of Light,” which is maybe the greatest Islamic work in the last a few hundred years? Most importantly, is he still not the same man, as witnessed not only by his thousands of close friends but also his staunch enemies, who lived an extraordinarily and monumentally pious life for eight decades?
Now, what bothers me is this: When I responded with “so what” on Twitter to Öcalan’s silly, ignorant and also latently racist remarks, some practicing Muslim Turks who like and respect Nursi as much as I do became upset with me. They questioned why I was accepting that Nursi was an Armenian. I was not. But the problem is this: We are not able to look at any issue without looking through a nationalist lens. We may call it positive nationalism but we must see that maybe not in normal, ordinary, peaceful times but on critical occasions like this, we easily forget that Islam does not care about ethnicity or nationality. This attitude does not serve justice either.