Thinking about Turkish Modernization: Cemil Meriç on Turkish
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Thinking about Turkish Modernization: Cemil Meriç on Turkish
7KLQNLQJDERXW7XUNLVK0RGHUQL]DWLRQ&HPLO0HUL© RQ7XUNLVK/DQJXDJH&XOWXUHDQG,QWHOOHFWXDOV 6HUGDU3R\UD] Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 26, Number 3, 2006, pp. 434-445 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\'XNH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cst/summary/v026/26.3poyraz.html Access provided by K.U. Leuven (12 Feb 2015 17:01 GMT) Thinking about Turkish Modernization: Cemil Meriç on Turkish Language, Culture, and Intellectuals Serdar Poyraz m Co So A u th th e l. Vo i do © ra pa 2 M 26 ti v si a , le idd , . No 121 1 0. 6 00 43 4 3, e ri Af Ea D an of d 06 0 92 e uk ca ies st 20 08 5 /1 by d St u 20 1x- Un i ve 06 4 - 02 ty r si Pre ss n this essay, relying on a close reading of the major works of one of the least-known, and, dare I say, most interesting, Turkish intellectuals of the twentieth century, Cemil Meriç (1916–87), I question the accuracy of what I call the “official dogma” of Turkish modernization. Briefly stated, this official account argues that Turkish modernization is a linear process of progress from tradition to modernity, from obscurantism to reason and enlightenment, and from the Empire to the Republic. This narrative of linear progress, which formed the backbone of the main arguments of diverse writers on Turkish modernity such as Bernard Lewis and Niyazi Berkes, explicitly depends on a set of dichotomies (tradition-modernity, religion-science, and Empire-Republic) and implicitly favors the dichotomies’ second terms (modernity, science, and Republic) over the first (tradition, religion, and Empire). While the first terms stand for arbitrariness with respect to political government and lack of reason in societal affairs, according to the accepted wisdom, the second terms represent order in politics and reason in society. Meriç debunks this simplistic account and argues that modernization in Turkey is a complex process during which some essential cultural ingredients of the society—the language and the shared norms of interpersonal behavior—are badly (perhaps irreparably) damaged. Turkish modernization, in Meriç’s account, is not a process of linear progress but a process containing serious amounts of alienation (of the political elite and the intellectuals from the common people) and displacement of identities: the casualties here include not only ethnic and religious minorities but also those societal groups that formerly represented the mainstream in several of the Empire’s institutions, such as the religious orders, or tarikats. Rather than sing the praises of the Republican political elite for their ambitious projects of political and social engineering, Meriç warns that their overconfident and hasty “reforms” push society to the brink of anomie by destroying the cultural connections of Turkish society to its own history.1 However, it should be strongly emphasized here that Meriç is not simply a conservative thinker who yearns for the past. On the contrary, as the following pages will make clear, his analysis of Turkish society includes a remarkable criticism of its past and traditions as well. 1. It is certainly not a coincidence that one of Meriç’s major books deals with the history of anarchism (particularly the history of the nihilist movement in nineteenth-century Russia). He is very interested in comparing the case of Turkey with Russia, where enormous dislocation in terms of identities took place in the late nineteenth century. See Cemil Meriç, Bir Facianin Hikayesi (The Story of a Disaster) (Ankara: Umran Yayınları, 1981). 2. Ümit Meriç Yazan, Babam Cemil Meriç (My Father Cemil Meriç) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1994). 3. Mustafa Armağan, Düşüncenin Gökkuşağı: Cemil Meriç (Istanbul: Ufuk Kitaplari, 2001). 435 Thinking about Turkish Modernization criticizes the so-called Marxists in Turkey (represented by the Türkiye İşći Partisi, or Turkish Workers’ Party, in the 1960s) for their dogmatic understanding of Marxism and their “religious” reading of Karl Marx. In addition, I talk about his approach to orientalism and argue that his ideas in the 1960s may be the first systematic account of orientalism written before Edward Said. More important, I try to demonstrate that Meriç not only accounted for the orientalism of Western writers (for the sake of argument, I call this “outward orientalism”) but also talked about the orientalist attitudes of the native intellectuals toward their own culture and people (“inward orientalism”). The third section mainly deals with Meriç’s ideas about the Turkish language and his harsh criticism of language reform in Turkey. He actively responded to the “reforms” in language by creating a highly peculiar literary style of his own, relying extensively on Persian and Arabic vocabulary yet not refraining from using French or Latin expressions in his works. Finally, I conclude by making a number of general remarks about Meriç’s writings and the possibilities they offer to the reader for a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Turkish Republic and the Turkish modernization process. Serdar Poyraz Placing himself above the simplistic dichotomy of modernity and tradition, Meriç criticizes both modern Turkish society and tradition from a critical/humanist perspective, calling for mutual understanding and tolerance between the different segments of Turkish society. Meriç symbolizes an intellectual trend in Turkey whose ideas are similar to those of Takeuchi Yoshimi in Japan and Jalal Al-e Ahmad in Iran in that they question the predominant Eurocentric notions of modernization and enlightenment. The secondary literature on Meriç is rather thin. For this article I made some use of the book published about him by his daughter (and Istanbul University professor) Ümit Meriç Yazan, 2 as well as the selections from his writings prepared by Mustafa Armağan. 3 Other than these two works, I completely relied on the primary material written by Cemil Meriç. The primary sources include all of his works, which are currently in print in Turkey.4 The following discussion consists of three main sections and a conclusion. In the first section, I present a brief life story of Meriç and try to demonstrate how the singular facts about his personal life may account for the later development of his character and ideas. In the second section, I try to conceptualize how Meriç understood the terms East and West with regard to civilizations and culture. I attempt to demonstrate that these terms did not have any geographical connotations in his works and that his use of these terms often referred to differing attitudes to reason and rationality prevalent in certain societies in different periods of history. For Meriç the civilizational dividing lines are demarcated not by religions (Christianity versus Confucianism or Islam a la Samuel Huntington) but by attitudes toward criticism and free speech. I also attempt to account for his peculiar use of Marxism as a critical tool in his investigations about the nature of European history. Again, Meriç is no dogmatist here, and he freely The Life and Works of Cemil Meriç Meriç was born on 12 December 1916 in Reyhanli, Hatay (Antakya), just before Hatay, a small town in southern Turkey, was placed under the French mandate. His father was a minor bureaucrat who migrated to Hatay from Dimetoka, Greece, with his family in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. In 1923 Meriç obtained his primary school degree (certificat d’études primaires), and after finishing secondary school in 1928 he began his high school studies in Antakya Sultanisi (Antakya High School), where a curriculum heavily influenced by French cul- 4. Cemil Meriç, Bir Facianin Hikayesi; Bu Ülke (This Country) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); “Türk Genci,” Yıldız 1 (1935); Mağaradakiler (Those in the Cave) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); Bir Dünya’nın Eşiğinde (In the Threshold of a World) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002); Umrandan Uygarlığa (From Social Life to Civilization) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar (Sociological Notes and Lectures) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); Jurnal, vols. 1–2 (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003); Saint-Simon: İlk Sosyolog, İlk Sosyalist (SaintSimon, the First Sociologist, the First Socialist) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002); Kırk Ambar (Encyclopedic Knowledge) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003). 436 Co S mp ar ie tu d So Af u th ri c M ture was followed. Ironically, in 1928 when his fellow students in mainland Turkey were trying to decipher the Latin alphabet, which had been newly established in high schools, Meriç was polishing his command of the French language by studying the French classics: ve a ti so As n aa le idd f ia , dt Ea he st Lise bir’de Hugo’nun Legends du Siecle’ini okuduk. Lise iki’de Chateaubriand’ın Atala, Rene ve Le Dernier des Abincerages’ını. . . . Lise üç’te Lanson’un ‘Edebiyat Tarihi’ sınıf kitabımız oldu. Yalniz Lanson mu? Zaman zaman Desranges’ın Seçme Yazılar’ı da. Ayrica klasikler: Moliere’den, Corneille’den, Racine’den üç dört kitap okumak zorundaydık. 5 [In the first year of high school, we read Legends du Siecle, written by Victor Hugo. In the second year, Atala, Rene, and Le Dernier des Abincerages by Chateaubriand. . . . In the third year our course book was History of Literature, written by Lanson. Only Lanson? Occasionally we read the “Selected Articles” of Desranges. And the classics: we had to read three or four novels by Molière, Corneille, and Racine.] Understanding the social and cultural diversity of Hatay in the 1930s, I think, is crucial for comprehending Meriç’s later development of ideas on culture and language (and why he was reluctant to buy the nationalist myths of the Turkish Republican elite wholesale). He experienced the curious combination of living in a vibrant periphery city of the Ottoman state (in terms of social structure and culture) and in a French mandate, where genuine contact with European civilization and culture was possible for the aspiring student because of the educational system. Moreover, he was spared the cultural shock caused by the radical changes in language and alphabet that were brought about by the Republican “reforms” in the Turkish Republic. Meriç himself seems to be well aware of the influence of his early life on his later intellectual stance: Lise tahsili boyunca hep Osmanlıca yazdım. Hür bıraktılar, harfleri kullanmada. . . . Belki Osmanlı’dan kopmadığım için inkılap aydınlarına benzemiyorum. . . . Araplarin ve Çerkeslerin yanında, onlara karşı kendi an’aneme gömüldüm. Fakat aynı zamanda Avrupalılaşmayı bütünüyle yaşadım. Fransız mahremiyetine girme imkanım oldu. Halbuki inkılap nesli bunların hiçbirini yaşamadı.6 [I always wrote in the Ottoman language during high school. They let us choose which language to write in. . . . I am dissimilar from the “intellectuals of reform,” maybe because I had never been too far away from Ottoman (culture). . . . Living among the Arabs and Circassians, I buried myself deep in my tradition as a defense against them. However, at the same time, I deeply experienced Europeanization. I had a chance to observe the intimacy of French culture. The generation following the reforms, on the contrary, could not experience any of this.] A brief fall under the spell of Turkish nationalism and the publication in a local journal of an essay in which he accused his Turkish teachers of not being nationalistic enough against the mandate authorities led to problems with the high school’s administration.7 As a result, he had to leave Hatay for Istanbul without graduating from high school (he was at the final grade at the time, and he would have been sent to Mulkiye [Istanbul University Department of Government] for university studies if he had finished high school in Antakya). During his first stay in Istanbul (1936–37), he attended the twelfth grade of the Pertevniyal Lisesi (Pertevniyal High School) and made acquaintance with Nurullah Atac (whom he would later harshly criticize for his role in the language reform) and Nazim Hikmet (for whom he translated a work by Joseph Stalin into Turkish from French). In any case, life proved to be harsh in Istanbul for a lonely young man, and because of financial difficulties Meriç had to return to Antakya, where he finished his secondary studies. After working as a schoolteacher in an Antakya village for a brief time in 1937, following his graduation from high school, he managed to find a job in the translation bureau of Iskenderun, where he directed a team that translated Turkish newspapers into French. 5. Meriç, Bu Ülke, 24–25. (All translations from Meriç are by the author). 6. Cemil Meriç, Jurnal (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1992), 1:64–65, quoted in Armağan, Düşüncenin Gökkuşaği, 38. 7. Meriç, “Türk Genci.” 8. During his stay at the university, he also lectured in the Department of Sociology. 9. Meriç, Mağaradakiler, 322. 60’lara kadar tecessüsümün yöneldiği kutup Avrupa. Coğrafyamda Asya yok. . . . Hint benim için Asya’nın keşfi oldu. Avrupa’dan görülen Asya, Avrupalının gözü ile Asya, ama nihayet Asya. Bu yeni dünyada da kılavuzlarım Avrupalıydı demek istiyorum, ilk hocam Romain Roland. . . . Ama büyü bozulmuştu, anlamıştım ki tarihte başka Avrupa’lar da var.9 [Up to the 1960s, my curiosity was directed to Europe. In my geography there was no Asia. . . . (Discovering) India meant the discovery of Asia for me. An Asia, perceived from Europe, in the European perspective, but in the end, Asia. I mean to say that in this new world, too, my guides were Europeans; my first master was Romain Roland. . . . However, the spell had been broken, and I realized that there were other Europes in history as well.] After publishing his book on Indian literature in 1964,10 Meriç began to examine one of the earliest modern socialist thinkers, SaintSimon. His book on Saint-Simon11 was followed by a number of very important publications in the 1970s and early 1980s in which he began to talk about the problematic nature of Turkish modernization. In other words, after a serious engagement in Indian literature and French philosophy, Meriç returned to the study of Turkish history and culture with decisive effect. His highly original criticisms of Republican ideology and of the naive belief of the Turkish bureaucratic elite in “progressing” by authoritarian measures led during this later period to various accusations being directed against him, to claims that he had begun his intellectual adventure from the “left” and decided to settle on the “right” in his later years. These, in my opinion, were shallow criticisms that missed the essence and scope of his cultural critique of Turkish society. In fact, the words left and right did not mean much to Meriç, who asserted force- 10. See Meriç, Bir Dünya’nın Eşiğinde, for a new printing of this book, which was originally published as Hint Edebiyati (Indian Literature). 11. Meriç, Saint-Simon. 437 Thinking about Turkish Modernization portant publications. In one of his later publications he explicitly says that until studying Indian literature and philosophy, his understanding of culture and civilizations was essentially Eurocentric: Serdar Poyraz In 1938, after Hatay became an independent republic for a brief interval, he was sent to a small town as district governor (nahiye muduru). The governor of Hatay duly dismissed him from his job after a month; in 1939 he was arrested for engaging in “communist activities.” The content of these activities was next to nothing, it seems, and after spending two months in prison during his trial, he was set free. He chose to return to Istanbul in 1940. Merić began his university education in the School of Foreign Languages (Yabancű Diller Okulu) in Istanbul that year. The school was designed to offer two years of language education in Turkey, followed by two years of practical studies abroad. However, he could not be sent abroad because World War II was being fought and was instead appointed as a French teacher to the Elaziğ High School in eastern Anatolia. Just before he went to Elaziğ, he married Fevziye Menteşoğlu, who was a teacher of geography, several years older than he. In 1945, he had to return from Elaziğ to Istanbul because of his wife’s health problems. In 1946 he was accepted as a reader of French at Istanbul University. He eventually retired from there in 1974.8 Meriç’s university job, together with the steady nature of his marriage, gave a semblance of normality to his turbulent life. But the apparent normality was cut short in 1954 when he lost his sight. He had had progressive myopia since the age of four, and his hectic (almost superhuman) schedule of constant readings did not help either. He went through a period of serious depression after a visit to Paris and a subsequent operation did not restore his sight. Thanks to the support of his family and students, he managed to return to his studies and in the 1950s published a number of translations from French literature. In the late 1950s, he prepared and published a French grammar book for Turks and began his studies of Indian literature. His interest in Indian literature and philosophy enormously influenced his later and more im- 438 m Co S pa ie tu d So Af u th ri c M rat so As n aa le idd i ve f ia , dt Ea he st fully, “İzm’ler idrakimize giydirilen deli gömlekleri. İtibarları menşelerinden geliyor. Hepsi de Avrupalı”12 (Isms are straitjackets of madness put on our intellects. Their esteem comes from their origins. They are all European). In another place, he even suggests that the terms left and right as analytical tools should be avoided in any serious discussion of Turkish society and culture: in addition to his complete works and diaries.15 These were literary diaries intended for publication after his death. Sol-Sağ . . . Çılgın sevgilerin ve şuursuz kinlerin emzirdiği iki ifrit. Toplum yapımızla herhangi bir ilgisi olmayan iki yabancı. . . . Avrupa’nın bu habis kelimelerinden bize ne? Bu maskeli haydutları hafızalarımızdan kovmak ve kendi gerçeğimizi kendi kelimelerimizle anlayıp anlatmak, her namuslu yazarın vicdan borcu.13 Batı ile Doğu’yu ayrı dünyalar gibi göstermeye kalkışanlar büyük bir gaflet içindedirler. Batı ile Doğu ancak haritada bir realite. İhtiyarlayan, belleri bükülen, bunayan milletler var. Ortaçağ’da, Avrupa Doğu, Asya Batı’dır. İbn Haldun Bergson’dan çok daha batılı. . . . Tarih, galiplerin yazdığı bir kitap.16 [Left-Right . . . two demons suckled by mad loves and unconscious venoms. Two strangers that are not related to the structure of our society at all. . . . Of what concern could those two malicious words of Europe be to us? Repelling those masked bandits from our memory and understanding and explaining our own reality with our own words are the intellectual responsibilities for any honorable author.] [Those who try to show East and West as separate worlds are gravely mistaken. East and West are realities only on a map. There are nations, which are aging, bent double, and in their dotage. In the Middle Ages, Europe was East, and Asia was West. Ibn Khaldun is much more European than Bergson. . . . History, a book written by the victors.] It is important here to note that the term ideology for Meriç always means a system of thought devised in a specific part of the world during a specific period of history in order to answer the questions that essentially belong to the geography where that ideology was created. So it is not surprising that he opposes the usage of the terms left and right as universal categories to explain the problems of modern Turkey. Meriç’s later publications (between 1974 and 1984) include important works such as Bu Ülke (This Country), Umrandan Uygarlığa (From Social Life to Civilization), Mağaradakiler (Those in the Cave), and Bir Facianın Hikayesi (The Story of a Disaster).14 After this period of immense intellectual and publishing activity in the last fifteen years of his life, Meriç passed away in 1987. In the early 1990s İletişim Yayűnlarű published his notes for the lectures he gave in the Sociology Department of Istanbul University, Civilizations, Ideologies, and the Issue of Orientalism in the Works of Cemil Meriç In one of the earliest entries to his diary in 1959, Meriç writes the following passage in which he attacks essentialist cultural classifications: The importance of this passage comes from the fact that Meriç here implicitly suggests that the use of the terms East and West should be relative since they can be “realities” only on a map. This raises an obvious question: relative in terms of what? Meriç answers this question in one of the fi rst lectures that he gave in the Sociology Department of Istanbul University in 1965: Doğu-Batı kutuplaşması, Batı’nın eseri olan çok yersiz bir tasnif. Eğer Batı hür düşüncenin vatanı ise zaman zaman Doğu, Batı olmuştur. 14. yüzyılda yaşayan bir İbn Haldun, 17. yüzyıldaki Bossuet’ den çok daha Batılı’dır.17 [The East-West conflict is an irrelevant conceptualization of the West. If West is (thought of as) the motherland of independent thought, then at times East turned out to be West. Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the fourteenth century, is much more Western than Bossuet of the seventeenth century. (Emphasis added.)] 12. Meriç, Bu Ülke, 90. “Izm’ler” is one of Meriç’s many curious neologisms. Being a suffix used for ideologies in modern Turkish (like Komunizm, Kapitalizm, etc.), it is used here as a proxy for any ideology coming from Europe. 14. Meriç, Umrandan Uygarlığa; Mağaradakiler; Bir Facianın Hikayesi. 13. Ibid., 79. 17. Meriç, Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar, 2. 15. Meriç, Jurnal, vols. 1–2. 16. Meriç, Jurnal, 1:54. [A question such as “Is the religion of Islam a hindrance to progress?” displays the lack of sociological thinking (on the part of the questioner). Islam is an institution of superstructure. It was not an obstacle to the appearance of, say, Ibn Rushd or Ibn Khaldun. Islam is a hindrance to progress as much as Christianity is. Religion is a “wing” for a developing society and a “ballast” for a collapsing one. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was because of social and economic reasons, and Islam had no role in that collapse. The feudal production system was routed by capitalism.] One should carefully note that Islam is defined as an “institution of superstructure” in the passage above. It means that Meriç essentially accepted the Marxist distinction between the infrastructure and superstructure (at least in 1968 when he gave that lecture), which privileges the role of the modes of production and economic relations over other sociological factors in explaining social phenomena. 18. Ibid., 194. 19. See Yazan, Babam Cemil Meriç, 23. 20. Meriç, Mağaradakiler, 232. Önce lisede Engels’in Anti-Duhring’i geçiyor elime. Üç cilt. Sosyalizmle ilgili bütün meseleler var bu kitapta. Çok dikkatle okudum, hatta yüz sayfa kadar da özet çıkardım. Kitabı Halep’ten satın almıştım. Marx’ın Kapital’ini de o sıralarda okudum. . . . Bir de Moskova’da basılmış bir Kapital hülasası vardı kitaplarımın arasinda.19 [First I got into my hands the Anti-Duhring, by Engels, in high school. Three volumes. All of the subjects related to socialism are included in this book. I read it carefully, even summarized it in approximately a hundred pages. I bought it in Aleppo. I read the Capital by Marx around that time as well. . . . In my library, there was also an extract of the Capital published in Moscow.] However, in my opinion, one should not overemphasize the role of Marxism in the thought of Meriç. Meriç uses Marxism basically as an analytical tool to attack the common assumptions made by the Turkish intelligentsia about European history and the superiority of European culture. In an important passage, he writes, Descartes’in XVII. Yüzyılda Avrupa’da başardığı düşünce devrimine benzeyen bir düşünce devrimi yaratmıştır bizde marksizm. Anlatmıştır ki Batı düşüncesi dokunulmaz bir hakikatler bütünü değildir. Her sınıfın, her milletin, her camianın kendini korumak için uydurduğu yalanlar var. Batı’dan icazet almadıkça Batı’yı tenkit edemezdik. Marksizm bize bu icazeti verdi. Yani şuurumuza takılan zincirleri kırdı ve Avrupa büyüsünü bozdu.20 [Marxism created an intellectual revolution here (in Turkey) similar to the one accomplished by Descartes in the seventeenth century in Europe. It taught that Western thought is not a monolith of untouchable truths. There are lies that are made up by all classes, nations, and communities in order to protect themselves. (Before Marxism) we could not criticize the West unless we got permission from the West. Marxism gave us this permission. Thus, it smashed the chains tied to our conscious and broke the spell of Europe.] 439 Thinking about Turkish Modernization İslamiyet terakkiye mani midir? şeklinde bir soru, sosyolojik kafadan mahrumiyeti gösterir. İslam bir üst yapı müessesesidir. Bir İbn Rüşd veya İbn Haldun’un yetişmesine engel olmamıştır. Hristiyanlık terakkiye ne kadar engelse İslam da o kadar engeldir. Gelişen bir cemiyet icin kanattır din, çöken bir ülke için safradir. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun çöküşü sosyal ve ekonomik sebeplerdendir, İslamiyetin bunda hiçbir rolü yoktur. Feodal istihsal sistemi, kapitalizm tarafından bozguna uğratılmıştır.18 It should be clear to the reader that Meriç was very well read in Marxist literature, making occasional references to the writings of Marx and Engels. He talks about his acquaintance with Marxist literature in the following manner: Serdar Poyraz It is obvious that Meriç associates the term West with freethinking. Since freethinking and criticism do not need to be associated with any particular geography, various parts of the world may, in principle, be more “Western” than others in different periods of history, according to Meriç. As his understanding of the East and West does not contain any references to a particular geography (Europe) or religion (Christianity), Meriç feels himself free to occasionally criticize the Turkish intellectuals who implicitly make the assumption of linking the ideas of progress and science with Europe and Christianity (and obscurantism and backwardness with Islam and Asia). For instance, in one of the lectures he gave at Istanbul University, he says, 440 Co S m ra pa ie tu d So Af u th ri c M so As n aa le idd ti v e f ia , dt Ea he st In other words, Marxism acted as an agent of disenchantment (to borrow from Max Weber’s terminology) for Meriç, pointing to the contradictions and problems of European history. His thorough understanding of Marxism, in my opinion, is one of the reasons, which may explain Meriç’s success in leaving behind the dichotomous way of thinking about Turkish culture (religion versus science, obscurantism versus reason, and Empire versus the Republic). These dichotomies implicitly depended on a view that proposed the essential “correctness” of reason, science, and European culture, understood as monolithic entities, vis-à-vis religion and traditional Turkish culture. Marxism, it seems to me, helped Meriç to see that those supposedly monolithic entities were problematic and full of contradictions themselves. Despite the importance he gave to Marxism in his writing, Meriç was no naive believer in Marxism. What he valued in Marxism was the use of dialectics as a technique of inquiry, not the Marxist doctrines about history and its supposedly inevitable course of action: Marksizm de dışarıdan gelen bütün ideolojiler gibi bir felaket kaynağı olmuştur. Çünkü, çocuklarımız hazırlıksızdılar. Marksizmin de bir ideoloji olduğunu bilmiyorlardı. Delikanlılar çarpıtılmiş sloganları dünyaca geçerli bir hakikat sandılar. Oysa Marksizm bir doktrin olmadan once, bir araştırma yöntemidir. Bir tekke şeyhi degildir Marx. Belli bir çağda, belli bir bölgede yaşamış, her insan gibi, birçok zaafları olan bir düşünce adamı.21 [Marxism has been a source of disaster like all the other ideologies of foreign origin because our children were unprepared. They did not know that Marxism is also an ideology. Youngsters thought of the distorted slogans as universal truths. However, Marxism, before being a doctrine, is a method of research. Marx was not a sheik of a dervish lodge. He was a man of thought, who lived in a certain age and region, with many weaknesses, like every human being.] In fact, in various places in his works Meriç criticizes Turkish intellectuals for reading Marx religiously and creating an unnecessary dogma of Marxism.22 What he proposes, instead of following an ideology blindly, is to take a critical stance against all ideologies and make a thorough reading of them by comparing various ideologies with one another. Not unlike the old European humanists, he encourages the reader to read and think about the ideologies before following any one of them: Hep birden esfel-i safi line yuvarlanmak istemiyorsak, gözlerimizi açmalıyız. İnsanlar sloganla güdülmez. Düsünceye hürriyet, sonsuz hürriyet! Kitaptan değil kitapsızlıktan korkmalıyız. Bütün ideolojilere kapıları açmak, hepsini tanımak, hepsini tartışmak ve Türkiye’nin kaderini onların aydınlığında, fakat tarihimizin büyük mirasına dayanarak inşa etmek. İşte en doğru yol.23 [We have to open our eyes wide if we do not want to fall into the deepest pit of hell. People cannot be herded with slogans. (There should be) freedom to think, an unlimited freedom! We should be afraid of the dearth of books, and not of the books. Leaving the doors open for all ideologies, understanding and discussing all of them, and building the future of Turkey in the light of those ideologies, depending on the great heritage of our history. This is the best way.] Elsewhere he stresses that the only possible way of establishing a connection to European culture is to learn to analyze both the strengths and the weaknesses of that culture: Yeni Osmanlılar’dan genç sosyalistlere kadar bütün intelijansiyamız hamakatin içindedir. Batı’yı tanımadan taklit etmişiz. Çare, Batı’yı bütün olarak tanımak. Batı’nın içtimai ve iktisadi tarihini bütünü ile bilmek. Her içtimai nazariyenin zehirli ve hayırlı taraflarını bütünün içine yerleştirerek anlayabiliriz. Batı’nın bütün dünya görüşlerini bilmek. Batı’yı bütünüyle, yalanı ile, hakikatiyle tanımak.24 [From the Young Ottomans up to the young socialists, our whole intelligentsia has been sunk into stupidity. We imitated the West without understanding it. The remedy is to entirely understand the West: to know the entire social and economic history of the West. We can figure out the poisonous and beneficial sides of 21. Ibid., 231. 23. Meriç, Bu Ülke, 94. 22. See Meriç, Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar, 238, 253. Also see Meriç, Mağaradakiler, 60, 230. 24. Meriç, Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar, 284. Oryantalizm bir günde kurulmaz ve bir koldan çalışmaz. Doğu evvela fi lolojik olarak tanınır. Fransa’da Ecole des Langues Orientales 19. yüzyıl başlarında kurulur. İlk hocası Batı’da 50 yil sahasında hüküm sürecek olan Silvestre de Sacy. Arapça tetkikler onunla başlar. . . . Batı’nın Doğu merakının temelinde mutlak olarak kapitalizm vardır, saf ilmi bir tecessüs değildir bu. Gelişen bir sınıfın ihtiyacıdır.25 [Orientalism was not founded in a day. And it does not operate in a single branch. The East, at first, was understood philologically. École des langues orientales was founded in the beginning of the nineteenth century in France. Its first teacher was Silvestre de Sacy, who reigned in his academic field for fi fty years in the West. Arabic études began with him. . . . At the base of the Western curiosity toward the East, there is capitalism; it is not a purely scientific curiosity. It is the need of a growing class.] When Said’s book Orientalism was published in the late 1970s, Meriç was so advanced in his analysis of orientalism that he dismissed some of Said’s ideas as exaggerations. 26 For example, in one of the entries he wrote in his diary in 1981, he says, William Jones’un “Muallakat” tercümelerini düsünüyorum. Edward Said’in ithamlari geliyor aklıma: oryantalistler ajandırlar. Belki doğru ama neyin ajanı? Adam Farsça’nın zamanımıza kadar muteber bir gramerini Fransızca olarak kaleme almıs, Nadir Sah Tarihi’ni Voltaire’in diline kazandırmış, Osmanlı edebiyatının İran ve Arap edebiyatları içinde çok orijinal bir yeri olduğunu delilleriyle ispat etmiş. Ajan bu mu? Biz yarım asır önce yazılan bir Arap Edebiyatı tarihinden habersiziz. Ne Imr’ul Kays’ı tanıyo- 25. Ibid., 173. 26. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 27. Meriç, Jurnal, 2:296. [I am thinking of William Jones’s translations of “Muallakat.” Then the accusations of Edward Said come to my mind: orientalists are agents. Perhaps this is true, but agents of what? The guy (William Jones) wrote a still respected grammar of the Persian language. He translated The History of Nader Shah into the language of Voltaire. He proved that Ottoman literature has an original place beside Persian and Arab literature. Is this what you call an agent? We are still unaware of a “History of Arab Literature” written fi fty years ago. We know of neither Imr’ul Kays nor Suk-ul Ukra. So who are the agents, the Westerners or us?] Moreover, in a lecture he gave at Bogazici University in 1981, Meriç made an important analytical distinction between the works of Western orientalists (for the sake of the argument, I call it “outward orientalism”) and the use of these works by the native, oriental intellectuals to classify their own people. I want to argue that these intellectuals look at their own society through orientalist lenses; their attitude might be called “inward orientalism” to distinguish it from the former. The destructive effect of the second phenomenon is much more important than the first one according to Meriç. Since he also compares the attitude of late Ottoman writers such as Ahmet Mithat Efendi about the West with the attitudes of some of the later Republican authors in the same lecture, I want to quote the relevant passage of the lecture here: Ahmet Mithat Müsteşrikler kongresine giderken, “Bizi nereye yerleştirecekler” diye düşünür. “Biz de Batı’yı tanıyoruz, yani müstağribiz.” Batı düşüncesini tanıyan insanların ismi, aynı zamanda halktan kopmuş bahtsız aydınların da ismidir. Ahmet Mithat, Avrupa’ya bir fatih edasıyla gidiyordu. Batı ile Doğu insan beyninin iki yarım küresi idi ona göre. İslam’ın vahdeti onu da etkiler. . . . Gulliver Kompleksi diyorum ben buna: Ölçüleri kaybetmek. Osmanlı için, hidayeti temsil eden Osmanlı ile delaleti temsil eden bir kafi rler ülkesi olarak Garb var idi. 441 Thinking about Turkish Modernization I turn now to an issue of central importance in Meriç’s writings, namely, orientalism in its various versions. A decade before Edward Said published his original work on orientalism, Meriç wrote the following remarks in 1968: ruz, ne Suk-ul Ukra’yı. Ajan biz miyiz acaba, batılılar mı?27 Serdar Poyraz every social theory by placing them in a gestalt. Knowing all of the worldviews of the West. Understanding the West in its entirety, including its lies and truths.] 442 Co S m ra pa ie tu d So Af u th ri c M so As n aa le idd ti v e f ia , dt Ea he st Ahmet Mithat’tan sonra durum tersine döndü. Küçüldükçe küçüldük. Batı’nın iftiralarına, biz de yenilerini ekledik. Şark bir harabezardır, bir miskinler tekkesidir. Ali Canip için de Nazım Hikmet için de Şark böyledir. Çetin Altan da her makalesinde Şark aleyhtarıdır. . . . Böylece kendimize düşmanın biçtiği ölçülerle yetinmemiş, bunlara yenilerini ilave etmişizdir. Oysa belli bir Şark prototipi olmadığı gibi, Batı prototipi de yoktur. . . . Bütün oryantalistleri yalancılık ve casuslukla itham etmek doğru olmaz. Bu yamyam Avrupa ile düşünen Avrupa’yı aynı kefeye koymak olur.28 [While Ahmet Mithat was going to the congress of the orientalists, he thought, “Where will they place us?” “We know the West and this makes us Occidentalists.” (The names of) the people who know the West correspond to (the names of) the intellectuals who have been alienated from the common people. Ahmet Mithat was still going to Europe in the manner of a conqueror. According to him, East and West were the two lobes of the same human brain. (He thought that) the idea of the unity (tawhid) in Islam would also affect Europe. . . . I call this Gulliver’s complex: losing the proportions. For the Ottomans, there was the Ottoman Empire, which represented the way of Islam, and there was the West, which represented error and corruption. After Ahmet Mithat, the situation changed. We became (intellectually) smaller and smaller. To the slanders made by the West we added new ones. The East is a house in ruins, a lodge for the rotten. For both Ali Canip and Nazűm Hikmet, the East is like that. āetin Altan is fiercely opposed to the East in his every article. . . . In this manner, we became not contented even with the (false) evaluations (about ourselves) made by the enemy and added new ones to those. However, there is neither a fi xed prototype of the East nor a prototype of the West. . . . It is not right to accuse all of the orientalists of lying and espionage. This would be confusing the cannibal Europe with the thinking Europe.] In brief, Meriç, it seems to me, produced from the 1960s onward an appealing and in some ways more perceptive version of the main thesis of Said on orientalism. Turkish Language and Intellectuals in the Work of Cemil Meriç Before I proceed to analyze Meriç’s ideas about the Turkish language and language reform, I want to make clear that, in my opinion, Meriç is one of the best stylists of the Turkish language in the twentieth century. In his writings he extensively uses aphorisms with striking effect and pushes the boundaries of the Turkish language to its limits by the widespread, and often brilliant, usage of irregular sentences (devrik cumle), where the regular verb does not appear at the end of the sentence, which is the general rule for a standard Turkish sentence. Moreover, he often conveys his ideas forcefully by using nominal sentences, which normally sound a bit unusual in Turkish. Also, his choice of vocabulary is extremely eclectic: he does not refrain from using any word of Persian, Arabic, or French origin in his prose if he thinks that it is the appropriate word for the context. In a certain way, he is the embodiment of the worst nightmares of the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Society):29 a very intelligent writer with an excellent command of several languages (including French, English, Arabic, and Persian) who does not care about “pure Turkish” and writes in an exciting, almost captivating, prose. Meriç’s stylistic choices are not arbitrary in my opinion. He surprises his readers by his strange grammatical choices in order to make sure that they are always alert and awake, so to speak, while they are reading his nonconventional theories and explanations. In other words, his unconventional literary style is an appropriate vehicle for the unconventional content of his ideas. What does Meriç think about the selfappointed saviors of the Turkish language who engaged in so-called language reform from the mid-1930s on, purifying Turkish from the influence of Arabic and Persian, and created an Orwellian Newspeak in its stead? Essentially he thinks that the Turkish language must be saved from its saviors. 28. Meriç, Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar, 345–46. 29. The society is an ideological institution formed in the early years of the Turkish Republic with the intention of “purifying” the Turkish language. [The reason for the misfortune of the Turkish language is that it was suddenly forced to jump while it was continuing its natural evolution (of walking). The bridges between the generations were destroyed, and a generation without a memory was produced. Being deprived of memory (means) being deprived of culture. The main characteristic of a nation: continuity. When the history of six hundred years was separated from the social organism by means of a surgical operation, Turkish thought fell into a vacuum. It fell into a vacuum because it could not lean on Western thought as well. Is it not a sad manifestation of this fall that, after fi fty years of intimacy with the West, our new generation did not develop anything of value? We still need at least another six hundred years of Newspeak 31 in order to be able to create The Poem on Freedom or Fog or even From the Vineyard of the Dervishes.] In one of the lectures he gave in 1975, Meriç vehemently attacked the idea of language reform and claimed that this idea was a consequence of the alienation of the Turkish intelligentsia from its own history and culture, which began in the Tanzimat era: Dil davası yoktur, intelijansiyanın yabancılaşması, başkalaşması, düşmanlaşması vardır. Türkiye’de halk kendi kitaplarını, aydın [There is no language problem; there is the problem of alienation, of alteration, and of the intelligentsia’s becoming an enemy to its own society. In Turkey, the people read their own books and the intelligentsia read the books of the West. Of course, they would be ashamed of speaking a language that would be understood by the people. Also, they could not tolerate the vocabulary of the Koran. . . . In reality there is no language problem. There is just the castration of the historical memory of the Turkish people.] As the above quotation demonstrates, Meriç’s ideas about the language reform are closely related to his ideas about the alienation of the Turkish intelligentsia from Turkish society, which, according to Meriç, started with the appearance of a new type of bureaucrat in the wake of the Tanzimat reforms, replacing the old class of the ulema: Ulema sahneden çekilince, yeni bir zümre çıktı ortaya; Avrupa’yı gören, Avrupa mekteplerinde tahsil yapan, Avrupa’yı sathi olarak bilen, sefaretlerle temas halinde olan, tercüme bürosunda yetişen insanlar çıktı sahneye: Tanzimat ricali. Söz sınıf-ı ulemanın değil, bu yeni yetişen intelijansiyanındı artık. Öyle bir vaziyet oldu ki, Tanzimat’tan sonra, yabancı dil bilmek Sadrazamlığa kadar getiriyordu insanı. Başka bir vasfa ihtiyaç yoktu . . . Bu yeni zümre, yeni intelijansiya halka neden iltifat etsin? Halktan kopmuştu, halkla hiçbir alakası yoktu. . . . Mütercim Rüştü Paşa, Vefik Paşa, Ali Paşa, Fuat Paşa, Reşit Paşa. Bunların tek vasfı vardı: Batı dili bilmek. Halkla ne gibi bir münasebeti vardı bunların? Hiç.33 [When the ulema left the stage, a new class came to the forefront, a new group of people who have seen Europe, who have been educated in European schools, who know Europe superficially, who have some contact with the embassies, and who have been trained in the translation bureau: the men of Tanzimat. It was the turn of this newly emerging intelligentsia to 30. Meriç, Jurnal, 1:70–71. 32. Meriç, Sosyoloji Notları ve Konferanslar, 295. 31. The hilarious neology Meriç uses to ridicule the pure language of the Turkish Language Society is Uydurca. I chose to translate it as “Newspeak.” 33. Ibid., 392. 443 Thinking about Turkish Modernization Türkçenin bedbahtlığı, tabii tekamülünü yaparken, birdenbire zıplamaya zorlanmasından olmuştur. Nesiller arasındaki köprüler uçurulmuş ve hafızadan mahrum bir nesil türetilmiştir. Hafızadan yani kültürden. Milletin ana vasfı: devamlılık. Altı yüzyıllık tarih cerrahi bir ameliyatla içtimai uzviyetten koparılıp atılınca, Türk düşüncesi boşlukta kalmıştır. Boşlukta kalmıştır, çünkü Batı’ya da tutunamamış, sırtını Batı tefekkürüne de dayayamamıştır. Elli yıldan beri Batı’yla bu kadar sarmaş dolaş olduğumuz halde, hala yeni neslin tek değer yetiştirememesi, bunun en hazin tecellilerinden biri değil mi? Uydurca ile bir Hurriyet Kasidesi, bir Sis, hatta bir Erenlerin Bağından yaratılabilmesi için en az bir altı yüzyıla daha ihtiyaç var. 30 Batı’nin kitaplarını okur. Halkın anlayacağı bir dil konuşmaktan elbette ki utanacaklardı. Sonra Kur’an’daki kelimelere tahammül edemediler. . . . Hakikatte dil davası yok, Türk insanının hafızasından iğdiş edilmesi var.32 Serdar Poyraz Meriç is a believer in continuities in the realms of language and culture, and one of his harshest criticisms against the Republican elite is that they do not have this sense of continuity: 444 Co S m ra pa ie tu d So Af A u th ri c M so e f si a n aa le idd ti v , dt Ea speak instead of the class of the ulema. Such a situation emerged that after Tanzimat knowing a foreign language sometimes elevated a man to grand vezirate. There was no need for further qualification. . . . Why would this new class, this new intelligentsia, care for the people? They had broken away from the people, they had no contact with the people. . . . Mutercim (Translator) Rustu Pasa, Vefik Pasa, Ali Pasa, Fuat Pasa, Resit Pasa. They had one qualification only: knowing a Western language. What kind of connection did they have to the people? None.] he st This newly emerging intelligentsia was “European” in a rather shallow sense. They wanted to act and live like Europeans, imitating European dress and manners. Otherwise, they were not genuinely familiar with European thought and philosophy. Meriç ruthlessly emphasizes one characteristic they shared with the ulema: they were both uncritical imitators. Osmanlı’da sınıf-ı ulema tekrarlayıcıdır. Kur’an’ın, hadislerin ve daha önceki imam ve müçtehitlerin tekrarlayıcısı. Tanzimattan sonraki aydınlar da tekrarlayıcıdır, Avrupalı yazarların tekrarlayıcısı. . . . Ikinciler. . . . yabancı bir kültürle karşı karşıyaydılar. Bu kültürü ayıklamaları, tenkit etmeleri güçtü. Yabancı bir dünya’da, bilmedikleri şartlar içinde gelişen bir kültürdü bu. 34 [The class of the ulema in the Ottoman state was repeating the Koran, the hadith, and the earlier imams and mujtahids. The intellectuals after the Tanzimat were also repeating, this time they were repeating the European authors. . . . The second group . . . was facing a foreign culture. It was difficult for them to sort out and criticize this culture. This was a culture that grew in a foreign world in circumstances unknown to them.] The Republican period merely accelerated the alienation of the intelligentsia from the common people, according to Meriç. Destroying the cultural codes of Turkish society, the Republican elite left only the “myth of Atatürk” as cultural cement for the society. Meriç, understandably, thinks that this is not enough for a healthy society: Dünyanın bütün tımarhaneleri bizim intelijansiyanın kafatasi yanında birer aklı selim mihrakı. Cemiyet tek mit’e dayalı: Atatürk miti. Başka bağ yok. İmparatorluğun birbirine düşman etnik unsurlardan mürekkep yamalı bohçası dikiş yerlerinden ayrılalı beri biz kendi kendimize düşman insanlar haline geldik. Mazi yok, tarihimizi tanımıyoruz. . . . İnsanları bir araya getiren hiçbir ideoloji doğmadı. Nihayet dil de gitti elden. Türk milleti. Hangi millet? Milliyetçiyiz. Hangi milliyetçilik?35 [Every madhouse in the world is a source of common sense compared to the head of our intelligentsia. Society depends on a single myth: the myth of Atatürk. There is no other bond. Since the patchwork of the Empire, which was composed of ethnic elements hostile to one another disintegrated in its seams, we have become our own enemy. There is no past, we do not know of our history. . . . No ideology arose that could unite the people. In the end, we also lost the language. Turkish nation. Which nation? We are nationalists. Which nationalism?] In another striking passage in his diaries, Meriç criticizes the cultural reforms of the Mustafa Kemal era: Mustafa Kemal musikiyi değiştirmeye kalktı, yapamadi. Zevk meclislerinde gazel aranıyordu, şarkı aranıyordu. Altı yüz senenin ötesine atlamak, yani milli tarihte alti yüz senelik bir parantez açmak mümkün müdür? Dil-Tarih Kurumu şefin bu emrini sadakatle başarmaya çalıştı. Tarih gömülmez. Binalarıyla, sokaklarıyla, müzeleriyle, mezarlarıyla yok edilmesi imkansız bir şahittir. Sıra dile geldi. Yeni harfler zaten geleneğin, irfan geleneğinin sırtına indirilen bir baltaydı. Selanikliler, Rusya’dan gelen Türkler ve şeften iltifat görmeye koşan gençler dili tahrip için cansiperane bir gayret harcadılar. Mustafa Kemal işin maskaralığa vardığını anladı, ama iş işten geçmişti.36 [Mustafa Kemal ventured to change the music, but he could not do that. People still looked for old songs and gazals in the musical/literary summons and meetings. Is it possible to jump beyond six hundred years or put six hundred years of national history into parentheses? The Institute of Language and History tried to follow this order 34. Meriç, Mağaradakiler, 24. 35. Meriç, Jurnal, 1:109. 36. Ibid., 302. Ben, herhangi bir tarikatin sözcüsü değilim. Yani, ilan edilecek hazır bir formülüm yok. Derslerimde de, konuşmalarımda da tekrarladığım ve darağacına kadar tekrarlayacağım tek hakikat: her düşünceye saygı.37 [I am not the spokesman for any religious order. I mean I do not have any ready-made formula to declare. The only truth that I have repeated in my courses and speeches, and the only one that I will repeat until (I am sent to) the gallows: respect for every idea.] The above passage, I believe, is the best possible way of summarizing the complex stance of an intellectual of such high caliber as Meriç. Conclusion Meriç offers a highly interesting critique of the modernization process of Turkey beginning from the Tanzimat era. His impact on the intellectual progress of the conservative intellectuals of Turkey in the 1980s coincided with the rise of a conservative middle class in Turkey (thanks to the economic shift of Turkey from import substitutive industrialization to export-led growth during the Turgut Ozal period), which provided the necessary readership to this rising new intellectual class. It is not surprising to see that these new intellectuals such as Ali Bulac, Mustafa Armagan, and Ahmet Turan Alkan eagerly ac37. Meriç, Bu Ülke, 53. 38. See, e.g., Ahmet Turan Alkan, Tercüman, 21 June 1987. 445 Thinking about Turkish Modernization Does Meriç offer a solution to the imbroglio of Turkish culture in the post-Republican era? Apparently he does not. In fact, he stresses that ready-made solutions and magical formulas of reform do not work in the realm of culture: knowledge their intellectual debt to the legacy of Meriç.38 In short, for the serious student who wants to understand the complicated process of Turkish modernization, the works of Cemil Meriç are indispensable. Serdar Poyraz of the “chief” in fidelity. History, however, cannot be buried. It is an indestructible witness with its buildings, streets, museums, and graves. Then it was the turn of the language. The new alphabet was indeed an axe skewered at the back of the tradition, the tradition of spiritual knowledge. Thessalonians, the Turks coming from Russia, and the young toadies eager to gain the favors of the chief made an incredible effort to destroy the language. Mustafa Kemal understood that the issue later bordered on charlatanry, but it was too late.]