İsmail Habib Sevük’s Together with Atatürk (Atatürk’le Beraber) (4)
“That is what a view of history should be!”
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| Mustafa Kemal at Adana Railway Station (16 February 1931) |
The place is Adana.
Following the forced dissolution of the Free Republican Party, Mustafa Kemal sets out on a nationwide tour lasting more than three months. He is seated on the ground floor of the house set aside for his stay, together with a gathering of some thirty to thirty-five people. Sitting directly opposite him is İsmail Habib Sevük, then the maarif emini of the Adana region -or, in today’s terminology, the provincial director of national education.
Sevük writes quite candidly that, as he recounts how “the English have officially recognised our new letters in Cyprus”, Mustafa Kemal listens to him without paying much attention:
With the air of someone impatient to say something else that has been building up in his mind and looking for an opening to do so, he listens without paying any attention to what I am saying. Sure enough, he says: “Speaking of the English, something has just occurred to me. How did the English race come into being?” (p. 86)
There is a profoundly unequal -and therefore unsettling- relationship here. Whenever Mustafa Kemal wishes to change the subject, he can readily make it clear to the person he is speaking to that he attaches no importance to what they are saying. Sevük -or whoever else happens to be sitting opposite him- either takes no offence at this or, because of his place in the hierarchy, is obliged not to.
After posing the question, Mustafa Kemal proceeds -so far as we can gather from Sevük’s account- by a kind of free association, “from the English to the Germanic peoples, and from the Germanic peoples to Gaul”, before recalling the name of Vercingetorix, the Gallic commander who fought against Caesar:
Monument to Vercingetorix (France)
— What was the name of that young Gallic commander-in-chief who almost succeeded in defeating Caesar? He had a complicated, convoluted name; ah yes, Vercingetorix! According to French historical works, the name means “the great chief of the valiant”. Yet, once its syllables are separated, its true meaning becomes apparent of its own accord: remove the vav [the Arabic letter representing “v” here] from the beginning of the first syllable, and what remains is “er” [a man, soldier or hero]. The second syllable is “senk”, that is, “cenk” [battle]; the third is “torik”, that is, “Türk” [Turk] … (p. 86)
This conversation takes place roughly four years before the Sun Language Theory was put forward, at a time when the Turkish History Thesis was being formulated. It would therefore be inaccurate to regard this pseudo-analysis as a direct application of the Sun Language Theory. Yet the method of arbitrarily breaking a foreign word into parts, bending and twisting those parts until they resemble Turkish words, and then drawing historical conclusions from them already displays all the features of the approach that would assume a systematic form in the Sun Language Theory a few years later. A proper name is broken up according to the desired conclusion, sounds are altered or discarded as necessary, and, just like that, Vercingetorix becomes “er-cenk-Türk”.
Sevük, of course, raises not the slightest objection to this analysis, which is entirely devoid of any scholarly basis. On the contrary, he sees in Mustafa Kemal’s words an almost superhuman grasp of history:
History has gripped him like a fever. Indeed, one of his most striking characteristics is that, whenever he takes an interest in a subject, he throws himself into it not merely with one part of his mind, but with his entire being. He does not merely touch it; he embraces it. (pp. 86–87)
After “analysing” the name Vercingetorix by this pseudo-scientific method, Mustafa Kemal does not stop there. As Sevük recounts, he moves on to the word Ege, citing Bedros Keresteciyan’s Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language, and from there to the great migrations of the Turks in prehistoric times. Then comes the maarif emini’s turn to be put to the test:
— Maarif emini, what do you make of all this? And tell us: what is the origin of Cilicia? What was Çukurova called in earlier Turkish? What is the origin of the name “Toros”?
Sevük describes them as “questions from the hereafter”. These questions have no answers grounded in scholarly knowledge. Yet the answer required to pass the test is perfectly clear: unquestioning acceptance of the greatness of the questioner and the truth of everything he says.
And that is precisely what Sevük does:
“By God, Your Excellency the Gazi,” I say, “everything we have known about Turkish history until now has consisted merely of scraps of conventional knowledge. It is under your exalted guidance that we shall acquire the knowledge which will, in some places, tear apart received wisdom and, in others, open up new horizons across vast realms of the unknown. Only after we have seen and read the great work that is the first fruit of this lofty guidance will the many truths left in darkness be brought to light for us as well.” (p. 87)
As the discussion turns from the name of the Taurus Mountains to the Armenians, and from there to the diversity of the peoples of the Caucasus, Mustafa Kemal asks: “İsmail Habib, what do you make of there being so many different communities in a single region?”
Sevük first explains that the Laz are in fact a much smaller community than is commonly assumed. He then goes on to argue that Armenians, Georgians, Abkhazians, Circassians and Chechens cannot be independent peoples:
What I cannot understand is this: can there really be small, independent communities numbering two hundred thousand, half a million or a million, called the Laz, Armenians, Georgians, Abkhazians, Circassians, Chechens and so forth?
They are undoubtedly the deposits left in that mountainous and broken terrain by the majestic tides of a great race that swept through East and West. The ruggedness of the terrain caused them to remain in separate groups and, as their languages and customs changed, they came to regard themselves as distinct races. Yet can there ever be an independent offspring race? Offspring races must necessarily belong to a great parent race. (pp. 89–90)
Here, the political meaning of this pseudo-historical thesis becomes entirely clear. The distinct languages, cultures and histories of different peoples are not regarded as evidence that they are peoples in their own right; instead, they are reduced to mere “deposits” of a great “parent race” left behind in mountainous terrain.
Mustafa Kemal’s reaction to Sevük’s answer is brief but highly revealing:
Sweeping his gaze over the entire gathering, the Gazi said with evident satisfaction, “That is what a view of history should be!” (p. 90)
The conclusion is determined in advance; words are then broken apart, leaps are made across thousands of years, and different peoples are proclaimed offshoots of a great “parent race”. Resemblance replaces evidence; the leader’s approval replaces debate.
On leaving the gathering, Fahrettin Pasha, the army inspector, pats Sevük on the back and congratulates him:
— In the three months of this tour, no one has done as well as you in history. Well done -you passed the examination with flying colours. (p. 90)
These words sum up the entire scene. Sevük is deemed successful not because he has shown his historical knowledge to be sound, but because he has given the answer most closely aligned with the framework laid down by Mustafa Kemal.
Yet it is not enough to explain this entire pseudo-scientific construction of history solely in terms of Mustafa Kemal’s unscientific fascination with history, or that of those around him. We cannot consider the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Theory that followed it in isolation from the class relations and material interests on which they rested.
In this process -which gathered momentum under the rule of the Committee of Union and Progress during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and continued through the formative years of the Republic- the Muslim-Turkish bureaucracy and local notables, together with the emerging Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie, sought to break the economic predominance of the non-Muslim bourgeoisie, which controlled a substantial share of commerce and industry, and to reorganise the economy in favour of Muslim-Turkish interests.
Through the Armenian Genocide, deportations, massacres, forced migration and the population exchange, the overwhelming majority of non-Muslims were driven from the lands on which they had lived, while their homes, land, shops, factories and other forms of wealth changed hands. This dispossession became one of the principal sources both of the growing power of the Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie and of its capital accumulation.
The Turkish History Thesis, in turn, served to confer retrospective historical legitimacy on the policies that accelerated the capital accumulation of the Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie through the confiscation of property belonging to non-Muslims. The claim that Anatolia had been Turkish for thousands of years reduced the peoples who had once lived in these lands -or who continued to live there- to historically secondary and foreign elements, or to communities that had supposedly forgotten that they were Turkish.
This ideological construction had two seemingly contradictory faces. On the one hand, non-Muslims were eliminated as alien and untrustworthy elements within the nation; on the other, the various peoples were said to have no independent historical existence, but to be communities that had broken away from a great “parent race” and lost their own identities. Yet this contradiction did not make the ideology any less useful; on the contrary, it furnished it with two distinct instruments that could be deployed as circumstances required: those who were to be eliminated were cast as alien, while the distinct identities of those who remained were denied.
Drawing on the intellectual framework of the Turkish History Thesis, Sevük portrays Armenians, Georgians, the Laz, Abkhazians, Circassians and Chechens as mere deposits of a great “parent race”. This is therefore no innocent historical error. The view that denies the distinct languages, cultures and histories of separate peoples is one of the ideological underpinnings of the drive to homogenise Turkey in ethnic and religious terms. Different methods were used against different communities in pursuit of the same objective: while the great majority of non-Muslims were eliminated and dispossessed, the distinct identities of Muslim peoples who were not Turkish were denied, and the aim was to assimilate them into the dominant national identity.
The progressive response to the racist theses of the imperialist powers that denigrated the Turks could not, of course, be to reverse the racial hierarchy and proclaim the Turks the source of all civilisations. These bourgeois-nationalist, pseudo-scientific theories of history and language, directly shaped by Mustafa Kemal, did not break with the racist patterns of thought employed by the imperialist powers. Rather, they represented an attempt to adapt those patterns to the needs of the new ruling class that was being built up through the elimination and dispossession of non-Muslims, and of its nation-state.
The “history examination” held in Adana is therefore a small but highly revealing example not only of loyalty to the leader taking the place of scholarship, but also of history being reconstructed in accordance with the material interests of the new nation-state and its ruling classes.
Concluded
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