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Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKMUWOThe Muslim World0027-4909© 2006 Hartford SeminaryApril 2006963

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

To Be a Believer in Republican TurkeyThe Muslim World

To Be a Believer in Republican Turkey: Three Allegories of

3

smet Özel

Scott Morrison

Columbia University New York, New York

I

n his extended autobiographical essay

Why Aren’t You Here Waldo?

the Turkish Islamist intellectual

3

smet Özel places a response in the mouth of Henry David Thoreau, who was at the time incarcerated for protesting

against the Mexican-American war. The question responds to Thoreau’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had asked him, “Why are you here, Henry?”

Özel’s portrayal of the exchange, and the association of his own life — as a poet and commentator on Turkish society and politics — with Thoreau’s, accentuate two pervasive characteristics of a new type of Muslim writer and writing emerging in Turkey since the late 1970’s. The author’s voices in this body of work, of which Özel offers an influential and early exemplar, are as comfortable when alluding to the life of Thoreau, a quintessentially Western (indeed, American) figure embodying the ideals of individualism and freedom, as they are when quoting chapter and verse from the Qur

’a

n or the fatwas of classical Muslim scholars during and prior to the Ottoman Empire. In fact,

3

smet Özel himself speaks French and English, but has little knowledge of Arabic. And yet these intellectuals — who reject the neologism intellectual (

entelektüel

) for

aydın

(from “illuminated” or “light”) — fit into a long, rich tradition of Islamist dissent and resistance.

1

3

smet Özel inaugurated this novel brand of Turkish Islamist thought with his collections of essays, many of which were originally published in Islamist oriented periodicals.

2

Özel’s works bristle with concepts and allusions he draws from Occidental literature, social and political thought that an educated reader from that part of the world may more immediately and readily relate to than the audience Özel seeks to address. Still, it would be inaccurate to label Özel as an elitist who, in looking Westward, turns his back on Turkey in a posture of careless disregard for his less erudite or worldly compatriots.

3

Özel

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writes regularly on political, cultural and social issues of the day. His topics include modern Turkish history and foreign policy, Kemalism, Turkey’s relations with the U.S. and the European Union, and the evolution of Islamist movements and ideologies.

4

Özel expounds on rights, democracy and democratic culture, the relationship of religion and politics (

laiklik

, which can be glossed as secularism), and the meaning of freedom and morality in Islam. In the 1980’s, the period in which he wrote the passages translated below, he poses Islam as an alternative to socialism and nationalism, as a lived reality, in keeping with the Marxian conception of praxis. Broadly speaking, Özel borrows and weaves together bits and pieces of larger ideologies, creating his own distinctive synthesis, and applying it to local and contemporary conditions.

His treatises and topics overlap with, although rarely cite, works of Turkish Islamists of his same generation, such as Ali Bulaç, Hüseyin Hatemi, Abdulrahman Dilipak and Rasim Özdenören. Özel’s audience is primarily the educated Muslim (who may or may not regard himself as an Islamist) who wants his faith to play an important role in his daily life.

3

smet Özel was born in 1944, the son of a police officer, in the Aegean town of Söke, of Kayseri province, Turkey. He went on to study political science at Ankara University and later graduated from Hacettepe University from the French Language and Literature Faculty. During his career, he did not make his living from writing alone but taught French, most recently at an Istanbul lycée. A well-established poet by his early twenties, Özel was attracted by leftist politics in the 1960’s and 70’s. In the 1980’s and 1990’s Özel transformed himself into an Islamist (slamci), even as he maintained that his faith and religious commitments were consistently present in the earlier stages of his career. This article focuses on Özel’s Islamist works. In the early years of the twenty-first century, he has dissociated himself from Islamism and other Islamist figures in Turkey.

To Be a Believer in the Republic of Turkey

A perennial theme in Özel’s works is the question of what it means to be a Muslim living in the modern and notionally secular Republic of Turkey. What are the obstacles in this particular time and place to realizing the values Özel prizes as truly and authentically Islamic? What are the temptations distracting believers from living distinctively Muslim lives, in harmony with an Islam that is something more than a political slogan or shibboleth?

In the following translations, the obstacles and temptations Özel portrays include the narrowness of rationality, or reasonableness, as the majority of society dictates it, over against the alternative path of thought offered, in the first passage, by the Turkish folk hero Nasreddin Hoca.

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A more specific, current obstacle Özel portrays is the fear, mistrust and suspicion radiating from the upholders of the status quo in social and political life, and the mutual misunderstanding and incomprehension that arises between practicing Muslims in Turkey and the entrenched political mainstream which opposes any discourse that smacks of Islamism. As the second passage will show, Özel holds that the gulf between Islamists and others effectively leads to the suppression of the demands of the believers, even those that could be most easily realized, with the least controversy and the smallest compromise.

Finally, in the third passage, in a lesson reminiscent of Marx and suggestive of Özel’s long allegiance to communist ideals, attraction to material and economic prosperity and well-being appear as distractions from what, in Özel’s view, Muslims ought to prize above all else: human redemption and the quest for salvation. In place of the fetishization of commodities and the pull of consumer culture and commercialization, Özel advocates neither asceticism nor the rejection of prosperity. Rather, he affirms the co-existence of consciousness, faith, and authenticity, together with material, and possibly political, success and recognition.

The Reasonable Path is Not One

Semarkand Han said to Nasreddin Hoca: “The reasonable path is one.” Nasreddin Hoca replied, “This is the biggest error any person who is said to be smart falls into; they see every thing and every event from one side only, and they suppose that this is a virtue. The people we know, who we say are smart, see events and objects from their own viewpoints as well. Those whom others consider intelligent gather around themselves like-minded people, so that they will be admired for their cleverness. But a truly smart person is someone who understands that the reasonable path is not one, but is in fact more than one. A single event has at least two faces, each of which has its own explanation. People who say the reasonable road is one are those who, when they describe an event, ignore the probability that there are other possible versions. However, people only see a problem from the side from which they approach it. If you approach the problem from one side, that is the side you will see. Problems themselves do not have just a single side.”

These words made Han think. She took Nasreddin Hoca’s words to jurists, theologians, to experts and to philosophers, but they assumed that his ideas were nothing but nonsense.

The next day Nasreddin Hoca rode into the city center astride a donkey. However, Hoca’s back was turned towards the donkey’s head, and his face was turned towards the donkey’s tail. Riding in this manner he arrived in front of the palace where Han’s counselors were assembled. They turned to

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Semarkand Han, “Let’s see, what are the ‘smart’ people in our neighborhood all looking at here?”

The emperor asked the counselors this question and the response he received was always the same: “A man seems to have mounted his donkey backwards.”

Nasreddin Hoca spoke up. He said “So! It was this that I was trying to explain to you yesterday. Those men who say the reasonable path is one, they all say the same thing. Everyone said that a man was mounting a donkey backwards. No one said that the donkey stood backwards under the man. The mind shows us the relationship between elements. Whether this relationship is right or wrong is a question of judgment. If what they want to say is that the relation between the donkey and the man is backwards, this is from their perspective looking at both the man and the donkey. The man mounted the donkey backwards means that the donkey was facing the right direction. It implies that the one who is sitting facing the wrong direction is the man. However, perhaps I am sitting correctly and the donkey is standing backwards underneath me.”

The concepts that relate different events and objects delimit the role of intelligence in human life. If we understand that intelligence depends on concepts, we will understand that whichever concept is the right or the wrong one to choose will change according to our underlying purpose. Which concepts we should use will become apparent based on the purpose we adopt. Because of this, events can be seen by one person as right, and by another as wrong. Saying that the reasonable road is no more than one can be nothing other than an effort to try to make one’s own perspective fit every person.

If something that is beautiful to us is beautiful to all people, the thing itself will vanish. If everyone determines a thing is good, we cannot say it is good. In order to distinguish between good and bad, beautiful and ugly, it is necessary to have both the good and the bad, both the beautiful and the ugly. If we take away one of these, we would also take away its opposite. The concept ‘light’ already includes the concept ‘darkness.’ The long is long in comparison with the short. If unbelief disappears from the world, how will we recognize faith? In the world we are able to recognize good character because of the existence of dishonorable character.

Intelligence shows us the existence of the opposite. It shows us the limits of our knowledge of the variety that exists in the universe. The claim that “the reasonable path is one” is valid in the sense that it confirms the relations between occurrences and objects. But finally, clever judgment cannot reveal the true nature of the relations between events and objects. As a result, what is determinative is concrete circumstance. This means that the relation a person chooses as the correct one, in his own mind, comes out of the perspective of

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that person’s education, feelings, moral value judgments and goals. In this way, the reasonable path is more than one.

When we place a wager with people we consider bad, we can credit that wager to those who are good. Which it really is may be known either before or after. To do one thing means to destroy the possibility of doing another. Did you destroy the possibility of doing a thing, or did you start to do another thing? He who knows death also knows life. We can also say that he who does not know anything of death cannot know anything of life. The people who say that the reasonable path is one conflate into one what is actually two possible realities, or two possibilities within reality.

5

[ . . . ]Özel begins with Nasreddin Hoca, the protagonist of a genre of traditional

children’s fables, whose words and actions, while appearing at first glance fanciful, if not foolish, contain a knowing depth and sagacity. The epithet ‘Hoca’ denotes a religious teacher or master, although today the word may or may not carry spiritual or religious connotations. Nasreddin Hoca stories are widely known by Turks of all walks of life. The fact that Nasreddin Hoca is a recognizably religious figure and Özel defends the insights he offers, amplifying and elaborating them in his own terms, suggests their soundness, in the author’s mind, and the potential educative value of Islamic, but also in this case, unmistakably Turkish, religious tradition.

Özel’s interpretation of the message inhering in Hoca’s example and words proposes an aesthetic and moral perspectivism, and the necessity of difference and contrast for the production of knowledge, goodness, and beauty. Thus, the existence of one quality or essence conceptually and actually requires its opposite. We can only

perceive

light if darkness also exists. In addition, light only

exists

because darkness also exists, and vice versa. Özel infers from this premise that unbelief and evil are necessary, as they make faith and goodness possible and recognizable.

Given the existence of these opposites in the world, what enables us to perceive the reality they constitute? The concrete qualities of ourselves, the preconceptions, purposes and sensibilities that we carry behind our eyes — “education, feelings, moral value judgments and goals” — make it possible, Özel replies. However, as he recognizes, the psychological tools and predilections the viewer brings to bear, wittingly or not, are highly individual. They vary widely from person to person. The unstated implication is that the realities humans can access are many and diverse. None should command greater value or respect than any other. Any effort to prove the superiority of one construal of reality — whether it be empirical, moral or aesthetic — over another, is groundless. The ability to ascribe value founders, caught up on the unavoidable subjectivity of perception, thought and feeling.

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Does the function Özel accords subjective faculties, in other words, his perspectivism, make substantive moral assessments obsolete or impossible? He does not tell us. It is not evident that he has considered this as a possibility. If it does, it may undermine the unmistakably ethical and activist thrust of his more literally political and argumentative claims, in this and in other writings. Alternatively, he may avoid such a moral relativism by ascribing moral truth and objectivity to the values adopted by a community or a society at a particular point in time. However, Nasreddin Hoca does not represent society as a whole. On the contrary, his is a minority belief, one which is, insofar as anyone attends it, ostracized. Yet, Özel clearly identifies with, and seeks the dissemination of Hoca’s wisdom. Consequently, he cannot be seeking to preserve moral objectivity by anchoring it in societal consensus.

In the last paragraph of the essay, Özel apparently proposes a binary (“what is actually two possible realities, or two possibilities within reality”) rather than a plural perspective. In the world of the Nasreddin Hoca story, observers can construe the relation of Hoca and the donkey in only two ways: Hoca is sitting backwards (as they chose to interpret it), or, the donkey is standing backwards under Hoca. Özel returns to this simple physical example in summarizing the moral of the story, even as the tale taken as a whole asserts, I suggest, the multiplicity of reality, following the individual differences between people that make up a decisive ingredient in the composition of reality. “Did you destroy the possibility of doing a thing, or did you start to do another thing?” Action requires inaction, as belief also requires unbelief. Achieving one potential means leaving another unrealized. Living requires dying, and dying requires living. However, whether we choose to understand our deeds as the taking of an action, or as inaction — as the neglect of other potentialities — is ultimately our determination to make, rather than a reality forced on us by the circumstances of a world that is objectively fixed.

Steak with Mushroom Sauce

A tourist staying in a luxury hotel in Spain wanted steak with mushroom sauce. But the tourist could neither speak Spanish, nor could the hotel attendants understand any of the languages the tourist knew. In order to express with a picture what he wanted, the hotel guest took a piece of paper and drew a picture of a slender mushroom and, beside it, a bull. On seeing the picture, the hotel attendant left to get what the tourist wanted. When the attendant came back, smiling, he gave the customer two things: a beach umbrella and a ticket for admission to a bullfight. I think that this tale can help explain human relationships in Turkey, and even the relationships of those living outside Turkey. There is a miscommunication, a misunderstanding, in the middle of this story, but this miscommunication itself provides us with a

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better understanding. Why would a tourist coming to Spain want steak with mushroom sauce? At most he would watch girls at the beach, and he would be curious about the bullfight, a thing which he cannot see just anywhere. In the same way, people’s political, social and economic demands, and also those demands that can best be realized in Turkey, can be misinterpreted. Before someone’s mind advances such an incorrect interpretation, in the form of “If it were I, I would want this,” he should understand more accurately what is being demanded. He should arrive at an understanding without being carried away by his preconceptions.

Muslims take a prominent place among those who are negatively affected by such preconceptions. In Turkey, in order to sustain the fears that “Muslims come” and “they bring Islamism,” there is a significant tendency and frequent recourse to evaluate Islamic demands as different and wrong. Only the fears that feed these tendencies and the faults that they know themselves, for they do not have any knowledge of Muslims, are their responsibility. But as a result of such fears, no one in the surrounding areas looks to Islam with interest. They do not make the connection between their own problems and the problems of the Muslims. When the situation reaches this point, they emphasize their own worries as if they were reading these problems off of the past mentality of Muslims. They will never comprehend that we want steak with mushroom sauce. Because of this, when we go out shopping they will close the place where umbrellas are sold, and they will cancel the bullfight exhibitions. (Of course, when they do this, we will also go and sedately eat our steak with mushroom sauce. Where can such abundance be found!)

6

[ . . . ]To paraphrase the salient points of the pages that follow the above

excerpt: Özel criticizes the entrenched political classes who, in his view, unjustifiably fear that Islamists will overthrow the secular republican order, and put in its place a structure of power harkening back to Ottoman times, with its conflation of religious and political authority. However, Özel does not reserve his fire for doctrinaire Kemalists. He also criticizes Turkish Islamists who celebrate, he believes wrongly, the reigning political ideology in Iran, and the legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini. This group, which Özel labels “Muslim Khomeiniyists” liken the rule of the pre-revolutionary regime of the Shah with that of the Kemalist Republican regime. Özel contends that the Khomeiniyists fail to recognize the differences between Turkish and Iranian society, tradition, and politics.

While Özel charges the Turkish authorities with wrongfully equating Turkish Islamists’ demands with those of Islamists in the Arab world (he singles out Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia), he contends that Islamists in

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Turkey are also wrong to look at the Arab states and societies as representing any semblance of a pure Islam, or as setting a precedent for Turkey to follow. Özel’s is in this way a distinctively and self-consciously Turkish voice. When in other works Özel tackles regional politics or the economic and cultural dynamics of the international system, with the special attention he pays the US, the purpose this wider perspective serves can invariably be traced back to Turkey, to the concerns of Turkey as a state in the international arena, and to Turkish society, which may be more or less aware of how politics and the world order impinge upon their lives. According to Özel, Turkey is

sui generis

. It is not Iran. Nor does it resemble Arab states, or other Muslims societies, wherever they may be. By his lights, Islamists in Turkey must find their own solutions to their own conflicts and controversies, rather than looking to the blueprints and endeavors of Islamists elsewhere.

Evidence for this characterization of Özel as a specifically Turkish Islamist appears in the pages following the text quoted above. Özel surveys the history of the foundation of the Republic, arguing that with the transition from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire to the modern territorial Turkish nation-state, the structures supporting society and state authority collapsed. He claims that these shattered structures have yet to be rebuilt. Özel investigates nationalism in Turkey, considering the meaning of Kemalism and the comparatively novel innovation of

laiklik

, and the works of the Turkish sociologist Ziya Gökalp, providing a thumbnail history of the founding of the Republic. However he does not regard the early and persisting efforts at state formation as successful antidotes to the shattered Ottoman legacy. In the last analysis, Özel says, Turks are Muslims. Yet he maintains that the promise this demographic and cultural commonality holds up, as a possible binder bringing together the disparate elements composing the Republic, remains unfulfilled.

[ . . . ] Today in Turkey and everywhere in the world Muslims want to eat steak with mushroom sauce, but they are only given beach umbrellas and tickets to a bullfight. However, one day, if this incorrect understanding comes to a close, and the steak falls in front of the Muslims, what will happen? As a matter of fact there are signs that this will occur. If Muslims do not succeed in raising their own cattle, slaughtering according to their own methods, cooking the meat in fire they themselves lit, and they do not succeed in eating at a time of their own choosing, they will not have achieved a truly meaningful result. In reality, the question is not whether they eat or do not eat the steak, it is whether or not they are focused on the road to human salvation. Muslims, whether in Turkey or anywhere else in the world, will be the focal point of their own attractive power. Whether or not they bring about an action that effectively appeals to the unbeliever in this or that area does not determine their success. They will remain at a distance

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from the unbeliever, even before making ready, as is needed, in order to advance Islam, and to bring about its coming.7

The essay thus ends with one of the cryptic phrases that strike unease in the hearts of the more or less secular majority in Turkey. I have not found and would not expect to find in other or future writings of 3smet Özel a programmatic statement calling for Islamic rule, along the lines of a renewed Caliphate, or an Iranian model of the rule of religious scholars, or even a populist democratic rule infused with Islamic norms. Unlike so many Islamist writers, whether originating from Egypt or the Arab Gulf states, Pakistan or India, Indonesia or Malaysia, Özel does not center his demands for reform on the implementation of Islamic law (ßeriat), nor does he present the sovereignty of God as the sine qua non of legitimate rule over Muslims. What exactly is the preparation that he believes is needed to anticipate the coming of Islam? And, more fundamentally, what is the coming of Islam, in socio-political terms, according to Özel?

Whether or not a steak is delivered to the plate set before religiously motivated Muslims in Turkey, whether or not particular Islamist platforms are sturdily erected, now or in the foreseeable future, Özel states that the pursuit itself, the devoted following of the path to salvation, is what counts. Effort is the metric of measurement, rather than concrete achievement. Is this vagueness, or this modesty of ambition, the product of conviction or of strategy? This is a question the secular establishment in Turkey believes it knows the answer to, and all too well. But the thrust of the above passage is that, according to Özel, it does not actually know; the establishment fails to see the congruence of their problems with those of the Islamists. Islamists and dogmatic Kemalists do not, in the metaphoric land of Spain, speak the same language. The Spanish speaking wait-staff do not understand the language the tourist speaks. Özel thus casts the Islamist as a stranger in his own land. He is a visitor assumed to be temporary. In the story of “Steak with Mushroom Sauce,” the tourist is compelled to signal graphically and silently his desires, driven to sketching a bull and a slender mushroom.

Although appealing to the opponents of Islamism is no doubt a pragmatic requisite for success in Turkey, Özel in this passage diminishes the significance and necessity of such appeals. Özel suggests that it can never occur to Turks opposing public expressions of religion that Islamists’ solutions could serve their interests as well.

As the hotel waiter prematurely concludes, surely a tourist in Spain would not want a dish he could find anywhere, but would, as tourists are wont to do, seek out the unique attractions of their vacation destination, and engage in activities they cannot find or (anonymously) practice at home, whether it be

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bullfights or sunning (and lechery) at the beach. To extend the metaphor to topics that concern Özel, the entrenched wielders of power speciously attribute to Islamists foreign, exotic, and strange desires. Some Islamists, who Özel accuses of falling into error, inadvertently nurture this misunderstanding when they look with admiration towards Iran and the Arab world. Özel urges the authorities and secular Turks to avoid haste, and to put aside for the moment their assumptions, those blinders that block a resident from understanding that the tourist is fundamentally no different from himself.

Özel insinuates that the misinterpretation and the estrangement of Islamists is in part willful: “in order to sustain the fears that ‘Muslims come’ and ‘they bring Islamism’” the unnamed authorities perpetuate exaggerated, distorted images of Islamists. They ascribe, in xenophobic fashion, every problem and fault as originating in this Islamist ‘other’ who lives in their midst. The Islamists’ fate looks worse at some moments of Özel’s narration than that of the tourist in Spain: even the bullfight and the beach will be closed. To the authorities, the will of the Islamists is far from innocuous. Their demands elicit fear, and the fear elicits marginalization and suppression. Yet again, if the ticket and the umbrella are not forthcoming, the Islamist still somehow finds his steak and eat it. Alternatively, if the powers that be see fit and they give leave to the Islamist to speculate about theories of Islamic rule and what a society shaped by Islamic values would look like, and even take steps to realize these dreams, they will not get what they really want. Rather they will receive the product of a cynical and false manipulation of their desires by forces outside of themselves. Özel depicts the tourist, the metaphorical Islamist, as irremediably passive. He is impaired by language and a bizarre appearance in a land that may or may not be his own.

How is the misrepresentation of Islamist demands to be overcome? Özel avoids this issue, but hints hopefully at the demise of mutual incomprehension. Opposed to the depiction of the solitary tourist, Özel holds out the possibility that believing Muslims can, by dint of collective will, free themselves. As in the Nasreddin Hoca parable, the second passage holds up the value of autonomy — the autonomy to choose whether one is acting, or refraining from acting. Muslims must obtain a measure of independence from their surroundings. They must undertake their own husbandry, their own meat-cutting and packing, and their own cooking, on their own time, and using their own tested and true methods. The metaphor evokes hilal butchery. The livestock that will fuel the bodies of the present and future generations of Muslims must be raised as they, rather than as some outsider, see fit. Truly significant achievement can only follow from this independent and self-reliant path.

The final allegory of the three recollects Özel’s days as a socialist, with a Marxian twist. The excerpt emphasizes the integral character of labor, rejecting

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specialization in favor of craft and subsistence. Just as “Steak with Mushroom Sauce” urges Muslim independence and autonomy, from the raising of livestock through to its consumption, in “The Turtle,” Özel obliquely criticizes alienated labor. This last passage exhibits a tincture of Marxian humanism, with its theme of commodity fetishism.

The TurtleThe prince of the Chu empire sent two officials to the sage Chuang-Tzu.

The officials found the philosopher fishing on the bank of a brook. The prince’s men approached respectfully, and said, “Our sovereign invites you to his palace to share with you the responsibility of state function.”

Hearing these words, the sage betrayed no response. Swinging his fishing line from side to side, he said to the palace’s officials: “I heard that in the Chu palace there is a sacred turtle. Although this turtle died two thousand years ago the prince ordered that he be hidden with great care inside a chest in the hall that is dedicated to the memory of the ancestors. Now I ask you, would a turtle want to be found in a palace as a dead thing, hollowed out on the inside, to be hid like a treasure, or would it want to remain as a living turtle with its tail in the mud?”

The state officials replied, “Of course, he would want to continue to live, and to keep his tail in the mud.”

“If that is so,” responded Chuang-Tzu, “then go along on your way. I too will stay here with my tail in the mud.”

Most of the time people forget that everything we possess has a price. They forget that every gain comes at some cost. We suppose that we will be able to add to our possessions the advantages that we will gain under one set of circumstances. However, everything that we gain under those circumstances we will lose under another set of circumstances. If we look at things from this perspective, we will realize that no one is in a better state than anyone else in any absolute sense.

[ . . . ]But the general tendency, unfortunately, is for us to begin to adjust to living in the palace like the turtle. If one day we should be the palace’s sacred turtle, let us be mindful of the fact that as long as we are the turtle hidden away in the chest, we are already dead. We will be distant from our former liveliness, so distant that we will no longer be familiar with the mud, and with how we used to wet our tails in it. Staying alive is not something that takes place in the mind. Muslims’ engagement in life is something that also surpasses the limitations of writing. Accept both the palace and stay alive. Is this possible?8

The central character, yet another wise man of sorts, albeit not a Muslim, refuses the offer of status, opting to remain quietly fishing for his livelihood,

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as Muslims raising their own meat also should, according to Özel. Chuang-Tzu decides to live by the muddy creek rather than in a palace, in order to stay fully, and humbly, alive. The moral Özel could draw out of this tale would naturally be one approving asceticism and self-denial, in opposition to a life of opulence and decadence: better a turtle squirming in the mud than a hollow shell nestled amongst finery and gold. However, the final challenge Özel adduces is, rather, to accept power, to heed the call to responsibility and to glory, to leave the bank of the brook, but to keep the life within oneself burning even amidst the trappings of power.

In his commentary, Özel speaks in economic terms, in a manner not fully consistent with the suggested criticism of commodity fetishism when he articulates an idea of, to use Marxian parlance, the exchange value of freedom and vitality. He urges the reader to recognize the price of taking any action, the cost of winning any advantage. He warns that we may neither fully appreciate the intangibles that we thereby sacrifice, nor the evanescence of acquisition and ownership. The never-ending process of earning and losing may not ultimately be as consequential as we believe. At the same time, it may be an unbreakable circle. The only way, Özel seems to propose, to imbue our lives with meaning is not to exit from such a cycle, but rather to raise our consciousness of what precisely we are gaining and what we are losing with each transaction and with the passage of each moment. Self-knowledge, then, is key. Even a lowly turtle knows himself well enough to prefer his home over a palace that will desiccate and ossify him. However, if we thoroughly know ourselves during our tenure in the palace, if we feel ourselves alive, minding our purpose and maintaining our integrity, then our death will not inexorably follow our embrace of power, prestige, and wealth.

While Özel concedes that material conditions, the economic structure, largely create reality, he cautions against the associated phenomenon of commodity fetishism. This term, as I apply it to Özel, denotes the confusion of the means to living for the ends of life; for example, the belief that money, which is admittedly a necessary good for living in a modern economy, is not only worth acquiring for what it can buy, but that it is also worth accumulating for its own sake. Özel equates commodity fetishism with death.9 In contrast with purely structural or economic determinism, Özel wants to reserve agency for the individual Muslim believer, even in the face of powers beyond himself: the weight of command and authority embodied by the palace which, if improperly understood and managed, can crush him. A persistent feature of Özel’s works, since his turn away from leftist politics per se, is his critical perspective on sweeping ideologies, utopianism and revolution. The model of change he upholds is that of simple and humble adherence to Islam. He summons believers to honor the faith in the minutiae of their daily lives. Rather

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than proselytizing, or preaching to those in or outside the faith, he urges individual Muslims to set an example for others in the way they live.

Awareness and consciousness is insufficient for staying fully alive, or for salvation: “To remain in life is not an event that takes place in the mind.” The Nasreddin Hoca story suggests alternative paths, paths that diverge from reason, rationality, and, I would venture, cognition, as tools for achieving truth, authenticity, and integrity. The physical experience of life, living with one’s tail in the mud, and the regular passing of time, are for Özel the loci of Muslim and human endeavor as much or more than the mind, against the philosophers and learned authorities who are blinded by their desire to be clever and to garner laurels for their intellectual greatness.

It is not possible to fully capture what is not cognitive by means of writing or language: “Muslims’ engagement in life is something which also surpasses the limitations of writing.” One cannot learn how to be a Muslim from reading books, nor can the sanctity of the faith and its values be wholly expressed through words. How one lives is indispensable. The perception of the world and the way to occupy it is a matter of judgment made by people’s subjectivity, a product of their history and the small but accumulating decisions that they make.

A Hoca, a Tourist, and a Reticent SageWhile a persistent theme threading through Özel’s works in his Islamist

period, during which he penned these three passages, is the meaning of living a Muslim life in Republican Turkey, the legacy of Özel’s Marxian sympathies lingers in the form of humanistic social critique.10 Whether for political or literary reasons, Özel does not directly refer to Marx in the works from which the passages above were selected. Özel’s humanism, in contrast to that of Marx, is one that does not denigrate religion as a shackle from which individuals should seek emancipation. As an intellectual ascribing himself an Islamist identity, Özel pairs an eye for Marxian human emancipation with an eye for spiritual salvation and religiously informed virtue. By means of these juxtaposed humanistic and Islamic lenses, Özel seeks to detect, to penetrate and to overcome the forces both within and surrounding believers that can prevent the development of their best Muslim selves. In the surrounding society, the twin strictures of narrow rationality and reasonableness, and the distortion of Islamist demands by the status quo authorities, impede individual Muslim liberation. And a force within them, the temptation of commodity fetishism, the marketing and sale of their vital energies, hampers self-realization and authentic living.

In this essay, I translate from the Turkish three allegorical tales written by 3smet Özel. The stories’ titles are: “The Reasonable Path is Not One,” “Steak

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with Mushroom Sauce,” and “The Turtle.” The protagonists of each are, respectively, Nasreddin Hoca (the folk hero cum religious teacher of children’s stories), a solitary tourist in a hotel restaurant in Spain who cannot articulate his desire for a simple steak, and Chuang-Tzu, a Confucian sage who opts to remain fishing by a brook rather than ascending the corridors of wealth and power.

The position of the Islamist, whether he is an intellectual or a working-class Turk, appears in various metaphorical shapes in the excerpts translated here. However, in all cases, he appears as a marginal and impaired, an incomplete and powerless, figure: hoca, tourist, and wise man sitting alone on a riverbank. Nasreddin Hoca rides backwards on his unassuming donkey, passing in front of the palace. The authorized religious and scholarly elite, scoffing, dismiss his ideas. He possesses wisdom but little power to persuade the ruler’s advisers of the validity of his divergent way of seeing the world. The tourist in Spain, who speaks an unknown language and cannot satisfy his basic desire for a nice steak, is packed off against his inclinations to the beach and the bullfight. He is hamstrung by the peremptory assumptions of the locals. Chuang-Tzu prefers his spot on the river, far from the seat of power. In all three images, the Islamist appears as the weaker, as the outsider, as the dissenter, but one who possesses integrity, a modest dignity, and even wisdom.

The locations of the protagonists bespeak the lonely, obscure road they travel: at the walls of the palace, alone on the river, or in the restaurant of a luxury tourist hotel in a foreign land. And yet, these figures are forever vacillating on the edge of success, whether it is the satisfaction of an appetite, or living a fuller life, or collecting long sought recognition and responsibility. The potential for wealth, prestige and power is stifled or frustrated by established opinion, mutual linguistic incomprehension, willful or accidental misinterpretation, and the unacceptably heavy cost of entering the halls of power and responsibility.

Özel defines success for these embodiments of the Muslim believer in Turkey as persisting on the right path, not in terms of palpable accomplishment. He remains coy about what the concrete results should be what the coming of Muslims and Islam in Turkey, actually means.

Endnotes1. Michael Meeker, ‘The Muslim Intellectual and his Audience: a new configuration

of writer and reader among believers in the Republic of Turkey,’ in Cultural Transitions in the Middle East, ed., Íerif Mardin (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1994), 153–188, 153. Noted above: Waldo Sen Neden Burada Degilsin? (Why Are You Not Here Waldo?) (Istanbul: Risale Yayınları, 1988). I am indebted to the Institute of Turkish Studies who supported the research and writing of this paper with a summer research grant (2003). I presented an earlier version of this paper at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska in

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November, 2003. Translations of the three passages are my own, as are other quotations from Turkish, unless otherwise noted.

2. E.g. Taßları Yemek Yasak (Eating the Stones is Prohibited) (Istanbul: Risale Yayınları, 1985), Tehdit Degil, Teklif (A Proposition, Not a Threat) (Istanbul: Çidam Yayınları, 1987), Üç Mesele: Medeniyet, Teknik ve Yabancılaßma (Three Problems: Civilization technology, and estrangement) (Istanbul: Düßünce Yayınları, 1978). Özel originally considered giving Three Problems the title Introduction to the Muslim Way of Thinking (Müsülmanca Düßünmeye Baßlangıç; noted in the preface to the first edition of Three Problems.) Özel’s earlier works consisted largely in poetry, such as Yes, Revolt (Evet, 3sya, 1969), and The Book of Murders (Cinayetler Kitabı, 1975). For biographical details above, I have drawn on Meeker, “Muslim Intellectual,” 162–5.

3. For example, in “The Murderer of the Watermelon” (translated in Meeker, ‘Muslim Intellectual,’ 181–3), Özel reveals his sympathy for the common villager and his distaste for those who fail to appreciate their knowledge, capability and dignity. Some of the sources Özel draws on, particularly in Three Problems, include Marquis de Mirabeau, Ernest Renan, philosophers and political thinkers such as John Locke, Galileo, Bertrand Russell, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Lenin, Nietzsche, Hegel, Alfred North Whitehead, Henry David Thoreau, and Nietzsche. Other figures featured in his work include Arnold Toynbee, Werner Heisenberg, and Claude Levi Strauss. Actual references to the Qur’an and the Sunnah are few, although Özel does employ ideas he attributes to Muslim thinkers, such as the fourteenth century thinker, considered by some as the founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun, and Muhammad Iqbal, who participated in the founding of Pakistan, and who is now revered as a national poet and hero. On the limits of Qur’anic reference, and for an analysis of the sources Özel employs, I have referred to Muhammet Boz(dag), “Bir 3slamci Olarak 3smet Özel’in ‘Medeniyet, Teknik ve Yabancılaßma’ Kavramlarına yaklaßımı üzerine bir degerlendirme,” (Ismet Özel as an Islamist: an evaluation of the approach to concepts in ‘Three Problems: technology, civilization, and estrangement’), doctoral thesis, university unstated, 1997.

4. Íerif Mardin ‘Religion and Politics in Modern Turkey,’ in Islam in the Political Process, ed. James P. Piscatori, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Binnaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1981).

5. Zor Zamanda Konußmak (To Speak in a Difficult Time) (Dergah Yayınları, Istanbul, 1984), 362–5.

6. 3smet Özel, Cuma Mektupları II (Friday Letters vol. II) (Istanbul: Çidam Yayınları, 1989), 55–56.

7. Özel, ibid., 64.8. Özel, Zor Zamanda, 321–3.9. A commodity is a good that can be bought and sold. The fetishism of commodities

is investing a value in saleable goods beyond their capacity to sustain or improve human welfare. A neo-Freudian psychologist influenced by Marx, Erich Fromm, employs a similar analysis and critique of the concept. Özel elsewhere cites Fromm, To Have or to Be (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), in which Fromm develops criticism congruent with that I ascribe to Özel.

10. I find resonance with Marx’s Grundrisse and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. A traditional scholarly interpretation differentiates early and late Marx, with the former characterized by humanistic and overtly normative analysis, and the latter by notionally scientific, economic deterministic analysis. Insofar as this is a valid dichotomization — Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968) argues it is not — Özel’s incorporation of Marxian ideas during his Islamist period bears a resemblance to the early Marx.