Thinking about Turkish Modernization: Cemil Meriç on Turkish

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume
26, Number 3, 2006, pp. 434-445 (Article)
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Thinking about Turkish Modernization:
Cemil Meriç on Turkish Language, Culture,
and Intellectuals
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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
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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:
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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
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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,
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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
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tu d
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Af
u th
ri c
M
so
As
n
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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
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M
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aa
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idd
ti v
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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.]