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You still haven't learned: That poem is not by Ziya Gökalp

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President Tayyip Erdoğan, during a program where he met with young people, once again recited the poem that served as the basis for his imprisonment in 1999. Dozens of media outlets, including Anadolu Agency, Haberler.com, Hürriyet, Takvim, Türkiye, Sabah, Sözcü, and TGRT, published reports stating that Erdoğan “recited Ziya Gökalp’s poem ‘Soldier’s Prayer’ during his meeting with the youth.”

However, this is incorrect information. Moreover, fact-checking platforms have written about this several times, and I have also written and warned about it repeatedly. I last wrote about this subject just last February. This poem, which begins with the lines “Minarets are our bayonets, domes our helmets, mosques our barracks,” is not by Ziya Gökalp; it is the poem “Divine Army” by the Ankara-based poet M. Cevat Örnek. Örnek included this poem in his books “7 Dağın Çiçeği” (1966) and “Gülden Dikenden” (1974). On the website dedicated to him, the story of this poem is told as follows:

“One Ramadan, while waiting at a bus stop after work with his son Ümit Örnek, he told his son, who likened the minarets of the mosque to bayonets and its domes to helmets, that he would put this into writing when they got home, and he wrote this poem.

The poem consists merely of a metaphor and is not intended to have any religious or political connotations.”

Unfortunately, ever since the years Erdoğan was imprisoned, the media has written that this poem belongs to Ziya Gökalp, and years have passed, yet it continues to be reported that way. Repeated warnings have failed to ensure that our journalist colleagues correct the error. One of the reasons this mistake has persisted for years without being corrected is the carelessness of journalism, and the other is that the Directorate of Communications continues to repeat this error in the news on its website.

The Directorate of Communications, which supposedly established a “Disinformation Combat Center” to fight against falsehoods, is both misleading people and doing an injustice to both Ziya Gökalp and M. Cevat Örnek by not correcting this obvious error. To whom should we complain?