Ummah or Nation?..

During the First World War, the Germans called the Ottoman Empire "Enverland," meaning "Enver's Land." The wagons carrying supplies to Turkey were labeled "Bound for Enverland."

Falih Rıfkı Atay, in the "Goodbye" chapter of his book Zeytindağı(1), writes: "I am finally leaving Damascus... As the train moves, we are emptying Syria and Lebanon from both sides of us as if they were ballast. Tomorrow, we will find ourselves among the villages of Anatolia, without Jerusalem, without Damascus, without Lebanon, without Beirut, and without Aleppo, drowned in the anxiety of our own lives and our own hearths, feeling so miserable..."

"A woman stands at the station, asking everyone who passes by: 'Have you seen my Ahmed?' Which Ahmed? Which one of the hundred thousand Ahmeds? Pulling her arm from beneath her tattered calico dress, she points in the opposite direction of the train's path, the direction toward Istanbul. 'He went this way,' she says. 'Have you seen my Ahmed?' No... None of us saw her Ahmed. But Ahmed saw everything. He saw a hell that even God could not describe to Muhammad."

***

Yes, the abandoned mothers of a desolate and forsaken Anatolia were weeping just like that. They were asking for their Ahmeds, whom they had raised in poverty and deprivation and sent off to war for the sake of the homeland. The Ahmeds were lost in the scorching heat of deserts that never belonged to the Ottomans. Anatolia's milk was wasted in this way. The Ahmeds were lost in a gamble played by the Ottomans... The tears of Ahmed's mother flowed into the Anatolian soil in such despair. The blood of the Ahmeds flowed in the deserts, in the thirsty lands, just like that...

***

But were those lands where Ahmed's blood flowed truly Ottoman? Let Falih Rıfkı Atay provide the answer:

"We are living as tenants in Jerusalem. What does not pass from Aleppo to this side is not just Turkish paper; neither the Turkish language nor the Turk himself passes through.

Jerusalem was as much 'not ours' as Florence is not ours. We wander the streets like tourists... Trade, culture, farms, industry, buildings—everything belongs to the Arabs or other states... Only the gendarmerie was ours. And not even the gendarmerie, just the gendarmerie's uniform. While the Ottoman sultanate was purely bureaucratic, even the bureaucracy was entirely or half-Arab. Besides never seeing a Turkified Arab, I rarely encountered a Turk who had not been Arabized... Because all minorities in the Ottoman Empire were privileged and the Turkish element was unprivileged, being the child of any Muslim minority was more advantageous than being a Turk... In Syria, Palestine, and the Hejaz, the answer to the question 'Are you a Turk?' was many times 'God forbid!' We had neither colonized these lands nor turned them into a homeland.

The Ottoman Empire was merely a free field and street watchman in these places. If the madrasa system and the lack of consciousness had continued, there is no doubt that Arabism would have penetrated deep into Anatolia... And we were slowly learning Arabic just to explain ourselves to the hotelier, the restaurant owner, or even the postman..."

This is how Falih Rıfkı Atay, who perfectly described the final years of the Ottoman Empire, wrote in Zeytindağı. A chain of ignorance, illusions, ambitions, and ingratitude...

***

The year is 2024... Nowadays, the rhetoric that "those who are not Muslim are not called Turks" is circulating. Cries for the "Ummah" are rising. Ignorance is, of course, a conscious choice. Are Arabs who are Christian or Jewish not Arab?..

For instance, is Mete Han, the ruler of the Great Hun Empire who was not Muslim, not a Turk? Was the Turkish Army, founded in 209 B.C., not Turkish?

Are all 16 Turkish states featured on the Presidential Seal Muslim?.. Are the Great Hun, Western Hun, European Hun, Hephthalite, Göktürk, Avar, Khazar, and Uyghur states not considered Turkish because they were not Muslim? Will they be rejected from Turkishness because they were not Muslim?.. Will the Chuvash, Gagauz, Karaim, Altai, Tuvan, Yakut, Khakas, and Yellow Uyghur Turks living today not be counted as Turks because they are not Muslim? Will they be told, "You cannot be a Turk because you are not Muslim"?..

***

Atatürk defined the "Nation" in 1930 and put an end to the debate. This definition is also a summary of Turkish history: "The people of Turkey who founded the Republic of Turkey are called the Turkish Nation."

Atatürk understood that the greatest legacy left by the Ottomans was the ignorance that hindered modernization. The main goal of the revolution Atatürk carried out was the creation of a nation-state, the Turkish nation. The foundation of the Republic's founding philosophy consists of the nation-state, the unitary state, and the secular state structure. The concept of a nation-state is not tied to ethnic or religious foundations. In a nation-state, language is important. In a unitary state, there is one country, one sovereignty, and one nation. The secular state structure is the cornerstone of Atatürk's principles.

The effort to kill the nation and replace it with an "Ummah," which has been erased from history through painful experiences, will only lead Turkey into darkness and backwardness. Just as it is now...

They possess the world's richest energy resources, yet they have no inventions. Why? The culture of "submission" means "servant," while the culture of "merit" means "free individual"... "Merit" means reason and science... If you question, your path leads to Atatürk and his revolutions...

Those who pursue the Ummah envy a geography that kills each other with weapons bought from others and tries to heal with medicine discovered by others... These ingrates of history, who envy Afghanistan but hope for help from the West and send their own children to schools in the West...

A Turkey that drifts away from Atatürk sees no daylight, and it never will...

(1) Falih Rıfkı Atay, Zeytindağı, Bateş A.Ş., Istanbul, 2003.