All Its Rivers

Staff Report, *Erdoğan lists controversial people central to Turkey’s culture* - Milliyet/Hurriyet Daily News
Friday, October 9, 2009

Ankara: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech on Oct. 3 at his party’s convention made headlines the next day as he paid homage to a list of people who contributed to Turkey's culture but some of them were, at one stage, considered enemies of the state while others died in exile.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s speech on Oct. 3 at his party’s convention made headlines the next day as he paid homage to a group of people who contributed to Turkey in one way or other.

His speech was considered to be groundbreaking because some of the names he mentioned were, at one stage, considered to be enemies of the state while others died in exile.

“If you try to remove Ahmet Yesevi, Hacı Bektaş, Pir Sultan and Hacı Bayram Veli from our culture, the country will become an orphan,” Erdoğan said. “Without Yunus Emre, Turkey will be without a voice. Without Mevlana, it would be without a soul. Without listening to Sabahat Akkiraz, Turkey will be without traditional music. If Turkey ignores Tatyos Efendi, it will lose half its songs.

“Turkey missed Cem Karaca as much as he missed this country. Songs that do not pay respect to Ahmet Kaya, who wrote, ‘Farewell, My Two Eyes,' are not complete songs. Just as one cannot imagine a Turkey without Mehmet Akif [Ersoy, the poet who wrote the national anthem], a country without Nâzım Hikmet is an incomplete Turkey,” he said in his speech.

“You may or may not accept their ideas, you may like them or not, but without Ahmed-i Hani or Said Nursi of Bitlis, Turkey's spirituality is deficient," he said. “We are Turkey with all its rivers, flowers, smells, mountains and stones,” he said.

His list immediately triggered a debate as well. For some, the list endorsed the right names, but others found it too narrow, arguing that it should have included more names.

The following personalities were mentioned by Erdoğan in his speech:

Ahmet Yesevi
Yesevi was born in 1093 in Kazakhstan. He was a Sufi poet as well as the leader of an Islamic sect. Although he never came to Anatolia, he became a beloved figure there as well. Together with other Anatolian figures like Mevlana Jelaleddin Rumi, Yunus Emre and Hacı Bektaş Veli, he had an influence on Alevi communities. He provided a philosophical perspective on Islam to Turkish communities that had recently accepted the religion. Although well versed in Arabic and Farsi, Yesevi also wrote in Turkish.

Tatyos Efendi
Tatyos Efendi was an Armenian with 47 songs including eight preludes, six saz semahs (special compositions for the saz, an Anatolian stringed instrument) and one major composition in Turkish classical music. Born in 1858 in Istanbul’s Ortaköy district, he lived his last years in poverty and died on March 16, 1913. Ahmed Rasim Bey, another composer, said one of his own pieces was the consequence of Tatyos Efendi’s life. Tatyos Efendi’s parents wanted him to become an artisan but he chose music instead.

Nazım Hikmet
Nazım Hikmet was prosecuted several times because of his poems and articles. In 1938, he was sentenced to prison for 28 years and four months for attempting to provoke an army rebellion. A communist, he was imprisoned for more than 12 years before being released in 1950 as the result of an amnesty. Fearing a new sentence, he escaped to the Soviet Union when he was 48 years old. Hikmet was then stripped of his Turkish citizenship in July 25, 1951. He was buried in Moscow after his death in 1963. On January 10, 2009, his citizenship was restored. He is one of Turkey’s most internationally recognized poets even though his work was forbidden in Turkey for many years.

Said Nursi
Originally from Bitlis in southeastern Anatolia, Said Nursi was the founder of the Islamic Nur movement and was arrested in 1934 in the central Anatolian city of Eskişehir on the charge of “launching a secret group aiming to change the system of the state.” He was sentenced to 11 months in prison and then to internal exile in the province of Kastamonu. In 1948, he was sentenced to 20 months in prison for founding an association with illegal political aims. He died in the southeastern Anatolian city of Şanlıurfa in 1960 and was buried in Halil-ür Rahman Dergah. His remains, however, were transferred to an unknown place by the leaders of the 1960 military coup.

Hacı Bektaş Veli
Hacı Bektaş Veli was born in Nişabûr in Khorasan (present-day Iran) in 1281. He came to Anatolia after finishing his education. In Anatolia, he led the locals to the “right way” by providing them mystical and philosophical instruction, later becoming popular among them. He and his students made contributions to Ahilik, a group composed of artisans who supported each other and shared religious and moral teachings. Beloved by Ottoman sultans, Hacı Bektaş Veli died in 1338. His followers became the Bektaşis, a Sufi order still widespread throughout Anatolia today.

Pir Sultan Abdal
Pir Sultan Abdal was a legendary folk poet and Alevi, a liberal sect of Islam. He lived in the 16th century and received education in an Alevi dervish house. He reflected the social, cultural and religious life of the people. He was a humanist, and wrote about love, peace, death and God. Not influenced by Divan literature, an elitist style favored by the palace and composed of Turkish, Arabic and Persian, he went beyond the formulaic norms of Sufi poetry culture and wrote in a manner that could be appreciated by ordinary people. He was executed by the Ottoman state following an insurrection in the 1500s.

Hacı Bayram Veli
One of the main Sufi teachers in Anatolia, Hacı Bayram Veli lived in the 15th century and greatly contributed to the unification of Turks throughout Anatolia with his teachings. A folk poet born in the small village of Solfasol near present-day Ankara, he became a scholar of Islam. His life changed after he received instruction in Sufism from Somuncu Baba in the city of Kayseri. Two major religious orders emerged out of his teachings, the Bayramilik Şemsiye and the Melamiye.

Yunus Emre
Yunus Emre was a Turkish poet and Sufi mystic. He has exercised an immense influence on Turkish literature from his own day until the present. Like the Oghuz-language “Book of Dede Korkut,” an older and anonymously written Central Asian epic, Turkish folklore inspired Yunus Emre in his occasional use of “tekerlemeler” as poetic devices handed down orally to him and his contemporaries. This strictly oral tradition continued for a long while. “Divan,” a large collection of his poems, was published after his death but because experts believed the collection also featured other poets’ works, its contents were later reduced to 357 poems.

Mevlana
Mevlana, known to the English-speaking world as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian and mystic. He was born in 1207 in present-day Afghanistan and came to Konya in 1228. Although Rumi's works were written in Persian, Rumi's importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. He was buried at his dervish convent in Konya after his death in 1273, a site that is now a museum.

Ahmed Khani
Ahmedi Khani was a 17th century poet and philosopher who represented Kurdish literature. He was born amongst the Khani tribe in Hakkari province in present-day Turkey. Hani studied religion and wrote his works in Kurdish languages although he was also fluent in Turkish, Arabic and Persian. The prominent poet started writing when he was 14 years old and later opened a school in the eastern town of Doğubeyazıt. He worked as a teacher for a long time. His most important work is the Kurdish classic love story, "Mem and Zin" (Mem û Zîn) (1692), a work widely considered to be the épopée of Kurdish literature.

Mehmet Akif Ersoy
Mehmet Akif Ersoy has been called Turkey’s national poet because he wrote the country’s national anthem, yet he was also a prominent author and academic. He worked as the editorial writer for Sırat-i Müstakimmagazine after the declaration of the second constitutional monarchy. He was a deputy during the Turkish War of Independence and was later awarded the Medal of Independence. He was labeled as the “unbeliever veterinarian” because of his personal opinions. In the last years of his life, he lived in Egypt and translated the Holy Koran into Turkish.

Ahmet Kaya
Ahmet Kaya was a Kurdish poet, singer, and a leading artist in Turkey. His works were labeled as “protest music” or “revolutionary arabesque.” During his career, he recorded approximately 20 albums. He was sent into prison for printing illegal banners when he was 16 years old. He was sentenced to three years and nine months in prison on charges of aiding and abetting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, after Turkish dailies released a picture taken during a concert in Berlin in 1993. He was forced to leave the country and later passed away in Paris in 2000.

Cem Karaca
Cem Karaca was a prominent Turkish rock musician and one of the most important figures in the Anatolian rock movement. The son of an Armenian mother and an Azeri father, Karaca recorded the leftist revolutionary album, “May 1,” in 1977. Karaca was abroad when the military coup of Sept. 12, 1980 occurred. Because of a May Day statement he had given in Germany, the coup leaders issued a warrant for his arrest. After some time, the government stripped Karaca of his Turkish citizenship, but did not rescind the arrest warrant. Several years later, then-Prime Minister Turgut Özal issued an amnesty for Karaca. Shortly afterward, he returned to Turkey. He died in 2004.

[Picture: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan]