Gökhan Bacık wrote | The Beşir Atalay incident: The crisis of rationalism in the Islamist movement

The removal of Professor Beşir Atalay's name from the Kırıkkale University campus sparked significant controversy. Atalay was a statesman who held critical ministerial positions during the AKP's early years. However, Atalay's name rose to prominence within Islamic circles during his tenure as Kırıkkale University administrator. Under his auspices, the university became a stronghold for many opposition figures, particularly during the February 28th coup.

After Atalay's name was removed from the campus, some liberal and Islamist writers published articles criticizing the decision. These articles generally criticized Atalay for his disloyalty and recalled how he had once protected many dissident academics on the campus where his name had been erased.

These points are certainly important. However, in my personal opinion, interpreting the erasure of Atalay's name based on these points misses the point. Far beyond these discussions, Atalay's "forgetting" also means that the intellectual and political perspective he represented is no longer respected. Therefore, the real issue is not disloyalty to Atalay, but rather the current lack of appreciation for the intellectual legacy he represents.

Atalay is an important figure who emerged from Islamist or Islamic circles. However, his intellectual legacy is not ideologically charged. Unlike many Islamists, he did not engage in ideological peddling.

The essence of Atalay's issue lies in this: Atalay represents methodological and objective social science research within the Islamic tradition. Islamism is inherently ideological, and its world, woven with slogans, points to a subjective universe of thought. Despite these problems, however, Islamism's greatest advantage is its ability to speak the same language as the vast majority of the population. Through figures like Atalay, the effort to understand society according to the objective method of social science has entered this subjective world.

In 1979, Beşir Atalay conducted a study titled "A Sociological Study on Village Youth: The Büyükgeçit Village Study." For Atalay, social reality is not the "revolutionary" goal we desire to see through the emotional influence of ideology, but rather the actual events themselves. What happens may not be what we desire, but in such cases, the most sensible thing to do is to accept it as it is.

Atalay and many others who grew up under his influence generously brought this methodological perspective to the AKP. With the AKP, surveys, operations studies, and similar approaches have gained unprecedented traction in Turkish politics. This has, to some extent, enabled the AKP to depart from its ideological obsessions and pursue a more realistic policy.

There's a point here that deserves particular emphasis: During this early period, Erdoğan placed perhaps more value than ever before on knowledge generated through social scientific methods. In my personal opinion, this is where Atalay's most important legacy to Turkish politics becomes evident. For the first time, an Islamic movement moved beyond its ideological and religious slogans and sought to understand social reality.

Therefore, beyond the erasure of Atalay's name from campus, his 'forgetting' symbolizes the departure of today's Islamist circles from the objective method I attempted to address above. The AKP has today adopted a more 'revolutionary' and ideological identity, so to speak, focused not on understanding social reality but on transforming it. Erdoğan should be given credit for his early emphasis on social science, but over time, he too appears to have abandoned this approach.

Considered within this framework, the erasure of Atalay's name should be seen not only as a "breaking of promises" but also as a sign of a transition from objective politics to an ideological paradigm.

One reason Atalay is forgotten is his emphasis on method over ideological rhetoric when trying to understand reality. If he had written two books reminiscent of ideological slogans like "Codes of Civilization in Islam," everyone would remember him today. Perhaps even some passages from these books were memorized. Yet, Atalay went to a village in Erzurum and tried to understand the reality there. Because this effort lacked any ideological overtones, Atalay was coded as someone "important and deserving of loyalty," but whose "intellectual legacy is unclear" or "incomprehensible."

In fact, the problem we're discussing here pertains not only to Atalay, but to the entire Islamic movement. As the AKP's connection to social science gradually weakened, Gülenism, too, drifted into a purely ideological realm. Indeed, instead of employing complex methods to understand social reality and develop policies accordingly, they opted for the easy way out: to entice their faithful followers. Today, while the community's theologians are searching for a miracle, their journalists are constantly hoping to uncover a political scandal or mafia secret and change the world. The "community" has become, as it were, caught between the Mahdi and the National Intelligence Organization (MIT) .

A more dramatic dimension of the issue is this: Many individuals who grew up intellectually and academically under Atalay's tutelage have now become almost verbatim echoes of the state's rhetoric, even on the most apolitical issues, such as "How should ants be fed?" Those who complain about Atalay's name being erased from campus should remember this: Social reality may not always reflect the state's desires. The academic's duty, however, is to stand for methodological accuracy and objectivity, regardless of the ideological or political implications of this emerging reality.

The more important question is this: A liberal writer, in an article criticizing the removal of Atalay's name from the campus, states: "Prof. Dr. Beşir Atalay was the rector who founded Kırıkkale University and created a democratic environment for all academics there, contrary to the oppressive climate of the time, and who waged an individual struggle to ensure the freedom of academic work." What sharp question should one ask when reading this? I leave it to the reader...