Kenan Çamurcu wrote: Being a dissident religious person in the years of tyranny of the religious people

Tanıl Bora's article titled "From the Early History of the Justice and Development Party" published on the website of Birikim magazine on June 25, 2025 would be a good start if it were not an unresponsive assessment of what famous names from the party's former cadres conveyed about the early history of the AK Party, but rather a backwards historiography.

Because there is nothing respectable in the attention-grabbing, agile maneuvers disguised as criticism by the Islamist/Conservative clan, such as the politicians, journalists, writers, men of letters, etc. in the old chain of command of the “chief” who now wears opposition badges because they were kicked out, but will come running back in the blink of an eye.

Is there anything to be taken into consideration and respected in the criticisms of the government by the conservative opposition, who remembers the famous columnist with admiration for his insults and curses against the opponents of the government, and remembers the evil he has done with favor, due to being ostracized? While he happily enjoys his days in the crucible of the government, we will not listen to public service announcements from those who call my criticisms “the language of discord and wickedness” and express concern and anxiety about the current course of events.

In the early years of power, the elite of the community would accuse me of being hasty, impatient, and doing things that would cause me to lose such a great opportunity and blessing when I had gained it. At that time, whoever I received seemingly moral advice and counsel from about not criticizing for now, it would invariably be followed by a high-priced job, a tender, a position, etc. They would advise and inculcate patience in us for the sake of the positions they were trying to create.

It is not the case that Islamist groups and communities have ever been concerned about the conservative government never attempting political structural reforms, democratization, or making rights and freedoms permanent from the beginning. Therefore, the current authoritarian regime with its obvious religious flavor cannot be considered the work of a single person. The current consistent autocracy was reached gradually and in stages with the enthusiastic support of Islamist groups, and the biggest factor in this is not forcing the government to implement political reforms when necessary. They made all their investments to buy time by presenting dysfunctional palliative measures as reforms.

They have fallen victim to the retrospective of Abdulhamid-i Sani's state Islamism and have hit the bottom of opportunism in a government that is lowly, unqualified, aimless, nihilistic, and that pure and naive worldly religiosity cannot seek but find.

So, from the beginning, holding power was more important than anything else for them. Even morality, truth, and the rights and laws of the people. Power was not a means but an end. For this reason, they never interfered with political regime reforms that would upset the established order. On the contrary, they did not neglect to find strategic intelligence in the "chief" not getting involved in that ball. In response, the energetic powers turned a blind eye to the conservative government doing whatever it wanted in cash-related business in return for not touching the political regime. How can they be sensitive enough to care about the rights and happiness of the people when they have placed not opening a breach in the political regime at the top of the hierarchy of importance?

I will not stoop to false modesty: I am probably the only Islamist who has tried to write the history of the Islamist/Conservative experience in a timely manner, starting with my article “Islamism’s Will to Change” in Birikim in October 2003 and continuing until April 2005, with 6 articles and interviews repeated elsewhere in between. As of today, of course, “former Islamist”.

It is not necessary to care about the excitement of neurotic religiosity with the term "old Islamist". When they are called to loot the treasury, they immediately abandon morality and run without hesitation, sneezing and coughing, while they are suffocating on the forbidden, the verbal secretions they spread around are neither understandable nor have an iota of value. In fact, the best they can do is swear, insult, slander, name-calling, labeling and tarnishing, disrespect, rudeness, etc.

According to the authors of the memoirs Bora examined, whatever happened happened after they were pushed aside, and the AKP started doing wrong things when these names representing the golden age left. As far as I know, there is no such literary genre as “narcissistic memoirs.” So let me contribute. It is impossible to derive theoretical benefit from the memoirs written by political personnel who put themselves in the center and turn everything around as they wish. Rather, it may be an “I’m in” move by the forgotten old ones in preparation for the possible and future post-Erdogan era.

Nothing happened later. It was there from the beginning. It started wrong, it just kept going. Accumulating, increasing, multiplying, getting heavier.

There is no impressive political history in AKP Turkey that would require political science to be interested in. How can one theorize a period that can be summarized by the 200 amendments to the tender law when there are so many other urgent issues? What respectable theory can we employ to convince the party commissioner, whose various personal problems I dealt with when I was a student, including pocket money, to have Gülenist prosecutors and judges investigate my tweets criticizing the ministerial performance and to have me convicted on the grounds that “I am unable to perform my duties due to threats”? After all, it is the same government that imprisoned those prosecutors and judges who convicted me based on the order of duty.

If I didn’t pay the fine they gave me, I had to serve my sentence on probation. What did the then Minister of Justice say about the invention of probation, “It is a very efficient system in the public interest”. Since I didn’t have the means to pay the fine, when I applied for probation, the officer in charge of the paperwork didn’t get excited when I explained that I could provide education in three languages, contribute with my undergraduate and graduate education, and be useful with my qualifications and experience. Of course, my aim wasn’t to evade the penalty, I thought, since this was the situation we were in, I might as well be really useful. The officer mumbled that there was no such field without even looking at me and assigned me to clean the visiting room at Ümraniye Prison, which was listed as a place in need of forced labor on the list he had, and to bring tea to the prison officers. While they were listening to the victimization story of the two prisoners next to me regarding the innocence of the murder they committed, my telling them that I was there because of my tweets made them sound like a joke.

The method of disciplining with criminal complaint, investigation and conviction was repeated quite a lot. While it was not possible to make inquiries on e-government yet, when I wanted to get a document for Criminal Record at Çağlayan Courthouse, the printouts were endless and the officer's creative jokes became an entertaining stand-up show for me.

The parody side of the issue is that while I was under heavy investigation and imprisonment by the powers that be, my name was among the 38 pro-government journalists whose homes the arrested police chief ordered to raid, detain and seize their computers in the Gülenists' last move.

Let the purged politicians never make such golden age literature. Although my situation is a bit special in terms of my role in the construction and development work of the spirit of 1994, being in the steel core, what I have experienced is of course nothing compared to other grave cases. Who faced what kind of treatment in that age of happiness.

My eldest daughter, while studying philosophy, joined the double major program and also studied law. I strongly recommended that she study philosophy, the queen of social sciences. When she decided to do a double major, I told her that the combination of philosophy and law was incomparable. She started with such enthusiasm and excitement, graduated successfully and immediately prepared for the judge-prosecutor exam. Her dream was to become a criminal judge. She passed this exam, which is considered the most difficult exam in Türkiye, three times in a row in the top ranks in two years.

I am probably the only person in the country who tries to use favoritism so that they don’t oppress her because she is my daughter and she is treated fairly. They rejected my daughter three times in the so-called interviews where a group of candidates were accepted together and each person didn’t last a minute. She was the only candidate who graduated from philosophy and law. The senior AK Party deputy from our Islamist era, who I asked to mediate so that she wouldn’t be oppressed, openly said that my daughter was rejected because of me. He told me that he had a light argument with the Minister of Justice at the time. It may be true, or he may have made it up to appear on the side of the gross victimization we suffered, I don’t know. But what is true is that many very successful young people who were rejected in the same interviews became disgruntled with life and committed suicide. Lives were ruined.

The AK Party’s pre-historians, who have been the recipient of Bora’s attention, cannot eliminate dystopian symmetry by scripting a rosy filmography inspired by the age of felicity of Islam. İhsan Arslan, who had undertaken to finance the magazine planned to be the New Agenda of the Islamist world under my management in the 80s, was fired by Beykoz Mayor Muharrem Ergül in 2006 on the grounds of “instructions from Ankara”. When I went to the TBMM, having lost all my money after having a heart attack and a bypass operation, and asked him for a job, he immediately threw away his usual respect, politeness and tact and advised whoever I was with to help me. In front of everyone. House conversations where his son Mücahid would serve tea and coffee, the law of friendship, without recognizing any other memories. I think what he meant was that I played a role in the alliance attempt between Mehmet Ağar, Erkan Mumcu and Ali Müfit Gürtuna in the run-up to the 2007 elections. The only political experiment in my life. That also failed when Mehmet Bey gave up. But the price he made me pay was heavy.

My fellow countryman from Izmit, Nihat Ergün, whom we met in the early 80s when he was busy with tradesmanship and I was busy with intellectual activities, also advised me to learn a lesson from the calamity with the reminder, "You should have known the value of what you have", when he was the AKP Group Deputy Chairman. In other words, from the very beginning, they were all there with ruthlessness, disloyalty, and the arrogance of the ruling power.

My unceremonious dismissal from Pendik Municipality, where I had been instrumental in carrying out brilliant work that would be mentioned in Şahin Alpay’s Intellectual Page , as early as 1994, while I was still gropingly discovering what municipality meant, in 2004, less than a year after I took office, can also be added to the list of examples of the conservative moral paradigm worth examining. I don’t know why, maybe it was because I was in a meeting with consultants and when I received the news that a child had lost his life by falling into the water accumulated in the İSKİ excavation, I said with great sadness that the issue was not to do politics by saying “Let the wolf take the lamb on the banks of the Euphrates”, but that the real issue was the loss of a child’s life in the city you govern, and similar warnings, advice, and recommendations. Because the reflex of expressing the truth is a fatal flaw in the conservative political universe.

The condition for being able to take place in the powerful basin is almost desertion and apostasy from morality. The story about two young people whose economy I considered it my duty to support during my student years, who decided to get married, is again the product of the factory that always proves Zizek’s proposition, “Normally, good people do good, bad people do bad; only religion can make good people do bad.” The father, who was very hesitant to marry his daughter to that boy, had agreed upon my insistence, but on one condition: “I am giving my daughter to you, I want you to promise to take care of her.” Now, this girl of ours, who has become a high-level executive of the AKP, did not see a moral problem in disappearing after honoring me with the political answer, “What do you mean, brother, we are the same people, we cannot deny your efforts in us” when I was most depressed and asked for help for the first time in my life.

The radical and traumatic transformation experienced by the decent people we know in the toxic environment they entered should have caused panic in the religious community from the very beginning. It didn’t. Even the most extreme examples became normal, even praised. Even to the point of tolerating comparing the emotional experience of encountering Erdoğan to Allah. No one, party members, Islamists, sects, etc., warned about this excess. When the bar was raised to this level, the way was opened for someone in pursuit of fortune to say that Allah manifested himself in him, or even integrated with him. Someone will definitely say this. This is how the gholat/extremist theology/kalam was formed in history.

This is such an environment that, from an academic who wrote and drew on Gadamer, Hermeneutics, etc., it was even possible to produce someone who sang with the salawat “salli ala Muhammed, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan” during his parliamentary election campaign.

An AKP celebrity who had made the transition from mayor to MP, said that he recognized me when I was introduced to him among the crowd of political notables at the Simge Publishing House, but that the real condition for recognition had not been met: “We did not eat your food.” I am not sorry that my answer caused the expected tension, and I will not apologize for it: “I have never had the money to offer food to the notables.” It must have been surprising for them to come across someone who had a high level of acquaintance with the powerful but ended up poor.

Alev Alatlı was saying “the government of slovenliness”, wasn’t she? We worked very hard to ensure that it would not be like that, that it would stay away from slovenliness, that it would be a decent, empathetic government that knows rights and laws, and that it would not deviate towards radicalism. In 1996, during his prime ministry, Erbakan left everything he did to spend hours with us, and the Cemal Reşit Rey hall was jam-packed for three days, and we discussed the need for renewal at the most competent and intellectual level with distinguished names from the Islamic world at the “Islamic Thought Conference”, the idea of ​​which belonged to me.

The famous conference where Erdoğan came up to me as I was leaving the hall and thanked me at length.

The alchemy called renewal and change is not limited to the political arena. For this reason, Mehmet Akif, Elmalılı Hamdi Bey, Şehbenderzade, Seyyid Bey and other pioneers fought against the political power and political tyranny of Abdulhamid while at the same time launching a frontal attack against religious tyranny.

The scruffy radicalism that was aware of what we were doing, the criminal radicalism that praised ISIS as the “locomotive of Sunnism,” tried to sabotage our efforts while trying to be associated with power.

Copy and paste repetition of former Interior Minister Sadettin Tantan's claim and accusation regarding the Yeni Zemin magazine, in which I also took part in the management, as "the source of the founding ideas of the AKP government". Although my situation does not quite fit the catalogue attributions due to the cocktail of organizations I was accused of in the witch hunt carried out under the auspices of the government. There is probably no other victim than me who was simultaneously associated with the Selam, Qaeda, Ergenekon organizations and subjected to all kinds of surveillance for years. I wish I could collect every last penny of the money the state spent on this unnecessary business from all the perpetrators involved in this crime and return it to the Beytülmal.

At that time, Nur Vergin was writing articles in Yeni Yüzyıl , targeting the activities we organized under the auspices of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality President Erdoğan, saying, “They are undermining secularism, you are not aware of it.” Of course, she was addressing the vigorous forces of the established order. I visited her at home. I explained that she was not being treated as she claimed and convinced her to contribute to the change effort. She was present at the first meeting we organized and was always among us afterward.

The last time we were together with Vergin was in 2009, at the three-day “Change and Future Search in Mardin” meeting that I organized for the Mardin Governorship, Mardin Municipality and GAP Administration. Along with Cengiz Çandar, Şahin Alpay, Ali Yaşar Sarıbay, Ümit Meriç, Sami Selçuk, Taha Akyol, Mithat Sancar and many others. My long chat visits to his house in Istanbul continued for a while. He told me that he had gone to an event in Ankara as a guest of Erdoğan. He had mentioned me to the people close to the “Reis” and the notables and asked why they were treating someone who had contributed so much with such exclusion. He said in astonishment, “Never mind, teacher.” He said, “What have you done to them, Kenan?” Of course I laughed. What can I do? What can I do with my flesh and legs, what can I do with my flesh and skin? But here is the line from the movie:

– They are trying to destroy me, but I am not who they think I am, I am nobody.

– But the problem is that they don't know that.

(Enemy of State, 1998).

I told İsmet Abi (Uçma) what Vergin had said and said, “Don’t you know that with this stinginess of mine, I wouldn’t be able to burn anywhere if I were fire?” He laughed. He said, “You are not aware of the effect you have caused.” I never wondered if that was the truth, and I assumed that what he said was a compliment and a consoling politeness. However, when I learned that my book “AK Party’nin Stra-trajik Meseleleri” (Şehir Yayınları), which he published in 2005, was recalled from sales points and confiscated when he was nominated for parliament, I realized the seriousness of the situation. And the meaning of his declaration of helplessness, “Only the President can remove the barricade in front of you, none of us have the strength to do that.”

Despotism is not a job that a single person can accomplish. It needs supporting columns that will keep that formation standing. Sociology needs to fully embrace despotism, internalize it and reproduce it repeatedly at micro levels so that the brain of the system does not have to intervene in every situation.

Perhaps the situation in Ruşen Çakır’s article “How many Islamist writers are there?” written in 2006 is more serious, effective and profound than I thought: “If, as some claim, these were intellectual chatter that could not bring any results (…) neither would Kenan Çamurcu have lost his job at the Beykoz Municipality. This intolerance, which has definitely reached the very top, shows that the criticisms in question are very meaningful and functional.”

This also explains why the socio-political ISIS, Khamenei, liberal class of the autocracy went into a collective frenzy on social media after the reasonable, moderate, objective words I said in my assessment with Ruşen Çakır regarding the possibility of the collapse of the Iranian regime, whose strength has been exhausted by Israel's attacks. What insults, blatant characterizations, attributions, lies, fabricated stories, what have they written? And with what spite. All of them are examples of lying, ignorance, lack of reason and judgment. A lot of people I know and don't know. From the complaint of "Did he show up again?", I understood that my preference for a quiet, introverted, isolated life for a long time was also being followed. Let me just say "but why" with a funny shout.

It is of course futile to expect moral behavior and preferences from the Islamism of interest, profit, profiteering, and ATMs that can survive in the greenhouse of the state (or in a kind of Matrix capsule) in the conservative oligarchy. I am aware that we are hitting a wall of impossibility in the calculation of the probability that this could change. After all, we are in the “new Turkey” where the accident of a small yacht by Erdoğan’s assistant in Bodrum is the first news, and the only thing that Islamism, which has made being in that crucible a life-and-death struggle, will fight for is to keep the authoritarian regime standing. Or, every other situation is far below the value attributed to the young girl who has become the symbol of the headscarf struggle announcing that “cigarette smoking” permits have been issued to hashish addicts on behalf of the ruling party.

Democracy needs political agnosticism. The essence of democratic functioning, the culture of vagueness, could not have emerged from this group that believed in certainty. And it didn’t anyway. But when it came to the concentration of power and wealth, they were able to evolve into ideological agnosticism without fail. The source of legitimacy and the survival algorithm of the conservative government and its socio-politics are both victimization porn.

If we are going to have the AK Party years examined by social sciences, the way and method should not be political science. It can be anthropology though.

I advise the Islamists who are going crazy with my words to calm down. We have entered a phase where we will start to see the political and legal consequences of their moral, psychological and ideological defeats. The hunting dogs of the intelligence (in terms of describing the task they are employed for, otherwise, impure dregs cannot be compared to the pure dog community, God forbid), the spare baggage carriers, the trains of the ISIS locomotive, the famous and consonant alphabetical ham-fisted shop assistants, the delirious loudspeakers who skip their medicines, are struggling with the psychopathology of how they have come so close to taking their place in the dustbin of history all of a sudden.

Arnold Schwarzenegger says his favorite line is “I'll be back” from The Terminator movie series. It's a good line, really.