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Ne zamandır tartışmak/sorgulamak istediğim bir konu var. Eleştirilerden, yanlış anlaşılmaktan ve yanlış zamanlamadan endişe ettiğim için yazmadığımı itiraf etmek zorundayım. Çünkü, aylar önce konuyu yüzeysel biçimde ele aldığımda aldığım tepkiler hala hafızamda. Ancak eleştirilerin gerçekleri kamufle etmekten başka anlamı kalmadı bugün. Bazı şeyler yanlış anlaşılma endişesinin ortadan kaldıracak kadar aydınlandı. Zamanlama açısından ise geç bile kalındı.
BOP (Büyük Ortadoğu Projesi) ve Türkiye'deki "cemaat"lerin nasıl "sivil toplum kuruluşları"na indirgendiği, bugünün Türkiye'sinde üzerinde en fazla durulması gereken konuların başında geliyor. Öyle de olacak. Önümüzdeki günlerde bu konuda oldukça yoğun tartışmaların yaşanacağını sanıyorum. Yaşanması da gerekiyor. Oldukça hassas bir konu olduğunun farkındayım. Ancak STK'ların niteliği, üstlendikleri rollerin değişkenliği, cemaatlerin bu dönüşümde nereden nereye gelmekte olduğu üzerinde ciddi bir tartışma açılması gerekiyor.
Soğuk Savaş sonrası alabildiğine desteklenen STK'lar artık özgürlük alanlarının genişletilmesinin ötesinde misyonlar üsleniyor. STK'lar küresel politikalar çerçevesinde belli güçler tarafından finanse ediliyor, güçlendiriliyor, gündemleri belirleniyor ve bir dış politika aracı olarak kullanılıyor. Bulundukları toplumun beklentilerinin ötesinde amaçlar doğrultusunda yönlendiriliyorlar; Amerika'nın ve Avrupa'nın bölgesel çıkarları doğrultusunda görevler üstleniyorlar. Demokrasi ve özgürlük konusunda ise yine belli güçlerin çıkarlarıyla örtüşen alanlarda, çok dar bir alanda işlevler görüyor.
Bu çerçevede, en belirgin değişim Müslüman/muhafazakar çevrelerde yaşanıyor. Soğuk Savaş sonrası örtülü gündemlerle yürütülen, 11 Eylül sonrası ise açık müdahaleye dönüştürülen İslam'ın ve İslam dünyasının kontrol altına alınmasına dönük çalışmalara paralel biçimde bu çevreler üzerinde köklü çalışmalar yapılıyor. Çalışmaların temel hareket noktası:
î Başa
Müslümanlar'ın kendi coğrafyaları ve dünya için kendi
söylemlerini, duruşlarını, dirençlerini üretip beslemelerinin önüne geçmek;
onları ehlileştirip terbiye etmek; inisiyatif alanlarını daraltmak ve onları
kendi stratejileri doğrultusunda belirlenen siyasi, ekonomik ve toplumsal
modellere bağımlı hale getirmek. İslami/muhafazakar çevreler, "statükoyu
dönüştürme" adına bu tuzağa çok kolay düştü.
Kendilerini teknik anlamda sivil toplum örgütlerine dönüştürmekten kaçınmadılar, bunun ne anlama geldiğini sorgulamadılar.
Oysa cemaatlerin, bu ülkenin direnç merkezlerinin bütün dış politika perspektiflerinden, devletlerin çıkar ve tahakküme yönelik stratejilerinden uzak durmaları, söylemlerini bütün bunların üstünde tutmaları, her buhran döneminde kendi dilleriyle konuşmaları, bulundukları toplumlar için umut olmaları gerekiyordu. Onların kökleri sağlam, sarsılmaz bir çınar gibi sapasağlam durmaları, gündelik çıkar ve politikalara mahkum olmamaları gerekiyordu. Kendilerini sıradan STK'ya indirgemeleri aslında iddialarını kaybettiklerinin, söyleyecek şeylerinin kalmadığının göstergesidir. Bu çevreler isterlerse belli alanlarda STK'lar kurabilir, geliştirebilir, bunlara uluslararası kimlik kazandırabilir ve çok şey de yapabilirdi. Ama onlar kendilerini dönüştürme, kendilerini STK'laştırma yolunu tercih ettiler. Bunu belki şu an fark etmiyorlar ama yakın gelecekte artık bulundukları topraklar için çok şey ifade etmediklerini, STK'ların niteliği gereği, işlevlerin tamamlayıp bir kenara atılacaklarını göreceklerdir.
Bir çoğunun uğruna kendisini yeniden yapılandırdığı BOP'un, Soğuk Savaş'tan hemen sonra geliştirilen, 1995'lerde planlaması yapılan, Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ) adıyla Institute for National Strategic Studies ve National Defense University tarafından Amerikan ordusu için çıkarılan derginin Sonbahar 1995'teki BOP özel sayısı ile duyurulan, aynı sayıda, Turkey's Role in the Greater Middle East başlığı altında Türkiye'nin üsleneceği rol hakkında ipuçları verilen tamamen askeri bir proje var olduğunu ve bizzat CENTCOM tarafından geliştirilip uygulandığını biliyoruz. Demokrasi ve özgürlük burada sadece Amerikan askeri ve siyasi çıkarları kadar var. Önce Osmanlı siyasi birikimi BOP'un emrine verildi. Şimdi bu çevrelerin bazıları aynı amaç uğruna seferber edildi.
Peki neden böyle oldu?
Mustafa Özel'in Anlayış dergisinin Haziran 2005 sayısındaki "İslami liberalizm, BOP ve tarih bilinci" başlıklı yazısına dikkat çekmek istiyorum. Pazar günkü Yeni Şafak'ta da aynı konuyu işleyen Özel, dönüşümün sebeplerini ve niteliğini net ifadelerle ortaya koyuyor. "Batı'nın bize biçtiği deli 'gömleklerini' itirazsız giyiyoruz. Cemaatlerimiz bile STK olup çıktı" diyen Özel, konuyu Leonard Binder'ın "Islamic Liberalism" adlı kitabında çarpıcı alıntılarla sunuyor. Müslümanların her girişimini BOP'un bir parçası olarak görme tehlikesine de dikkat çeken Özel, BOP'un 15 yıl önceden habercisi olduğunu söylediği Binder'dan şu çarpıcı ifadeleri sunuyor bize: "İslam dünyasında güçlü bir İslami liberalizm olmadan, burjuva devletleri ortaya çıksa bile, siyasi liberalizm başarılı olmaz." İslami liberalizm ise: "Kutsal kitaba dayalı geleneksel İslami yönetim anlayışını temin eden, fakat aynı zamanda liberal siyasi uygulamaları İslami geleneğin kabulüne şayan sahih bir yorumuna dayandıracak yorumcu bir çerçeve sunabilmektir." Özel'e göre gerçek niyetini gizlemeyen Binder, bugünün görevi için: "dinin, rakip bir toplumsal kuvvet tarafından kullanılmasına imkan verilmeden, burjuva ideolojisinin bir parçası haline getirilmesidir. İslam liberal kapitalizmin yörüngesine sokulmalıdır" diyor.
Tartışmanın hareket noktası burası olmalı. Soros-STK bağlantıları, Avrupa ve ABD'nin Türkiye'deki muhafazakar çevreler ve STK'lar üzerindeki çalışmaları, bu çalışmaların hangi aşamada olduğu, İslam dünyasının dönüşümü ve kontrolüne yönelik stratejilerle cemaatlerin üstlendikleri rol arasında ne tür ilişki bulunduğu, hangi askeri, siyasi projelere malzeme edildiği ve daha birçok sorunun cevabı buradan hareketle bulunabilir ancak.
Konjonktürel bir çıkar ilişkisi değil, köklü bir zihinsel dönüşüm tartışmaya çalıştığımız. Dolayısıyla bu dönüşümü kamufle etmeye yönelik her girişim başarısız kalacaktır. Türkiye'de "Parayı Verdi Düdüğü Çaldı" adıyla yayınlanan Frances Stonor Saunders'ın "Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War" adlı kitabının, bu çevreler tarafından dikkatlice okunması gerekiyor.
ABD'nin Ankara büyükelçisi Eric Edelman ayrıldı. İki yılı ancak bulan bir süre kaldı ülkemizde; bu 'kısa süre rekoru' anlamını da taşıyor. Size sanki çok daha uzun yıllardır görev yapıyormuş gibi geliyorsa, bu, Edelman'ın kaldığı süre içerisinde çok konuşulan bir büyükelçi olmasından... Washington'daki yeni görevine başladığında da adını sıkça duyacağımızı sanıyorum; Türkiye orada da kapsama alanı içerisinde bulunacak çünkü...
Göreve ilk atandığında, Kongre'den onay çıkar çıkmaz, ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı'nda düzenlenen tören, katılanların anlatımından biliyorum, yönetimin kendisine (ve tabii Türkiye'ye de) verdiği önemi ortaya koyacak çarpıcılıktaydı. "Törende bir tek Bush yoktu" diyeyim de temsil düzeyini anlayın. Sadece politikacılar, üst düzey bürokratlar değildi çağrılılar, 'Neo-Con' diye anılan kadronun medyadaki önemli isimleri de oradaydı...
Büyükelçi Edelman evinde düzenlediği 'bağımsızlık bayramı' törenindeki konuşmasına iyi hazırlanmıştı. Bayram, 'bağımsızlık bildirgesi'nin imzalandığı 4 Temmuz günü kutlanır ABD'de, Türkiye'deki Amerikalılar da o gün veya hemen öncesinde tören yaparlar... Bu yıl, Eric Edelman'ın dönüşü yüzünden erken bir tarihe alındı tören ve geçen perşembe öğle saatlerinde yapıldı...
Geçen hafta The New Anatolian gazetesine İngilizce yazdığım yazıda, Başbakan Tayyip Erdoğan'ın Washington gezisini değerlendirirken, bazı Amerikalı işgüzarların Beyaz Saray buluşması sonrası yaptıkları dezenformasyon kampanyasına da değinmiştim. Daha görüşme biter bitmez, birileri, Washington'da görevli bizim gazeteciler aracılığıyla, "İyi geçmedi" mesajını iletmişlerdi. Büyükelçi Edelman, "Bilgin olsun diye söylüyorum" dedi elimi sıkarken, "Ben tek bir gazeteciyle görüştüm, ona da öyle bir şey demedim..."
O görüştüğü tek gazetecinin Sedat Ergin olduğunu beyanatı Milliyet'te üç gün boyu yayımlandığında anladım. Dezenformasyon kampanyasının Amerikan heyetinden bir başkasının eseri olduğunu kendisine de söyledim...
î Başa
Amerikalılar Türkiye'de tam bir 'tabula rasa' yapıyorlar;
bunun anlamı, masanın üzerini bütünüyle boşaltmak veya 'bir şeyi sıfırlamak'
demek... Yalnız büyükelçi gitmiyor, büyükelçiliğin bütün önemli koltukları da
boşalıyor... İstanbul'daki ABD başkonsolosu David Arnett de emekli oluyor.
Amerikalıların yeni bir başlangıç planladıkları anlaşılıyor. Yeni büyükelçi
gelene kadar Nancy McEldowney maslahatgüzar olarak görev yapacak; Ankara'ya
müsteşar olarak yeni atandı Nancy Hanım...
Girer girmez karşılaştığım elçiliğin 3 numarası John Kunstadter, "Emekli oluyorum, ama Türkiye'de kalacağım" dedi bana. Güldüm. Bu sütunun sürekli okurları, Amerika'nın tartışma konusu olduğu pek çok ortamda, kendisinden "Alman soyadlı Amerikalı diplomat" diye söz ettiğim için onu iyi tanırlar. Türkçeyi nicemizden daha iyi bilir Amerikalı diplomat, ülkemizde çok dostu olduğu da bilinir. Gülmemin sebebini aktardım: "Yakında bir gazetede yazmaya başlayacağını bile duydum..."
O duymamış, ama yine de "Neden olmasın" dedi. Resmî tezleri Türkiye'ye yansıtmak için Amerikalı bir yazara ihtiyacı yok Washington'un; o görevi severek üstlenen yazar çok Türk basınında. Ancak, yakın zamana kadar büyükelçilikte görev yapmış Amerikalı bir diplomatın, hiçbir aracısız, resmî çizgiye birebir uygun görüşlerini yazması iyidir. Bn. Kunstadter zaten bizim mesleğe uzak biri değil; görüşlerini başkalarıyla paylaştığı kendi internet not defteri (blog) var.
John Kunstadter epey hayal kırıklığı yaşadı ülkemizde; muhtemelen ülkesindeki âmirlerine de kendisi hayal kırıklığı yaşattı. 1 Mart tezkeresi öncesinde Meclis'te milletvekilleriyle birebir ilişki kurup nabızlarını tutuyordu. "Tezkere çıkar" öngörüsü oylamayla doğrulanmadı. Herhalde kızmıştır...
Ona da kızanlar çok oldu. Kunstadter isminin bir ara 'istenmeyen adam' haline gelme ihtimali vardı. İşlemleri zamanında durduran, şikâyetin, "Milletvekillerini etkilemek üzere temas kuruyor" üzerinde yoğunlaşması oldu. Dışişleri, "Bizim diplomatlar da aleyhimize gelişmeleri engellemek için her gün Kongre'deler" uyarısında bulundu da, niyet eyleme dönüşmeden kaldı.
Bir ara, Andrew Finkel Sabah'ta köşe yazısı yazıyordu. Finkel'ın adını şimdilerde Milliyet'in pazar günleri verdiği Business ekinde görüyorum. Ülkemizde görev yapıp di-limizi bildiği için pekâlâ görüşlerini Türkçe ifade edebilecek yabancı meslektaşlar var; John Kunstadter'in uygun bir yayın organında yazmasına ancak sevinirim...
Amerikan büyükelçiliğinde düzenlenen 'bağımsızlık bayramı' törenine çok sayıda subay ilgi göstermişti. En kalabalık grubu ise Ak Parti milletvekilleri teşkil ediyordu. Bir AKP milletvekilinin, bir-iki gün önce, Saddam ile Bush arasında paralellik kurmasının yol açtığı rahatsızlığı gidermek üzere gelmişti milletvekillerinin çoğu.
Bir ABD gözlemcisi dostum, "Yeni büyükelçinin Türkiye'ye gelmesi de, Edelman'ın atanacağı koltuğa oturması da zaman alacaktır" dedi bana. Sebebi, bu tür atamalarda onay makamı olan Kongre'nin iktidar-muhalefet kavgası yüzünden kilitlenmesiymiş... Müsteşar Nancy McEldowney o zamana kadar ilişkilerin doğru zemine kavuşmasını sağlayabilecek iyi niyette göründü bana.
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In the development of Islamic studies in European and, later, American universities, Jews, and in particular Jews of Orthodox background and education, play an altogether disproportionate role....The role of these scholars in the development of every aspect of Islamic studies has been immense — not only in the advancement of scholarship but also in the enrichment of the Western view of Oriental religion, literature, and history, by the substitution of knowledge and understanding for prejudice and ignorance.1
A major accession of strength resulted from the emancipation of Jews in central and western Europe and their consequent entry into the universities. Jewish scholars brought up in the Jewish religion and trained in the Hebrew language found Islam and Arabic far easier to understand than did their Christian colleagues, and were, moreover, even less affected by nostalgia for the Crusades, preoccupation with imperial policy, or the desire to convert the "heathen." Jewish scholars like Gustav Weil, Ignaz Goldziher, and others played a key role in the development of an objective, nonpolemical, and positive evaluation of Islamic civilization.2
ALMANSOR:
We heard that Ximenes the Terrible
in Granada, in the middle of the market-place
— my tongue refuses to say it! — cast the Koran
into the flames of a burning pyre!
HASSAN:
That was only a prelude; where they burn books
they will, in the end, burn human beings too.10
The tangible evidence for the Jewish appreciation of this favorable prejudice may be seen in mid-nineteenth-century urban synagogue architecture in the "Moorish" style. Minarets and domes rose above the skylines of Leipzig, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Cologne. The style spread eastward to Budapest and St. Petersburg, southward to Florence, and westward to New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati.13 In some of these synagogues, opined one contemporary Jewish critic, "the crescent alone is wanting at the summit."14 Certainly one factor in this choice was a desire to avoid explicitly Christian styles; another was the Moorish style's freedom from figural ornamentation. But the splendor of Islamic architecture deployed in a synagogue sent a subliminal message. Jews had shared in the genius of Islamic civilization, and they could provide cultural leaven for a new and open Euro-American civilization, based upon a shared aesthetic and transcending of religious differences.15 In France, the work of associating the Jews with the romantic Orient did not have to be done by Jews themselves; it was done for them by the orientalist painters. The great nineteenth-century painters included no Jews, but in Morocco and Algeria, which the artists much favored, they often chose local Jews as subjects, especially for domestic scenes and whenever Muslims were unapproachable. In the words of one art historian: "In North Africa, as [Eugène] Delacroix [1798-1863], [Théodore] Chassériau [1819-56], and [Alfred] Dehondencq [1822-82] had found, it was only in Jewish houses that artists could get an idea of Oriental life. The same was true of the Levant."16 The romantic representations of Jews in the work of the French orientalist painters were almost wholly sympathetic and admiring.17 The exhibition of such works, at the Salon in Paris and elsewhere, reminded Europeans of the placement of Jews in Islamic civilization, and the role of Mediterranean Jews as mediators between Europe and Islam. |
In English letters, Jewish orientalism manifested itself in the literary works of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), the subject of an essay by Minna Rozen in this volume. Disraeli was born to Jewish parents, but his father had him baptized at the age of thirteen. His conversion opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to the ambitious young man. But his physical appearance proclaimed him a foreigner, in an England preoccupied with pedigree. Painfully aware of the ways his Jewish origins could be used against him, he sought to turn them to advantage by associating the Jews with the noble Arabs of the desert and the refined Arabs of Spain — both the focus of a burgeoning English romanticism.18 Disraeli worked to achieve this purpose through his novels. In Tancred (1847), the reader learned that the Arabs of the desert were "Jews upon horseback," and that Jews were "Mosaic Arabs," bound by ties of race to "Mohammedan Arabs." In Coningsby (1844), the reader learned that in the "unrivalled civilization" of Muslim Spain, the children of Ishmael rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves. During these halcyon centuries, it is difficult to distinguish the followers of Moses from the votary of Mahomet. Both alike built palaces, gardens, and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of the state, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, and rivalled each other in renowned universities.19 By linking himself with that East most romanticized by the English, Disraeli sought to appear as heir to its store of wisdom, which he would put at the service of England's new power. Disraeli moved from literature to politics after the decline of romantic orientalism, and it became the turn of his opponents to associate him with the Orient, in a malevolent way. Lord Cromer (1841-1917) — his own claim to wisdom resting upon years of administration in India and Egypt — offered this retrospective on Disraeli: "No one who has lived much in the East can... fail to be struck with the fact that Disraeli was a thorough Oriental." As evidence for this categorization, he cited Disraeli's taste for tawdry finery, the habit of enveloping in mystery matters as to which there was nothing to conceal, the love of intrigue...the luxuriance of the imaginative faculties, the strong addiction to plausible generalities set forth in florid language... all these features, in a character which is perhaps not quite so complex as is often supposed, hail from the East.20 Any English reader would know that by "Oriental," Cromer did not mean the noble desert Arabs or the cultivators of Andalusian gardens. He was making of Disraeli an Egyptian effendi or an Indian nawab — those dissembling Oriental gentlemen whom Cromer professed to know so well. For Europe's Jews, there seemed no reason to think twice about identification with the caliphate of Baghdad, the glories of Muslim Spain, and the landscapes of Morocco — all the subjects of admiration by Europe's romantics. But the efforts of Jews to associate themselves with the Islamic Orient, even when successful, had mixed results, if only because that Islamic Orient evoked a very wide range of associations in Europe, including dismissive contempt. The fanatically nationalist Prussian state historiographer Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96) did not intend a compliment when he wrote in 1879, "There will always be Jews who are nothing but German-speaking Orientals."21 As worldly romanticism gave way to racial nationalism in Europe, Jewish identification with the Orient became less of an asset, and played into the hands of growing numbers of anti-Semites.
Literary exploration was supplemented by
geographic exploration. Travel to remote places was one of the great
avenues of social mobility in the nineteenth century, and provided a high
platform for self-expression. While Indian and Mediterranean Islam fell
increasingly under the influence and direct control of Europe, other
Muslim regions had yet to be "explored" — that is, visited and documented
by Europeans. During the nineteenth century, several European Jewish
travelers traversed the lesser-known lands of Islam.22 But two men gained particular fame for their
accounts of travels across Arabia and Central Asia, both formidable
frontiers of nineteenth-century exploration. |
William Gifford Palgrave (1826-88), born in London, was not a Jew by any conventional definition. But he had a Jewish background. His father, Francis Ephraim Cohen, converted to Anglicanism before his church marriage, and emerged transformed as Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861), distinguished author of The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832) and founder of the Public Record Office. His second son, William Gifford, was left with the thinnest residue of Jewish identity, which apparently included a smattering of Hebrew. After studies at Oxford and a stint of service with the Indian army, "Giffy" not only became a Catholic, but joined the Society of Jesus, and was ordained a priest. He arrived in Lebanon in 1855, where he preached the gospel in Arabic — and, without explanation, reverted to the name Cohen. Palgrave had no interest in Judaism, but he increasingly harked back to his Jewish origins, as part of his growing preoccupation with race and nationality. In 1862, Palgrave secured funding from Napoleon III (r. 1852-70) for a mission to the deepest parts of Wahhabi Arabia, with the purpose of exploring possibilities for a Franco-Arab alliance. He disguised himself as a Syrian Christian doctor ("Seleem Abou Mahmood-el-Eys"), and it is possible that he also pretended to be a Muslim on occasion in Najd. Nothing came of his political scheme, but Palgrave did write an account of his travels, his Personal Narrative of a Year's Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-1863 (1865). This book had an immense influence, and not just as a (controversial) travelogue of Arabia. As Benjamin Braude shows in his essay for this volume, Palgrave contributed to the later British conviction that the Arabs were a noble people — "the Englishmen of the East" — entitled to independence from Ottoman rule. Yet it must be conceded that the relationship of Palgrave's Jewish origins to his own ideas about the Arabs must remain a matter of speculation, since all his references to those origins are so oblique. |
A clearer picture emerges in the case of an explorer with much firmer Jewish moorings: Arminius Vámbéry (1832-1913). Vámbéry was born into an impoverished Jewish family in Slovakia, then part of the Habsburg Empire. "Hershel" spent his first years in the traditional heder, where he acquired a command of the Hebrew Bible and Talmud. But he soon distanced himself from belief, and in his later studies (pursued intermittently in Christian denominational schools) he demonstrated a talent for languages. He became an itinerant tutor, and began to teach himself Arabic and Turkish, while dreaming of adventure in the East. In 1857 he left for Istanbul, where he worked as a tutor in better Turkish households, and where doors finally began to open. In 1863, disguised as a dervish ("Rashid Effendi"), he visited Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Herat. His account of this journey, Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (1864), made him internationally famous, especially in Britain where interest in Central Asia ran high. He then appeared to have converted to Protestantism, in order that he might teach Oriental languages at the University of Pest. One of his first students was the young Ignaz Goldziher. His subsequent career included philological research and political advocacy, marked by a combination of Russophobia and Anglophilia. Vámbéry's motives were always mixed. From poor and humble origins, he remained obsessed with money and station throughout life. He was not free of prejudice, and he often wrote sardonically about the customs and beliefs he encountered in the East. But he had a fundamental sympathy for Muslim peoples. "We alone, we think, have the right to be mighty and free, and the rest of humanity must be subject to us and never taste the golden fruits of liberty," he wrote after the Young Turk revolution. But Europeans "tend to forget that constitutional government is by no means a new thing in Islam, for anything more democratic than the doctrine of the Arab Prophet it would be difficult to find in any other religion."23 As Jacob M. Landau suggests in his essay in this volume, Vámbéry's Jewish origins may have been at the root of his sympathy for the oppressed — a sympathy he extended not just to Muslim peoples, but to the Jews themselves. It was Vámbéry who arranged the 1901 meeting between the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909).
Academe put up the most formidable barriers
to Jewish participation — barriers that stood well into the nineteenth
century. Before the emancipation of Europe's Jews, learned Christians did
not regard them as credible authorities in matters of faith — even the
false faith of Islam. Such credibility was inseparable from an adherence
to the true Christian faith, and information about Islam had to be
embedded in an affirmation of Christianity's truth and Islam's falsehood.
Even in the Enlightenment, Arabic studies remained a handmaiden of
theology, and in most cases served as an adjunct to the Hebrew and
biblical studies of Christian theologians. The theological connection
formed an insurmountable barrier to the emergence of Jewish academic
authorities on Islam in Europe.Three developments combined to break down the barrier and afford Jews a role in the rapid expansion of the European scholarly exploration of Islam. The first was the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment: Jewish scholars began to take an interest in secular history, and the place of Jewish narratives within that history. The second development was the Jewish emancipation: Jews gradually won admission to secular academic institutions, as students and professors. The third development was Europe's secularization: Europeans increasingly sought an understanding of Islam and the Muslims freed from Christian theological dogma. In the nineteenth century, the scope of Jewish scholarship expanded. No longer limited to traditional study of the law, it came to embrace the origins and history of the Jews, and of the peoples with which they had interacted. The new "science" of Jewish studies, emphasizing history and philology, focused also upon the history of Jews under Islam. Many European Jewish scholars first acquired Arabic and Judeo-Arabic as a basic tool for the study of medieval Jewish philosophy and history. Jewish cultural history could not be researched and written without this tool, and while Jews learned Arabic alongside non-Jews in universities, they usually did so with the different intent of studying Jewish sources. Two of the pioneers in this field were Solomon Munk (1805-67) and Moritz Steinschneider (1816-1907).24 Only a minority applied these linguistic tools to the study of Islam, usually in the first instance to Jewish-Muslim relations and Jewish elements in Islam. The theme of Islam's debt to Judaism would be a recurrent one in the Jewish study of Islam, precisely because Jewish scholarship, following Hegel, had settled upon monotheism as the great contribution of the Jews to world civilization. In 1833, Abraham Geiger (1810-74), a brilliant young rabbi from Frankfurt, published a book entitled Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?, analyzing the Prophet Muhammad's adaptations from Judaism. (The original Latin thesis was written for a competition at the University of Bonn, where it took the prize.) Geiger's adept handling of the sources and his careful analysis won him widespread praise among the handful of scholars then devoted to the academic study of Islam. |
As Jacob Lassner points out in his study for this collection, Geiger overstated the case for Islam's borrowing from Judaism. But the book has been rightly called the dawn of historical research on Islam, and Geiger's approach to the relationship of Islam to other religions retained its validity for a century. No less important, it introduced a tone of respect into the study of Islam — so much so that Geiger came under some criticism from Christian colleagues, particularly for assuming the sincerity of the Muslim prophet. Muhammad, he wrote, "seems to have been a genuine enthusiast who was himself convinced of his divine mission." His conclusion: "The harsh judgment generally passed upon him [by Europeans] is unjustifiable."25 This caused something of a stir, and in an otherwise favorable review of Geiger's book, the French scholar Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838), founder of modern Arabic studies, felt compelled to insist that Muhammad was a "skilled imposter."26 Geiger, however, was not destined to become a historian of Islam. He applied his immense talents to building the intellectual foundations of Reform Judaism, applying the same source-critical techniques to Jewish origins. Nonetheless, Geiger remained a partisan of Islam, especially in comparing the experience of Jews under Islam and Christianity. In 1865, he contrasted Islam, which "always left itself favorable to the cultivation of science and philosophy, with a Christian Church that increasingly nourished a repugnance of science and reason."27 This was a clear voice of dissent in a Europe where Islam continued to be regarded as inimical to science and reason. Only a handful of Jewish scholars, formed in the "science of Judaism," went still further, and devoted themselves fully to Islamic studies. A German Jewish contemporary of Geiger's was the first to do so. Gustav Weil (1808-89) was born in Sulzburg, Baden, to a rabbinical family. Like his forebears, he was to have been a rabbi, and he studied Talmud under his grandfather in Metz. But he abandoned this at the first opportunity, entering the University of Heidelberg at the age of twenty. There he studied philology and history, as well as Arabic. In 1830 he went to Paris to study under Silvestre de Sacy, and from there he accompanied the French forces which occupied Algeria, as a correspondent for an Augsburg newspaper. In 1831 he proceeded to Cairo, where he spent more than four years teaching French at the new Egyptian medical school established by Muhammad 'Ali Pasha (r. 1805-49) and run by the French physician Antoine Barthélémy Clot-Bey (1799-1867). In Egypt he perfected his Arabic and acquired Turkish and Persian. After some months in Istanbul, he returned to the University of Heidelberg, where he served as a librarian for almost twenty-five years. He was appointed a professor in 1861. In 1843, Weil published a life of Muhammad entitled Mohammed der Prophet. Lewis describes this work as the first Western biography of Muhammad "that was free from prejudice and polemic, based on a profound yet critical knowledge of the Arabic sources, and informed by a sympathetic understanding of Muslim belief and piety. For the first time, he gave the European reader an opportunity to see Muhammad as the Muslims saw him, and thus to achieve a fuller appreciation of his place in human history."28 Weil achieved this through an exacting and exhausting use of manuscripts then available in Europe. Although trained in philology, Weil came to regard himself as a historian of Islam, who took his inspiration from Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). The Rankean influence was most notable in Weil's five-volume Geschichte der Chalifen (1846-62). A contemporary French scholar described this work as "the first complete history of the caliphate, written according to the demands of European criticism and composed from the original sources... the authors are controlled by each other, the facts discussed and the authorities cited."29 Weil reproduced the narrative style of his Arabic sources, resulting in an account that was neither dramatic nor analytical — a critic once described it unkindly as ledern, dull. But Weil's work nonetheless represented an advance in its dispassion and detachment. Another Jewish scholar, Hartwig Derenbourg (1844-1908), achieved something similar in making possible a more sympathetic understanding of the Muslim view of the Crusades. The Paris-born Derenbourg, son of a specialist in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew, studied Arabic in Leipzig. He then taught it in Paris, and in 1885 was appointed to the new chair of Islamic studies at the École des langues orientales. In 1880, while cataloguing Arabic manuscripts in the library of the Escorial, he discovered the autobiography of Usama ibn Munqidh, a twelfth-century writer and diplomat from Syria, who left a vivid and very human account of Muslim life at the time of the Crusades. Derenbourg published the text in 1886, and a French translation in 1889. Derenbourg also would be remembered for the direction he gave to one of his last students, Louis Massignon (1883-1962). In 1907, Massignon read Muslim mystical texts with Derenbourg, who encouraged him to take up the tenth-century mystic Hallaj as his thesis subject. Derenbourg died before the thesis was completed, and Massignon dedicated his thèse complémentaire, a lexicon of Muslim mysticism, to Derenbourg's memory.30
By the middle of the nineteenth century,
research had replaced romance, philology had replaced poetry, and the new
authorities on the East became preoccupied with establishing "scientific"
hierarchies and categories. The idea that the Jews were Semites owed its
origins to philologists, concerned to establish the genealogy of
languages. Jews and Muslims came together under this Semitic rubric —
benignly, as speakers of cognate languages, Hebrew and Arabic;
condescendingly, as peoples limited in their cultural development and
mental processes by the languages of their expression; and, ominously, as
members of an inferior racial category. The passage from the benign to the
condescending is usually associated with two comparative philologists,
Ernest Renan (1823-92) in France, and Theodor Nöldeke (1836-1930) in
Germany. Both had disparaging things to say about Semitic cultures —
Renan, from a belief in the supremacy of Indo-European peoples; Nöldeke,
from a veneration of Graeco-Roman antiquity.Yet in the schema of both Renan and Nöldeke, the Jews of Europe had escaped the Semitic bind. Renan held that "race" was determined not by blood, but by language, religion, laws, and customs. A Muslim Turk, in his estimate, was "today more a true Semite than the Jew who has become French, or to be more exact, European."31 Theodor Nöldeke, writing on "Some Characteristics of the Semitic Race," reached essentially the same conclusion: In drawing the character of the Semites, the historian must guard against taking the Jews of Europe as pure representatives of the race. These have maintained many features of their primitive type with remarkable tenacity, but they have become Europeans all the same; and, moreover, many peculiarities by which they are marked are not so much of old Semitic origin as the result of the special history of the Jews, and in particular of continued oppression, and of that long isolation from other peoples, which was partly their own choice and partly imposed on them.32 If this were so, then Jewish scholars were not to be regarded as Semitic specimens, but as fellow Europeans, who could participate as intellectual equals in Europe's discovery of Islam. And so even as Nöldeke made disparaging remarks about Eastern peoples and Semitic cultures, he could hail a Jew, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), for his brilliant insights into Islam. |
Goldziher produced nineteenth-century Europe's great breakthrough in Islamic studies. Born in the Hungarian town of Székesfehérvár, son of a leather merchant, he received a rigorous schooling in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud from an early age. He completed his philological studies in Leipzig in 1870, and then undertook further travels in Europe and the East. But he could not secure a professorship at the University of Budapest on his return, and from 1876 he made his living as secretary of the Reform (Neolog) Jewish community in the city. His two-volume Muhammedanische Studien (1888-89) overturned the world of orientalist scholarship, not just by its sheer virtuosity, but by its guiding notion that Islam was a faith in constant evolution. Goldziher's interests ranged widely, from the development of Muslim sects to Arabic poetry. But his best-known contribution lay in his study of Islam's oral tradition, the hadith, and his realization that it must be regarded not as a record of the Prophet Muhammad's deeds and sayings, but as a window on the first centuries of Islam. Bernát Heller (1871-1943), Goldziher's closest student, wrote of his teacher that
This assessment has been criticized for implying "that the secret of [Goldziher's] academic achievement... must be something mysteriously Jewish," whereas "several of Goldziher's contemporaries (mostly the bearers of the 'white man's burden') recognized this duality within Islam and the special sanctioning of the social practice without much knowledge of the Talmud. The cleverest of all was C. Snouck Hurgronje."34 The criticism simultaneously succeeds in making the point and missing it. The Dutch Islamicist Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) reached his understanding of this "duality" through extensive travel in Muslim lands and years of service as a colonial administrator in the Dutch East Indies. He also drew upon the inspiration of Goldziher himself (to whom, wrote Snouck Hurgronje, "in defining the direction of my studies, I owe more than to anyone else.")35 Goldziher, in contrast, did not need to be positioned in a Muslim land by an imperial power to achieve his insight. As a young man of twenty-three, he did spend a Wanderjahre in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, but he never again stopped for more than a few days in a Muslim land. How was it that Goldziher achieved such an intimate understanding of Islam, without sustained contact with its living expression? There was the fact of his genius. But his understanding of Islam was mediated by his intimate familiarity with another religion of law, in constant tension with actual practice, and formulated in a Semitic language: Judaism.36 Goldziher regarded Judaism and Islam as kindred faiths. Islam originated as a "Judaized Meccan cult," but evolved into "the only religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level."37 During his stay in Damascus, Goldziher's assimilation of the two faiths reached a point where "I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim." In Cairo he even prayed as a Muslim: "In the midst of the thousands of the pious, I rubbed my forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was I more devout, more truly devout, than on that exalted Friday."38 He nevertheless remained a committed Jew, convinced that a reformed Judaism, salvaged from rabbinic obscurantism, could attain Islam's degree of rationality without sacrificing its spirituality. During his career, he continued to produce studies on Jewish themes, of a kind that followed the path pioneered by Geiger before him. In his politics, Goldziher supported the movement of Islamic revival and sympathized with resistance to Western imperialism. The diary of his youthful travels is replete with expressions of indignation over Europe's intrusion in the East: "Europe has spoiled everything healthy and tanned the honest Arab skins morally to death after French example!"39 During his stay in Cairo, where he became the first European admitted to studies at the Azhar mosque-university, "I spoke out against European domination in the bazaar....I spoke about theories of the new local Muslim culture and its development as an antidote to the epidemic of European domination."40 Goldziher also formed a fast friendship with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-97), who was then in Egypt preaching against the country's subordination to foreigners. His anti-imperialism found little outlet after his return to Budapest — Austro-Hungary had no colonial possessions in Muslim lands — but he later expressed sympathy for the 'Urabi uprising in Egypt, and remained an unwavering believer in the project of Islamic reformism. The mid-nineteenth century saw the completion of the formal emancipation of Hungary's Jews, most of whom registered their nationality as Hungarian. Like many Jewish intellectuals, Goldziher became a fervent Hungarian nationalist, which destined him to remain on the margins of learned Europe. He was offered the positions at the University of Heidelberg and Cambridge University during the 1890s. But Goldziher, for reasons personal and patriotic, would not leave Budapest, and so did not assume a university chair until 1905. Neither was Goldziher a Zionist: freedom for the Jews had to come through affiliation with Europe, not separation. In a letter of 1889, he wrote: "Jewishness is a religious term and not an ethnographical one. As regards my nationality I am a Transdanubian, and by religion a Jew. When I headed [back] for Hungary from Jerusalem [after his Wanderjahre] I felt I was coming home."41 In 1920, Goldziher's schoolmate from Budapest, the Zionist leader Max Nordau (1849-1923), urged him to join the planned university in Jerusalem — the future Hebrew University. Goldziher replied: "Parting with the [Hungarian] fatherland at this time would be like demanding a heavy sacrifice from a patriotic point of view."42 He declined the offer. In this collection, Lawrence I. Conrad considers Goldziher's critique of Renan. Goldziher was an incisive critic of Renan's theories about the limits of the Semitic mind, and Goldziher's deflation of Renan laid the groundwork for the subsequent development of Islamic studies. Ultimately, Goldziher, not Renan, exercised a predominant influence on the new field. (Unwary readers of Said's Orientalism, in which Renan looms large and Goldziher has gone missing, are all too liable to conclude the opposite.) Goldziher's enduring work, according to Albert Hourani, "created a kind of orthodoxy which has retained its power until our own time."43 "Our view of Islam and Islamic culture until today is very largely that which Goldziher laid down."44Goldziher's paradigm has persisted for reasons best explained by Jaroslav Stetkevych: [Goldziher] is emerging more and more as quite a solitary survivor of another age, looming higher the lonelier he stands. From among all the nineteenth-century philologists he is the one still capable of informing us and surprising us by being ahead of us in much of what we are doing or of what remains to be done....he figures among the pioneers of a meaningful integration of literary studies into cultural anthropology....At his best, he ceased practising the rites of Orientalism and participated in a cultural-interpretative enterprise of broad, contemporary validity.
From the turn of the century,
universities across Europe opened their doors to Jewish scholars of Islam,
especially in Germany, where the new Jewish scholarship already included
the study of Arabic and Islam. Yet precisely in this heart of Europe,
anti-Semitism was evolving into a fatal racism. It would strike the
universities early and in full force, so that at crucial points in their
careers, many of these scholars would become migrants and refugees. Some
of them are the subjects of studies in this collection — an arbitrary
selection from a distinguished list of displaced orientalists. If they may
be said to have shared one thing, it would have been an admiration for
high Islam, confirmed by the turning of much of Europe against its
Jews.Where does one begin? Perhaps with Josef Horovitz (1874-1931), born in Lauenburg, Germany, and son of a prominent Orthodox rabbi. Horovitz studied at the University of Berlin, where he also began to teach. He also traveled through Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, on commission to find Arabic manuscripts. From 1907 to 1914, he lived in India, where he taught Arabic at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, the modernist school established by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in 1875. In 1914, he was appointed to teach Semitic languages at the University of Frankfurt. His range included early Islamic history, early Arabic poetry, Qur'anic studies, and Islam in India. In this collection, the late Hava Lazarus-Yafeh examines Horovitz's long-distance role as first director (in absentia) of the School of Oriental Studies at the new Hebrew University. He was not a fervent Zionist, and his political sympathies lay with Brit Shalom, the intellectual movement (comprised largely of German Jews) that abjured a Jewish state. Nevertheless, he gave crucial scholarly legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise in Jerusalem, which would provide a haven for so many of the Jewish refugee scholars from Nazi Germany. Or one might begin with Max Meyerhof (1874-1945) born in Hildesheim, Germany. Trained as an ophthalmologist, he went to Egypt in 1903, where he served as chief of the Khedivial Ophthalmic Clinic. In 1914 he returned to Germany to serve as a military medical officer, and then practiced for a while. But he returned to Cairo in 1923 and remained there for the rest of his life, practicing medicine by day, and investigating the history of medieval Arab medicine and science by night. Meyerhof was also famous for his organization of medical care for Egypt's poor, for which he was much honored by medical societies. |
Or one might well begin with the archeologist and art historian Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948). Born in Celle, Germany, he conducted a sensational excavation at Samarra in Iraq, from 1910 to 1913. The discoveries in this early Abbasid capital put him at the forefront of the new field of Islamic art, and in 1920 he was made professor at the University of Berlin. The art historian Oleg Grabar has called Herzfeld "the most versatile of the small group of scholars who, at the turn of the century, set the study of Islamic art on a more or less scientific basis." He was the first to address the question of the uniqueness and originality of Islamic art, and "he was much in advance of his time and of the knowledge available to it. Because of his involvement in the exciting arguments of the newly developed art historical schools in Vienna, he was conscious, especially in his earlier works, of the importance of theoretical and abstract considerations in dealing with the problems of early Islamic art."46 After the First World War, Herzfeld focused on pre-Islamic Persia; in 1935, he left Nazi Germany and was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Or perhaps one might begin with Gotthold Weil (1882-1960), born in Berlin, founder of the oriental department of the Prussian State Library in that city, professor of Jewish history and literature at the University of Berlin from 1920, and successor to Horovitz as professor of Semitic languages at the University of Frankfurt from 1931 until the Nazis dismissed him three years later. (Following Horovitz, he headed the School of Oriental Studies in Jerusalem in absentia.) In 1935 he emigrated to Palestine, and was named head of the National and University Library in Jerusalem. Weil's field was Arabic grammar and prosology, but his contact with Tatar prisoners-of-war in the First World War stimulated an interest in Turkish studies, a field in which he held a chair at the Hebrew University. Or perhaps a point of departure might be Richard Walzer (1900-75) born in Berlin, who specialized in Islamic philosophy, and who sought the continuity of Greek tradition in the Islamic world, demonstrated by the preservation of lost Greek materials in Arabic philosophical texts. In 1933 he left Nazi Germany for the University of Rome, and then in 1938 relocated again to Oxford. Albert Hourani has attested to Walzer's influence there: He and his wife Sofie had a kind of salon in which, among Biedermeier furniture and with the lovely Monet inherited from her parents looking down at us from the wall, we would meet colleagues and visiting scholars, and where books were discussed and a kind of stock exchange of scholarly reputations was held. Richard taught me the importance of scholarly traditions: the way in which scholarship was passed from one generation to another by a kind of apostolic succession, a chain of witnesses (a silsila, to give it its Arabic name). He also told me much about the central tradition of Islamic scholarship in Europe, that expressed in German.47 Or perhaps once might commence with the Frankfurt-born Richard Ettinghausen (1906-79). After completing his doctorate in Islamic studies in Frankfurt, Ettinghausen came to the United States in 1934, in the first instance to the Institute for Advanced Study, and ultimately to the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Ettinghausen had a far-ranging expertise in all aspects of Islamic art, but specialized in Islamic painting — Arab, Turkish, Persian, and Indian. He was famously active in the museum world, doing much to place Islamic art before the American public through exhibitions. He served as a head curator of the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian, and as the consultative chairman of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, directing its permanent installation. His ties to Israel found expression in his avid promotion of the establishment of a museum for Islamic art in Jerusalem. |
One could well conclude with the youngest of them all, Franz Rosenthal (1914-2003). Born in Berlin, where his early work focused on Aramaic studies, Rosenthal fled Germany in 1938, arriving in the United States in 1940. In 1943 he was naturalized, and he spent two years in army intelligence. In 1956, after teaching in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, he commenced a thirty-year career at Yale University. Rosenthal excelled in Muslim intellectual history, and especially the development of early and classical Muslim scholarship and historiography. He gained his widest renown for his fully annotated three-volume translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. These (and other) German-Jewish scholars viewed the study of Islam as the perfect point of intersection of classical and Jewish studies. They were drawn to "golden ages" and those achievements of Islamic civilization that had universal significance, and which demonstrated Islam's tolerance of difference. They worked from the assumption that Islam arose in part upon Jewish foundations, and emphasized that it had provided the civilizational framework for a period of Jewish achievement since paralleled only by the present age. They also were fascinated by the role of this Judeo-Islamic civilization in the preservation and transmission of Greek philosophy and science. Needless to say, these Jewish scholars remained completely aloof from the efforts to mobilize German orientalism for political purposes, and they stood at the forefront of the intellectual struggle against the increasing ethnocentrism of the German academy. Jews were forced out of the universities very early in the Nazi reign, so that nearly all of the Jewish orientalists managed to leave Germany.48 Former colleagues who were Nazi sympathizers then wrote the Jews completely out of the history of German oriental studies. Hans Heinrich Schaeder (1896-1957), professor at the University of Berlin, was an authority on Islamic mysticism, the Persian poet Hafiz, the orientalism of Goethe, Iranian Manichaeism, and much else. He was also the effective spokesman of German orientalism throughout the Nazi period. Schaeder's colleagues and students included many Jews. But it was Schaeder who, in 1940, published a remarkable historical summary of the development of German oriental studies that managed to avoid mention of a single Jewish scholar.49 The excision of Jews from the past record was not nearly as consequential as their absence from the subsequent development of Islamic studies in Germany. Not a single Jewish orientalist returned to Germany after the war. "The tradition of Islamic studies in Germany suffered irreplaceable losses in this period," relates a recent German account of post-war scholarship, "because most of the younger scholars who worked in the field had to leave the country. Their emigration has seriously and for at least two generations weakened the potential of the German tradition of Islamwissenschaft."50 The greatest wartime loss to Jewish scholarship on Islam was the death by suicide of Paul Kraus (1904-44). Kraus, who was born and raised in Prague, accumulated superlatives over a short but brilliant career. After Goldziher, opined one Jewish colleague, "there has not been a scholar like Kraus in this field who combined so many signs of scholarly genius."51 An Egyptian colleague said that he inspired "awe." After preparation in ancient Semitics at the University of Berlin (where he studied under Schaeder), Kraus became fascinated by the history of Islamic sciences, and seemed destined for fame at an institute established precisely for this field in Berlin. But the rise of the Nazis in 1933 compelled a move, and he managed to secure a scholarship in Paris with the help of Louis Massignon. There he and Massignon began an intensive cooperation, preparing the pericopes of Hallaj for publication. The relationship between Massignon and Kraus was complex and asymmetrical, and remains difficult to put in focus. As Joel L. Kraemer demonstrates in his study for this collection, the two men were complementary opposites. Had Kraus remained in Paris, he might have opened an entirely different line of intellectual succession to Massignon, far from the spirit of Catholic penitence. But he was not a French national, and in 1936 he was informed that he could not be employed in France any longer. The Hebrew University made Kraus an offer at that time, but he had spent time in Palestine some years earlier, and found it an inhospitable place. He preferred an offer, arranged for him by Massignon, at the Egyptian (later Cairo) University, where he became a protégé of the Egyptian critic and scholar Taha Husayn (1889-1973). Kraus spent eight years in Cairo. He had a masterly command of Arabic, in which he lectured and sometimes wrote, and a passion for the study of Islamic civilization in all its aspects. Yet in Cairo, his spirit was eroded by the specter of a possible German invasion, the death of his wife, fear for his academic reputation, and Egyptian nationalist resentment against foreigners in the university. He had come from a world which had gone dark, and whose darkness continued to pursue him. In 1944, after a change of government in Egypt, Kraus was told he would be dismissed from his post. He returned to his flat and hanged himself. Kraus, for all the complexity of his motives, must be numbered among the casualties of war. The fate of Kraus raises the question of solidarity: the extent to which Jewish scholars were protected or assisted by their colleagues outside Germany. There is much lore about the many German-Jewish scholars of Islam who reached safe haven in America and Britain through the help of colleagues. France, however, represented a more complex instance, personified by the towering figure of French orientalism, Massignon. In December 1933, Massignon wrote this to a French diplomat in Cairo: "For myself, as one who has personally rescued one of the academic victims of the Hitlerite regime [Kraus], I am certain that we in France must resist every demand to increase the percentage of Jews among us, if we want to avoid a crisis as violent as that of our neighbors." In the same letter, he took a dim view of the arrival of Jewish scholars in Turkey. (The Turkish government in 1933 invited some thirty German refugee professors, many of them Jewish, to assist in the reorganization of the University of Istanbul.) "There is evidently a very strange international role that is being played presently in the world by a Jewish elite," wrote Massignon. "The massive injection of German scholars of Jewish origin, to which Turkey has consented (the University of Istanbul) is rather revealing of this action. I hope we can spare Syria an immigration of the same kind, which would precipitate catastrophes."52 Of course, neither did he want the German-Jewish scholars in Palestine: in 1939, he lamented that at the Hebrew University, "instead of Oriental Sephardim speaking Arabic, there are these Germanized Ashkenazim."53 This was the same Massignon who was guided to the subject of his life's great work by his Jewish teacher, Derenbourg; who acknowledged the crucial encouragement he received from a Jewish mentor, Goldziher; and who depended in his later work upon the labors of a Jewish student, Kraus. Yet as the 1930s unfolded, Massignon showed a growing hostility to Jewish refugees, experiencing what he himself would describe as his "crisis of anti-Semitism." This has been documented in detail by Massignon's most recent biographers, who conclude that "in his episodic reactions to the Jewish question in France, Massignon was incontestably the prisoner of a time and a place in which anti-Semitism had become banal."54 Massignon's views were an intimation of just how saturated with anti-Semitism continental Europe's intellectual classes had become, and how certain it was that the continent would lose its privileged place as the center of great Jewish achievement in the field of Islamic studies. To continue to Part 2 of this article, click here. © Martin Kramer
1Bernard Lewis, "The Pro-Islamic Jews," in his Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East, new rev. ed. (Chicago: Open Court, 1993), 142, 144. 2Bernard Lewis, "The State of Middle Eastern Studies," American Scholar 48, no. 3 (summer 1979): 369-70. 3Bernard Lewis, "The Study of Islam," in his Islam in History, 12. 4Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 5Maxime Rodinson, "Western Views of the Muslim World," in his Europe and the Mystique of Islam, trans. Roger Veinus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), 3-82. 6Albert Hourani, "Islam and the Philosophers of History," in his Europe and the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 19-73 (on Goldziher, 51-53); idem, "Islam in European Thought," in his Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7-60 (on Goldziher, 36-41). "Edward [Said] totally ignores the German tradition and philosophy of history which was the central tradition of the orientalists," said Hourani in an interview. "Therefore among others he has ignored Goldziher." Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians, ed. Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (London: Ithaca Press, 1994), 43. 7On Heine's orientalism, see Mounir Fendri, Halbmond, Kreuz und Schibboleth: Heinrich Heine und der islamische Orient (Hamburg: Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1980); and Christiane Barbara Pfeifer, Heine und der islamische Orient, Mizan, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1990). 8On Heine's reading in orientalist sources, see Heinrich Heine. Säkularausgabe, vol. 4K (Kommentar) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), 21-46. 9Ibid, vol. 1 (Gedichte, 1812-1827) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1979), 140. (The lines are from the poem.) 10Ibid., vol. 4 (Tragödien, Frühe Prosa, 1820-1831) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1981), 15. 11Ibid., 11. 12Hichem Djaït, "Islam and German Thought," in his Europe and Islam, trans. Peter Heinegg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 75. 13For an extensive survey, see Hannelore Kunzl, Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogenbau des 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhunderts, Judentum und Umwelt, vol. 9 (Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1984). 14Albert Rosengarten, A Handbook of Architectural Styles, trans. W. Collett-Sandars (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), 485 (originally published in 1857). Rosengarten was the first modern architect of Jewish birth in Germany, and a critic of the "Moorish" style, which he thought lacked the "elevating effect" of the Romanesque and Gothic styles. 15Cf. John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture 1500-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sweetman (287 n.13) points to the role of synagogues in familiarizing Europe with Islamic architectural forms. But he attributes use of these forms to an "urgent Zionism which sought to draw attention to Palestine as the true home of the Jews....the interesting fact remains the choice, by Jews disenchanted with Europe, of Islamic dome and minaret-forms." He also writes (236) that in adopting these architectural forms, "the Jews sought to give expression to their sense of alienation in Europe." This interpretation misses the mark. The Moorish style was most popular with the most assimilationist and anti-Zionist segments of European (and American) Jewry. Another verdict on one of the most famous Moorish synagogues in Europe, the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue in Berlin, is applicable to the style as a whole: it "revealed the taste for Reform and modernity and cultural assimilation," and expressed "optimism and confidence." Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 270. 16Philippe Jullian, The Orientalists: European Painters of Eastern Scenes (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 146. These painters represented Jewish life in their work, but Jewish women also served as models substituting for Muslims: "Access to Muslim households and harems was notoriously difficult through the [nineteenth] century, and even in the 1880s Renoir complained of the difficulty of finding suitable models. In general, artists drew their subjects from the local Jewish population." The Orientalists: Delacroix to Matisse, ed. Mary Anne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1984), 177. 17The famous landmarks: Delacroix's Noce juive (c. 1837-41, Louvre) and Musiciens juifs de Mogador (1847, Louvre); Chassériau's Le Jour de Sabbat dans le quartier juif à Constantine (c. 1847, lost to fire); and Dehondencq's Mariée juive au Maroc (c. 1870, Musée de Reims). 18For Arabia, Spain, and English romanticism, see Kathryn Tidrick, Heart-Beguiling Araby: The English Romance with Arabia, rev. ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), 32-53; and the exhibition catalogue The Romantic Image of the Legacy of Al-Andalus (Granada: Presidential Committee of the Legacy of Al-Andalus, 1995), 30-44. 19Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby or the New Generation (London: The Bodley Head, 1927), 289. (The passage appears in book 4, chapter 10.). 20Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring) quoted by Anthony S. Wohl, "'Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi': Disraeli as Alien," Journal of British Studies 34, no. 3 (July 1995): 397. 21Quoted by Paul Mendes-Flohr, "Fin de Siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation," in his Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 81. 22They included David D'Beth Hillel (d. 1846), who spent a year in Baghdad, visited the Shi'ite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, and wrote a unique account of dissident sects of western Persia; Israel Joseph Benjamin (1818-64), who traversed Syria, Iraq, Persia, and Afghanistan, then crossed all of North Africa, and published an account; Jacob Eduard Polak (1820-91), physician to Shah Nasir al-Din (r. 1848-96); and Hermann Burchardt (1857-1909), photographer and ethnologist, who died at the hands of marauders between San'a and Mecca. 23Arminius Vámbéry, "The Future of Constitutional Turkey," The Nineteenth Century and After (March 1909): 361-62. 24Steinschneider's work did have an impact on Islamic studies; see Franz Rosenthal, "Steinschneider's Contribution to the Study of Muslim Civilization," Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 27 (1958): 67-81. 25Quoted by Lassner, 107 below. 26Ibid. 27Ibid.,106. 28Lewis, "Pro-Islamic Jews," 142. 29Jules Mohl, quoted by D.M. Dunlop, "Some Remarks on Weil's History of the Caliphs," in Historians of the Middle East, eds. Bernard Lewis and P.M. Holt (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 320. 30Mary Louis Gude, Louis Massignon: The Crucible of Compassion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 17-18, 251 n.44. 31Quoted by Daniel Rivet, "Les délices de l'ailleurs," Télérama hors-série: Delacroix (September 1994): 44. 32Theodor Nöldeke quoted by Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 45-46. 33Quoted by Róbert Simon, Ignác Goldziher: His Life and Scholarship as Reflected in his Works and Correspondence (Budapest and Leiden: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Brill, 1986), 20. 34Ibid. 35Quoted in Scholarship and Friendship in Early Islamwissenschaft: The Letters of C. Snouck Hurgronje to I. Goldziher, ed. P.Sj. van Koningsveld (Leiden: Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1985), xiv. 36Cf. Jean-Jacques Waardenburg, L'Islam dans le miroir de l'occident, 3d rev. ed. (Paris and the Hague: Mouton, 1962), 266. 37Raphel Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 20. 38Ibid., 28. 39Ibid., 144. 40Quoted by Simon, Ignác Goldziher, 44. 41Quoted by Simon, ibid., 61. 42Quoted by Simon, ibid., 60. After Goldziher's death, the new Hebrew University purchased his library of 6,000 books and transferred it to Jerusalem. 43Hourani, Islam in European Thought, 2. 44Interview with Hourani, in Approaches to the History of the Middle East, 42. 45Jaroslav Stetkevych, "Arabic Poetry and Assorted Poetics," in Islamic Studies: A Tradition and its Problems, ed. Malcolm Kerr (Malibu, Calif.: Undena, 1980), 120-22. 46Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 12-13. 47Albert Hourani, "Patterns of the Past," in Paths to the Middle East: Ten Scholars Look Back, ed. Thomas Naff (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 38. 48The Iranologist Fritz Wolff (1880-1943) was an exception, and did perish. The Arabist Werner Caskel (1896-1970), although not Jewish by any other criterion, had a Jewish father. He was dismissed from the University of Greifswald in 1938, and narrowly avoided deportation. The Turcologist Franz Babinger (1891-1967) had a grandmother of Jewish birth. In 1934, Der Strümer denounced him as racially tainted and he left Germany. 49Hans Heinrich Schaeder, "Deutsche Orientforschung," Der Nahe Osten (Berlin) 1 (1940): 129-34. 50Baber Johansen, "Politics, Paradigms and the Progress of Oriental Studies: The German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) 1845-1989," M.A.R.S. (Paris), 4 (winter 1995): 88. 51D.H. Baneth, quoted by Kraemer, 181 below. 52Massignon (Paris) to Henri Gaillard (Cairo), 12 December 1933, in the archives of the French embassy in Cairo, Archives du MAE, Nantes, carton 74/14 ("Français islamisants"). For Jews and other Germans at the University of Istanbul, see Hort Wildmann, Exil und Bildungshilfe: Die deutschsprachige akademische Emigration in die Turkei nach 1933 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1973). 53Massignon's letter to Nouveaux Cahiers, quoted by Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, Louis Massignon (Paris: Plon, 1994), 257. 54Ibid., 258. |
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Kemal Çiftçi Önemli keşifler yapmış bilim adamlarına baktığımız
zaman, bu kişilerin hepsinin sanata ve düşünceye büyük önem verdiklerini
görürüz. Meselâ, Nikola Tesla, ilk defa elektrik motorunun hareketli bir
manyetik alan içinde döndüğünü gördüğü anda, meşhur Alman şairi Goethe’nin
bir şiirini terennüm ettiğini söylemiştir. Kuru bir teknik eğitimle medenî insanların
yetiştirilemeyeceğini geç de olsa anlayan Amerikalılar, bunu telâfi
etmenin yollarını aramaya başlamışlardır. Nitekim Rochester
Üniversitesinde bu yönde bir adım atılmış ve mühendislik eğitimini üstün
başarıyla tamamlayan öğrencilere, ek bir yıl okuma imkânı tanınmıştır.
Öğretim harcının alınmadığı bu ek sürede, sanat ve edebiyat konularında
seçmeli dersler verilmektedir. Şu da var ki istenen seviyede eğitimin
verilebilmesi için ailelere iş düşmektedir. Victor Hugo, “Bir insanı
medenîleştirmeye karar verince, işe büyük annesinden başlamalıdır.”
demiştir. Gerçekten de ailenin tutumu ve eğitime verdiği değer, son derece
önemlidir. Bunu, canlı bir örnekle sergileyelim: Hâlen Yale
Üniversitesinde çocuk psikiyatrisi profesörü olan James P. Comer’ın,
birlikte ilkokula başladığı üç arkadaşı daha var. Bunların hepsi, gelir
durumu iyi olmayan zenci ailelerden. Hepsinin de babaları demir-çelik
fabrikasında çalışmaktadır. Comer, tahsiline devam edip profesör olduğu
hâlde diğer üçü tahsillerini sonuna kadar götürememişler. Biri alkolik
olup erken yaşlarda ölür. İkincisi küçük yaşlarda çeşitli suçlar işlemeye
başlar ve hayatının büyük bir kısmını hapiste geçirir. Üçüncüsü de akıl
hastahanesine düşer. Prof. Comer, kendisiyle aynı ekonomik şartlara
sahip ailelerden geldikleri hâlde, eğitimde başarısız duruma düşen
arkadaşları ile kendisi arasındaki farkı şöyle
açıklıyor: “Görünüşte
ailelerimizin durumu birbirine benziyordu. Ama benim ailem, okumaya ve
okula büyük önem veriyordu. Annemle babam, elimden tutup beni kütüphaneye
götürürlerdi. Bu şekilde ben, birçok kitabı okuma imkânı buldum. Öteki üç
arkadaşım ise hiç kitap okumuyorlardı. Bu yüzden arkadaşlarım,
öğretmenlerin gözünde ‘kötü öğrenci’ idiler. Öğretmen nereden bilsin ki bu
arkadaşlarımın anne babaları, kütüphaneden ve okuldan korkan insanlardı!”
(Educating
Poor Minority Children, Scientific American, November
1988.) Öğrencinin evdeki yaşantısı ile okulu arasındaki
tezat, onun psikososyal gelişmesini derinden etkiliyor ve dolayısıyla
akademik başarıyı da baltalıyor. Müfredat programları ise genellikle bu
gerçeği görmezlikten geliyor. Bir insana bilimi, okumayı, yazmayı ve
matematiği öğretmek, seri üretimin yapıldığı bir fabrikada otomobile kapı,
lâstik, direksiyon ve lâmba takmak kadar basit ve standart bir iş
değildir. Prof. Comer, kültürlü olmayı bir özellik saymayan
aileden gelen bir çocuğa, kitap okumayı benimsetmenin gayet zor olduğunu
belirtiyor. Hele hele aile, okula güvenmemesi gerektiğini çocuğuna telkin
etmişse veya öğretmenler, çocuğun sosyal özellikleriyle bağdaşmayan
telkinlerde bulunuyorlarsa... Böyle bir durum, öğrencinin okula
yabancılaşmasına sebep olur ve onu okuldan soğutur. Bazen bunun tam tersi
de olabilir. Öğrenci, okulda başarılı olur, ama anne babasının ve ait
olduğu sosyal çevrenin kültürünü reddetme tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya
kalır. Yukarıdaki problemleri azaltmanın yolu, öğrencileri
psikolojik yönden takviye etmek suretiyle çatışmayı önlemektir. Bunun için
de okul ile aile arasında iyi bir diyalog başlatmak gerekir. Yale
Üniversitesinde “okul geliştirme programı”nın direktörlüğünü yapmakta olan
Comer’ın öncülüğünde yürütülen çalışmalarda, oldukça başarılı sonuçlar
elde edilmiş. Yale ekibinde kurulan heyetlerde, öğretmen, idareci ve
veliler yer alıyor ve “davranış bozukluklarına sebep olan okul
prosedürlerinin değiştirilmesi, okulun akademik ve sosyal problemleri”
gibi konularda ortak kararlar alınıyor. Böyle bir çalışmada dikkat
edilmesi gereken konuları ise Comer şöyle
sıralıyor: 1. Okul müdürünün otoritesine saygı gösterilmeli.
Ancak müdür, kurul üyelerinin görüşünü almadan, bir şeyi empoze etmeye
çalışmamalı. 2. Problemlerden dolayı suçlu aramakla zaman
kaybedilmemeli; bütün enerji, problem çözümüne
ayrılmalı. 3. Kararlar, oy çoğunluğuyla değil, fikir
birliğiyle alınmalı. Böylece, “kaybeden” veya “kazanan” taraflar söz
konusu olmamalı. Buna benzer programların ilk zamanlar bazı
zorluklarla karşılaşmasının normal olduğunu söyleyen Comer, aradan fazla
zaman geçmeden birçok okulun uygulamayı benimsediğini söylüyor ve şu
hatırlatmada bulunuyor: “Problemlerin altındaki gelişme ve sosyal meseleler
açığa kavuşturulmadıkça, ‘eğitim reformu’ adı altında yapılan her türlü
faaliyet boşa gidecek, ayrılan zaman ve para havaya
uçacaktır!” En önemli malzemenin “insan” unsuru olduğu gerçeğini unutmadan, günümüz şartlarına ve ihtiyaçlarına uygun nesillerin yetiştirilmesine önem veren bir zihniyetle, mevcut eğitim sisteminin ciddî bir eleştiriye tâbi tutulması gerekmektedir. |
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Bir komutan, Kara Kuvvetleri Komutanı Org. Yaşar Büyükanıt, “Eşarba kimse bir şey diyemez” demiş ve eklemiş: “Erzurum’daki olay kapıda duran görevlinin işgüzarlığı...” Bu açıklama dünkü gazetelerde haber olarak yer aldı. Oysa, benim bildiğim, o komutana bağlı askerî binaların hiçbirine eşarplı kadınlar ile sakallı erkekler alınmıyor. Eşarp moda olduğu için takılmış, sakal tıbbî zorunluluk yüzünden bırakılmış olsa da...
Geçen gün sohbet ettiğimiz merkez partilerde politika yapmış ünlü bir dost kendi başından geçen ilginç bir olayı anlattı. Üç kişiymişler; eşleriyle birlikte, üst düzey bir komutan tarafından akşam yemeğine dâvet edilmişler. İçlerinden biri kısa süre önce geçirdiği bir ameliyat sebebiyle yüzündeki yarayı örtmek için sakal bırakmış. O sakal yüzünden komutanın dâvetlilerini içeri sokmamış kapıdaki görevliler... “Çok nâziktiler” dedi olayı anlatan; biri, “Efendim, isterseniz berberimiz sorunu şuracıkta çözüversin” teklifinde bile bulunmuş...
Sorunu dâvetin sahibi komutan çözmüş sonunda. Hayır, “İçeri bırakın” diyerek değil, konuklarını Boğaz’daki bir lokantaya götürerek...
Benzer bir olayı, Hıncal Uluç’un İzmir’de çıkan Gözlem gazetesinde yazan ağabeyi Öcal Uluç da yaşamıştı; bir yazısından hatırlıyorum: Eşiyle birlikte İzmir Orduevi’nde yapılan bir düğüne gittiklerinde kapıdan çevrilmiş... Sakalı yüzünden... Hıncal Uluç da sakalıyla herhangi bir askerî tesise giremez... Öcal ve Hıncal Uluç’un babaları Fuat Uluç 27 Mayıs sonrasında adı epey gündemde olan albay rütbeli bir asker ve politikacı olduğu halde... Her iki yazar da babalarının yolunda oldukları halde...
Ben yine de, Org. Büyükanıt’ın, “Eşarba kimse bir şey diyemez” sözünü önemsiyorum. Bu sözün, bir tâlimat halinde bütün askerî tesislere iletilmesiyle, hiç değilse düğün, nişan ve sünnet gibi bazı sosyal etkinliklerde yaşanan rahatsızlıklar sona erebilir...
Komutanın, Atatürk Üniversitesi’nde yaşanan başörtüsü krizini iletişimsizliğe, kapıları tutan görevlilerin işgüzarlığına bağlaması ise gerçekle tam uyuşmuyor. Sebebi basit: Erzurum’da mezuniyet törenlerinde ilk kez bu yıl karşılaşılan bir olay değil bu...
Sabah yazarı Umur Talu eski yazılarına göz attığında, Atatürk Üniversitesi mezuniyet töreninde başörtülü veliyi kapıdan içeri sokmama olayının tıpkısı tıpkısına aynen geçen yıl da yaşandığını fark etmiş; dün buna değiniyordu... Bir yıl önce de o olayla ilgili bir tepki yazısı yazmış çünkü... Geçen yıl olayın bu kadar tepkiyle karşılanmamasına dikkat çekiyor doğal olarak. Doğrudur: Başörtülü anneler geçen yıl da Atatürk Üniversitesi kampüsü kapısından döndürülmüştü, ama olay o zaman fazla büyümemişti...
Acaba neden?
î Başa
Neden bu yıl insanlar bu konuda daha tepkisel
oldu, genellikle başörtüsüne ‘ters’ bakan kalemler bile “Artık fazla oluyoruz”
anlamına gelen yazılar yazdı,
CHP lideri olayı kınadı, komutan “Eşarba kimse bir şey diyemez” açıklamasını yaptı? Bu önemli bir soru. Herkesin üzerinde ciddi biçimde düşünmesi gereken bir soru olduğuna hiç kuşku yok... En başta da eski cumhurbaşkanı Süleyman Demirel’in...
Başörtüsü konusunu gündeme taşıyan Süleyman Demirel’dir. Televizyonlara çıktığında, sözü Tayyip Erdoğan’ın cumhurbaşkanlığı adaylığına sürükleyerek dikkatleri Çankaya Köşkü’ne çıkacak kişinin eşinin başörtülü oluşuna yoğunlaştırmasa ortada tartışılacak bir konu olmayacaktı. İnsanlar, ‘cumhurbaşkanı’ olacak kişide pek çok özellik arıyor ülkemizde, bunlar arasında eşiyle ilgili ‘başörtüsüz olma’ şartı bulunduğunu sanmıyorum...
Bugüne kadar gelmiş geçmiş cumhurbaşkanları içinde eşi başörtülü olan vardı: Birinci Cumhurbaşkanı Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’ün sonradan ayrıldığı eşi Lâtife Hanım Çankaya Köşkü’nde otururken başını örtüyordu. Kenan Evren’in Çankaya’ya çıktıktan az sonra kaybettiği eşi pek ortalıkta görünmedi, ancak muhafazakâr biri olduğu anlaşılıyor Sekine Hanım’ın... Evren Paşa eşinin vefat yıldönümlerinde köşkte mevlit okuturdu; herhalde katılan kadınlar mevlit sırasında başlarını örtüyorlardı.
Hem neden eş? Neden tartışma hep ‘eş’ üzerinde yoğunlaşıyor? Köşk başörtüsü yasağı uygulanacak bir ‘kamusal alan’ ise, hemen bütün cumhurbaşkanlarının annelerinin kapıdan döndürülmesi gerekmez miydi? Turgut Özal’ın, Süleyman Demirel’in ve Ahmet Necdet Sezer’in annelerinin gördüğümüz fotoğrafları hep başı örtülü değil midir?
Anne veya eş, ne fark eder?
Komutanın “Eşarba kimse bir şey diyemez” sözü eğer kabul edilebilir bir ölçüyü yansıtıyorsa, sorunun çözümü yolunda önemli bir adım atılmış sayabiliriz. Çünkü, ‘başörtüsü’ veya ‘türban’ denilen örtü, üreticilerinin gazete ve televizyonlara verdiği reklâmlarda açıkça ifade edildiği üzere, aslında ‘eşarp’tır... Omuza da atılır, başı yarım veya tam örter eşarp; “Kimse bir şey diyemez” kabul ediliyorsa zaten mesele yok demektir.
Aynı komutanın bir açıklama daha yapmasına ihtiyaç var: Politikacı dostumun üst düzey bir komutanın dâvetine gittiği askerî tesisin kapısından dönmesine, albay oğlu bir gazetecinin düğüne katılamamasına yol açan ‘sakal yasağı’ ile ilgili bir açıklama yapmasına... Her iki açıklama da bir tâlimat haline getirilirse iyi olur.
En kötüsü kafa karışıklığı çünkü.
