Inspired by his title, I think it is also fair to suggest that it is who defines that also governs. And this is exactly what the Jacobin Turkish state has been trying to do for several decades. Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ's press conference, where he attempted once again to define democracy, pluralism, religion, Islam, civil society and community, is case in point. The awkwardness of a mighty soldier's uninvited and unwelcome intrusion into the field of sociology and political science aside, it is worth analyzing briefly what the oligarchic Jacobin elite have been trying to do in the country with their definition attempts.The Turkish state has relied on bureaucratic and military power when ruling the country, but as most authoritarian regimes would do, it has also endeavored to "govern by defining," by which I mean that it has attempted to legitimize its own discourse and actions and delegitimize several "others" by defining everything under the sky in the light of its 19th century militantly positivist and Jacobinist ideology. Once, the almighty state defined the Kurds of Turkey ethnically as "mountain Turks," and this definition, which was aimed at the total homogenization of the country's population, has cost more than 30,000 human lives. Several retired generals recently stated that they were wrong on this and in his last press conference, Chief of General Staff Gen. Başbuğ -- for the first time for a general on active duty -- implied that there are also citizens who are ethnically not Turkish, but Kurdish.
Another area that our state has felt free to define, delegitimize and govern is religion. I have coined the term "Lausannian Islam" to highlight what the Turkish state has been trying to socially engineer within the borders that geographically defined the current Turkey in the post-World War I Lausanne Treaty. Our state attempted to create a kind of Turkish Islam that would have no ties with the Muslim world, especially the Arab world. This Islam would be based on Turkish culture and, if possible, Arabic, the language of the original religious sources, would be completely abandoned, preferring inaccurate and inauthentic Turkish materials. The universally known and understood call to prayer (ezan) was even abandoned and a Turkish version was made compulsory for several years, until the Democrat Party (DP) came to power in 1950. But the state's Turkish Islam was not aiming at all Turks, either. Afraid of Stalin and the Soviets, our state version of Turkish Islam has neither addressed nor mentioned other Turks all over the world. Given that, sociologically speaking, our version of Islam has innumerable similarities with the Sufi-based Central Asian Islam, our amateur social scientists' definition of Turkish Islam has been grossly flawed and mistaken from the start. In our information age, one can only smile at these naïve attempts.
But unfortunately, history has not been able to teach its lesson to our generals, as in the case of Başbuğ, and they are still striving in futile attempts to define "true Islam," "true Islam-society relations," "true nature of religion," "true religious communities" and so on and so forth. In addition to lacking universal academic standards and criteria, all these definitions are wrong, and several quotations from leading social scientists to support these definitions are misquoted. Not surprisingly, all these militarist definitions are the products of militant and Jacobinist positivism, implying that the generals are destined to lose again.
I wonder if these generals do not have any "true" social scientist friends who will advise them that they should give up trying to govern a society much more sophisticated than their military training. If not, they should at least tell them, as friends, that using state of the art weapons and computers does not make one modern -- one has to understand and humbly digest the Zeitgeist and universal socio-political standards as well.
