The History of the Struggle for Enlightenment in Turkey, in Memory of Ahmet Taner Kışlalı

Entrusting the Enlightenment Not to the State but to the Class

October 21, 2026 at 12:15 PM30 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

The History of the Struggle for Enlightenment in Turkey, in Memory of Ahmet Taner Kışlalı

An Ambush Laid for the Light

A Short History, for Young Comrades, of Those We Lost and What They Left Us

Dear Young Comrades,

Today is 21 October. Twenty-seven years ago this morning, on 21 October 1999, Prof. Dr. Ahmet Taner Kışlalı was torn from us in Ankara by a bomb planted in his car in front of his home. This piece was written to remember him. But not only him. Kışlalı was one of the victims of the ambush that has been laid for more than a hundred years in these lands against reason, science and secularism. Before him there was Kubilay, there was Sabahattin Ali, there were Bahriye Üçok, Turan Dursun, Uğur Mumcu, and the thirty-three people burned to death in Sivas. After him, there were others.

So this is a memorial piece, but its real subject is a war: the war waged against the light. We will talk about who defended what in this war, who targeted whom and why, and how we can carry this legacy today.

Summary: What Are We Telling in This Piece?

Let us say it briefly first, then go into the details.

Who was Kışlalı? He was born in 1939. He graduated from Mülkiye, did his doctorate in Paris and became a professor of political science. In 1977 he was elected MP for İzmir from the CHP (Republican People's Party), and in 1978–79 he served as Minister of Culture in the Ecevit government. After 12 September he withdrew from politics and returned to the university. From 1991 until his death he defended secularism and the Enlightenment in his weekly column in Cumhuriyet. With his book Siyaset Bilimi (Political Science), he trained generations.

What happened? In the spring of 1999, a newspaper published his photograph with a red cross drawn over it. A few months later he was killed. His murder was tried together with the murders of Muammer Aksoy, Bahriye Üçok and Uğur Mumcu in the "Jerusalem Army / Tevhid-Selam" case. Some of the perpetrators were convicted. But the relationships behind the hitman have remained in the dark for twenty-seven years.

Why is his name on the streets? Because the people wrote onto the map of the city what his killers wanted to erase. The name given to a neighbourhood in Çankaya, and to streets, parks and schools in many cities, is not so much a commemoration as an act of defiance: "We have not forgotten, and we will not let it be forgotten."

What is the main theme? In Turkey, the Enlightenment began from above, at the hands of the state, and always remained half-finished. Reaction, meanwhile, offered the ruling classes a service in every period: blocking class consciousness by binding the people to sect, religious community and fate. In the Cold War it was fed by the strategy of "religion against communism"; after 12 September it became state ideology under the name of the "Turkish-Islamic synthesis"; in the 1990s it targeted intellectuals one by one with bombs. The balance sheet of this war is the people whose names we will recall, one by one, in this piece.

What is our conclusion? We cannot leave the Enlightenment to the state. Today the real bearers of reason and science are the working classes and their organisations. The truest way to remember Kışlalı is to tie the secularism and scientific thinking he defended to the struggle for the emancipation of labour.

Now let us go into the details.

Why Do We Remember?

Let us repeat what we have said before: visiting a grave is only one form of remembrance. Real remembrance is telling what a person did, what they defended, the turning points their life passed through and what they ask of us.

We remember Kışlalı for three reasons:

We live in a country where an intellectual paid for his words with his life. To forget who exacted that price is to accept the next one.
His killing was not an isolated event but a link in a chain. We cannot understand the link without seeing the chain.
The relationships behind his murder have still not been brought to light. To remember is to keep demanding a reckoning.

Let us also say one thing up front: Kışlalı was not a socialist; he was a Kemalist. We will not claim him as "one of us". We will remember him as an intellectual who stood by reason and secularism at the cost of his life. We keep here the principle we used in our piece on Ruhi Su: neither saint nor villain. To tell a person's story at their true size, with both their contribution and their limits.

The Life of Ahmet Taner Kışlalı

From Mülkiye to Paris

Kışlalı was born in 1939. He went to high school at Kabataş High School in Istanbul. He then entered Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science, known to everyone as Mülkiye. In those years, Mülkiye was the kitchen of political thought in Turkey. The generation trained there in the early 1960s, in the relatively free atmosphere after 27 May, was debating socialism, planning, development and the political structures of the West and of Turkey.

Kışlalı completed his doctorate at the Paris Faculty of Law in 1967. His thesis was published in French in 1968 as Forces Politiques dans la Turquie Moderne (Political Forces in Modern Turkey). Note the date: 1968. In Paris, students and workers were in the streets; in Turkey, the universities were entering a wave of boycotts and occupations. Kışlalı's book Öğrenci Ayaklanmaları (Student Uprisings), published in 1974, bears the traces of this period.

Between 1968 and 1972 he worked as a lecturer, teaching at Hacettepe and at Ankara University. He became a professor in 1988.

The years as minister

The 1977 election is the one in which the CHP received the highest vote in its history. Behind this rise lay the workers' movement of the 1970s, the strength of DİSK (the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions) and the left-wing climate created by 15–16 June and the May Days. In this election Kışlalı became MP for İzmir. In 1978 he served as Minister of Culture in the 42nd government formed by Bülent Ecevit.

This period as minister was a brief interval in which the claim to take culture out of being an object of consumption for a minority and open it up to the people was voiced at the level of the state. But the same years were the years when fascist attacks, massacres and political murders escalated in the streets. Both the Bahçelievler massacre and the Maraş massacre took place in 1978. Kışlalı, as Minister of Culture, was the minister of a country where culture was being tested in blood in the streets.

After 12 September

The coup of 12 September 1980 cut off Kışlalı's time as an MP and his politics, as it cut off the whole of Turkey's political life. Parties were closed, and former politicians were banned. Kışlalı returned to academia and taught political science at Ankara University's Faculty of Communication.

We described in detail in the 12 September Dossier what 12 September did to the university: YÖK (the Council of Higher Education) was established, hundreds of academics were expelled from the university under martial law decree No. 1402, and scientific autonomy was abolished. In this atmosphere, Kışlalı became an academic who taught, wrote books and, in his own words, wrote against "the unbearable lightness of attacking Atatürk".

His pen and his books

Kışlalı was also a journalist. He was managing editor of the newspaper Yenigün. From 1991 until his death he wrote the column "Haftaya Bakış" (A Look at the Week) in Cumhuriyet.

Even the titles of his books tell you where he stood:

Forces Politiques dans la Turquie Moderne (1968)
Öğrenci Ayaklanmaları (Student Uprisings, 1974)
Atatürk'e Saldırmanın Dayanılmaz Hafifliği (The Unbearable Lightness of Attacking Atatürk, 1993)
Siyaset Bilimi (Political Science, 1994)
Kemalizm, Laiklik ve Demokrasi (Kemalism, Secularism and Democracy, 1994)
Seçimsiz Demokrasi (Democracy Without Elections, 1995)
Bir Türkün Ölümü (The Death of a Turk, 1997)
Ben Demokrat Değilim (I Am Not a Democrat, 1999)

The title of the last book was a deliberate provocation. Kışlalı's thesis was this: without secularism and the Enlightenment, the ballot box alone is not democracy. If half of a society lives as subjects and the other half as citizens, the ballot paper merely records this inequality. In the 1990s this thesis drew harsh reactions from two sides: on one side, the liberals who said "the ballot box is everything" and whitewashed political Islam in the name of "democratic legitimacy"; on the other, the political Islamist press that targeted Kışlalı as a "secularist Jacobin".

Personal tragedies

Kışlalı's life was not made up of public struggles alone. In 1995 he lost his first wife, Nicole (Nilgün) Kışlalı, whom he had married in his Paris years, in a traffic accident. He himself was seriously injured in the same accident. From this marriage he had two daughters, Altınay and Dolunay. In 1997 he married Nilüfer Kışlalı, and their daughter Nilhan Nur was born. When he was killed, his youngest daughter had not yet even reached school age.

The Anatomy of a Murder

First, marking the target

In the spring of 1999, the newspaper Akit, citing one of Kışlalı's articles, published his photograph with a red cross drawn over it. This was not criticism; it was marking a target. The Turkey of the 1990s knew very well what a cross drawn over an intellectual's face meant. Because the same method had been used before for others.

Young comrades should keep this detail particularly in mind: political murders do not fall from the sky. First the language is prepared, then the target is marked, then the hitman comes. Today, when we see "lists", "exposure" campaigns and waves of lynching on social media, we have to remember this sequence.

The morning of 21 October 1999

On the morning of 21 October 1999, a bomb planted in Kışlalı's car, parked in front of his home in Ankara, exploded. Kışlalı was 60 years old. His funeral in Ankara was attended by tens of thousands. The city that had seen off Uğur Mumcu six years earlier was once again seeing off an intellectual killed by the same method. People could see the same hand striking the same target.

The case: A file called "Hope"

The Kışlalı murder was not tried on its own. It was merged into the same file as the murders of Muammer Aksoy, Bahriye Üçok and Uğur Mumcu. The official name of the case is the "Illegal Jerusalem Army / Tevhid-Selam Organisation Case". Among the public it is known, after the name of the operation that launched the investigation, as the "Umut (Hope) Case". The case was first heard at the State Security Court. When the State Security Courts were abolished, it passed to the Ankara 11th High Criminal Court. Three defendants were convicted of founding and leading the organisation, five of membership of it. The Constitutional Court later ruled that five defendants had been denied access to a lawyer in custody, opening the way to a retrial. According to an NTV report from 2020 (in Turkish), the proceedings were still ongoing at that time.

On the twentieth anniversary of the murder, the family's lawyer, Erdem Akyüz, wrote (in Turkish) that although 19 years had passed since the case was opened, the hoped-for clarity had not been achieved, and the relationships behind the murders had not been uncovered.

Let us be careful here. In this piece we will not give space to unverified claims, to rumours of the kind "this service did it, that organisation had it done". But saying the following is not a claim; it is a fact: in the murders of intellectuals in Turkey, the hitman is sometimes found, but the mind behind the trigger is almost never found. This is not a coincidence; it is a pattern. And patterns tell us something about the power relations that sustain them.

The Real Story: A Hundred-Year War Against the Light

To understand Kışlalı, we need to see the chain from the beginning. In this section we tell the short history of the struggle for Enlightenment in Turkey, through a class lens.

What is the Enlightenment, and whom does it serve?

Let us first clarify the concept. The Enlightenment was the intellectual weapon that the rising bourgeoisie of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe used against the feudal order and the church. Reason, science, experiment, citizenship, equality before the law, the separation of religion from affairs of state... These were not abstract principles. They were the programme of a class rising against the church's land, the nobility's privileges and the claim that royal right was "God-given".

Marx and Engels did not reject this legacy; they wanted to carry it through to the end. In their view, once the bourgeoisie came to power, it began to fear its own Enlightenment. Because reason could question not only the privilege of the church but also the privilege of capital. That is why, throughout history, the bourgeoisie stood one day with the Enlightenment and the next day with religion and reaction. Whichever suited it.

The main thesis of this piece follows from this: The consistent defenders of the Enlightenment, those who will carry it through to the end, are no longer the bourgeoisie but the working classes. Because those who most need reason, science and secularism are those whom others want to resign to their fate.

The last century of the Ottoman Empire: reform from above, silence from below

The roots of Enlightenment thought in Turkey go back to the nineteenth century, to the Tanzimat (1839). But there is an important difference from Europe here: in the Ottoman Empire there was no strong native bourgeoisie. The reforms were carried out not by a rising class but by bureaucrats and officers trying to save the state.

Namık Kemal's writings on "the homeland" and "freedom", Tevfik Fikret's poem "Tarih-i Kadim" (Ancient History), and the proclamation of the Constitution (1876 and 1908) are the turning points of this period. But all these movements were cut off from the broad masses of the people. The peasant lived inside the network of the madrasa and the religious order, without knowing the language of the Enlightenment. The 31 March Incident (1909), with its slogan "we want sharia", was the first great bloody bill for this gulf.

Let us note a lesson that reaches all the way to today: An Enlightenment carried out in spite of the people gives reaction the chance to win the people over.

The republican revolutions and their limits

After 1923, the Republic put the Enlightenment programme into practice through the power of the state:

3 March 1924: The Law on the Unification of Education unified schooling and closed the madrasas.
1925: The dervish lodges and shrines were closed.
1926: The Civil Code was adopted. Women were recognised as persons equal to men before the law. We told the hundred-year story of this code in The Class of Alimony.
1 November 1928: The alphabet reform.
1934: Women gained the right to vote and stand for Parliament.
1937: Secularism entered the Constitution.

These were great steps and cannot be belittled. But looked at through a class lens, two limits are immediately visible.

First, the revolutions did not touch the land question. In the village, the agha, the sheikh and the landowner stayed in place. Women were counted as equal under the Civil Code, but in the village they were still being married off for a bride price. The law changed; the relations of production did not. The material basis of reaction stood just as it had.

Second, the Enlightenment was imposed from above, and the same state also suppressed the Enlightenment's most consistent bearers, the socialists and workers' organisations. Nazım Hikmet was tried in 1938, imprisoned until 1950 and stripped of his citizenship in 1951. There was no right to strike or to form unions. In other words, while closing the madrasa with one hand, the Republic banned the most advanced form of reason, class consciousness, with the other.

Kubilay: the first great warning

On 23 December 1930 in Menemen, Mustafa Fehmi Kubilay, a reserve officer and teacher, was killed by a group that had risen up with a call for "sharia"; he was beheaded. Kubilay was a teacher. This detail is no coincidence. The first targets of the war against the Enlightenment have always been the school, the teacher and the book.

The Village Institutes: an attempt at Enlightenment from below, and its liquidation

The most brilliant Enlightenment experiment in the history of the Republic was the Village Institutes. In these schools, founded by the law adopted on 17 April 1940, village children studied, produced and taught at the same time. Under the leadership of İsmail Hakkı Tonguç and Hasan Ali Yücel, the child of the Anatolian peasant held the tools of Enlightenment in their own hands for the first time. The mandolin, theatre, world classics, agriculture, blacksmithing and literacy came together. In our piece on Ruhi Su, we described the place of Hasanoğlan in this story.

And this experiment was liquidated precisely because it was an Enlightenment from below. After 1946, with the transition to multi-party politics, landlords and reactionary circles targeted the institutes as "nests of communists". The right wing within the CHP itself began this liquidation, and the Democrat Party closed the institutes completely in 1954.

Here is the essence of this story: The state wanted Enlightenment, but it did not want the people's own Enlightenment. When the peasant's child began to think, to question, to question the landlord's rights, the Enlightenment was declared "dangerous".

1948: Sabahattin Ali and the purge of the DTCF

The same years were years in which intellectuals were targeted. In 1948, at Ankara University's Faculty of Language, History and Geography (DTCF), scholars such as Pertev Naili Boratav, Behice Boran and Niyazi Berkes were removed from the university on the grounds that they were "leftists".

And on 2 April 1948, Sabahattin Ali, the author of Kuyucaklı Yusuf (Yusuf of Kuyucak) and Kürk Mantolu Madonna (Madonna in a Fur Coat), was killed on the Bulgarian border. A writer who had lived his whole life under imprisonment, exile and prosecution was murdered on his way as he tried to leave the country.

The Cold War: "religion against communism"

After 1950 a new period began. Turkey joined NATO and became part of the US Cold War strategy. One important pillar of this strategy was to weave a religious "green belt" around the Soviet Union and to use religion as a barrier against the left.

In this period, "Associations for Combating Communism" were set up in Turkey. Religious orders and communities became the vote bank and street force of the right-wing parties. "Bloody Sunday" on 16 February 1969 in Istanbul, when workers and students protesting against the US Sixth Fleet were attacked with clubs and knives, was the street face of this alliance.

Here the class picture is very clear: reaction became a weapon that capital and imperialism used against the left. The propaganda of the "godless communist" was used to alienate the worker from his own union, his own strike, his own class.

The 1970s: the years when intellectuals were targeted one by one

The second half of the 1970s was one of the bloodiest periods in Turkey's history. In this period, fascist attacks, massacres and political murders cost thousands of lives. Let us recall some names that bear directly on the subject of this piece:

Bedrettin Cömert (11 July 1978): Art historian and translator at Hacettepe. Killed on his way to the university.
Abdi İpekçi (1 February 1979): Editor-in-chief of Milliyet. Killed by an ülkücü (far-right nationalist) hitman.
Cavit Orhan Tütengil (7 December 1979): Sociologist at Istanbul University. Killed at a bus stop.
Ümit Kaftancıoğlu (11 April 1980): TRT producer and writer, a people's writer from the Village Institutes tradition. Killed in front of his home.

In the same years, in Bahçelievler (1978), seven young TİP (Workers' Party of Turkey) students were murdered in their home. In Maraş (December 1978) and Çorum (1980), there were massacres targeting Alevi citizens. Maraş is the most painful example of how reaction, by stirring up sectarian hatred, got the poor to slaughter one another. And then this chaos was made the justification for 12 September.

12 September and the Turkish-Islamic synthesis: reaction becomes state ideology

12 September 1980 is the turning point of this story. As we described in detail in the 12 September Dossier, while crushing the left, the unions and the universities, the coup deliberately filled the vacated space with reaction.

The "Turkish-Islamic synthesis" was formulated around the Aydınlar Ocağı (Intellectuals' Hearth) and became the official ideology of the state.
With the 1982 Constitution, religious culture and ethics classes became compulsory.
İmam hatip schools and Quran courses multiplied rapidly.
The scholars expelled from the university under decree No. 1402 were replaced by cadres loyal to the regime.
Religious orders and communities became partners in the accumulation of capital in the "liberal" economy of the 1980s.

Here we need to see the class relationship clearly. The economic programme of 12 September was the 24 January decisions: holding down wages, banning strikes, export-led capital accumulation. To implement this programme, the worker had to be unorganised, silent and resigned to his fate. Religion was the cheapest tool for this resignation. The Turkish-Islamic synthesis was the ideological insurance of the 24 January decisions.

A large part of the answer to give young people who ask how political Islam came to power lies here. Political Islam walked down the road that 12 September opened. We discussed this in detail in Why Do Workers Vote for the Right? as well.

The 1990s: bombs and bullets

By the 1990s, the reaction that 12 September had nourished was now targeting intellectuals directly. The chronology of this period reads like a book of mourning:

Date	Whom we lost	What they defended
31 January 1990	Muammer Aksoy	Jurist, president of the Turkish Law Association, constitutional defender of secularism
7 March 1990	Çetin Emeç	Journalist, Hürriyet columnist
4 September 1990	Turan Dursun	Former mufti, critic of religion, author of the "Din Bu" (This Is Religion) books
6 October 1990	Bahriye Üçok	Professor of theology, defender of women's rights; killed by a parcel bomb sent to her
24 January 1993	Uğur Mumcu	Investigative journalist; killed by a bomb planted in his car
2 July 1993	Sivas, the Madımak Hotel	33 intellectuals, artists and young people attending the Pir Sultan Abdal Festival, and 2 hotel workers, burned to death
11 January 1995	Onat Kutlar	Poet, writer, one of the founders of the Sinematek; died of injuries from a bomb that exploded in a café in Istanbul
21 October 1999	Ahmet Taner Kışlalı	Political scientist, defender of secularism and the Enlightenment; killed by a bomb planted in his car

Look at the names in this table. A jurist, a theologian, a former mufti, a journalist, a film-maker, a political scientist, and the bards and children at a people's festival. What do they have in common? All of them were voices of reason, of questioning, of science or of popular culture. That is why they were targeted.

Sivas must be remembered in particular. As we described in our piece on the Sivas massacre, the hotel was besieged for hours and set on fire, and the state did not intervene. The case was dropped in 2012 under the statute of limitations. The slogans of the crowd gathered in front of the hotel on the day of the massacre were the same as the slogans of those who killed Kubilay. Sixty-three years had passed, but the ambush was still in place.

Kışlalı's killing was one of the last links in this chain. Nor did the chain end there. Necip Hablemitoğlu was killed in 2002, Hrant Dink in 2007. In 2015, young people and working people calling for peace were massacred in Suruç and at Ankara Station on 10 October. The targets widened, but the pattern did not change: first the targeting, then the attack, then a case that remains in the dark.

A Table: What Reaction Says, and the Enlightenment's Answer

Let us put the two sides of this hundred-year war side by side:

What reaction says	The Enlightenment's answer
Poverty is fate, a test to be endured with patience	Poverty is the result of a relation of production; it can be changed
A woman's place is the home; she is subordinate to the man	Women and men are equal before the law and in life
Science must stop at the boundary of faith	Science accepts no boundary to questioning
The school raises good servants of God	The school raises thinking citizens
Society is made up of religious communities and sects	Society is made up of classes; sect is a curtain drawn over class
Obedience is a virtue	Organising and claiming one's rights are virtues
The intellectual is a stranger to the people	The intellectual is valuable to the extent that he speaks for the people's reason

The last row of this table matters to us. Because reaction has always tried to brand intellectuals as "elites cut off from the people". Unfortunately, some representatives of the tradition of Enlightenment from above also laid the ground for this accusation.

The Limits of the Kemalist Enlightenment: An Honest Reckoning

To remember Kışlalı without talking about the limits of the tradition he belonged to would be unfair both to him and to ourselves.

The Kemalist conception of the Enlightenment had three fundamental weaknesses.

First, its subject was the state, not the people. The Enlightenment was conceived as something to be brought from above, by the bureaucracy and the army. The people were seen as an object to be enlightened. This approach blocked the people from enlightening themselves through their own organisations and their own experience. The fate of the Village Institutes is the proof.

Second, it did not see the class question. The discourse of a "classless, privilege-free, fused mass" made the classes that actually existed invisible. Yet the strength of reaction fed on the helplessness produced by poverty, the land regime and exploitation. Waging only an ideological struggle against reaction, without touching this material basis, was like pruning a tree's leaves while watering its roots.

Third, at critical moments it compromised with reaction. At the end of the 1940s, religion classes returned to the schools and the first imam hatip courses were opened. 12 September, declaring itself "Atatürkist", made the Turkish-Islamic synthesis the ideology of the state. In other words, the discourse of "Atatürkism" could also serve as a curtain for reaction's capture of the state.

Kışlalı saw some of these contradictions. The anger in his books Seçimsiz Demokrasi and Ben Demokrat Değilim was directed at how right-wing governments and liberals were eroding secularism. But he too looked for the solution not in the people's own organisation but in loyalty to the founding principles of the Republic.

This is where our difference begins. We see the Enlightenment not as a legacy to be preserved as a "founding principle", but as a living tool that working people need for their own emancipation. This difference matters not in order to belittle Kışlalı, but in order to go forward from where he left off.

Three Questions: Looking at the Struggle for Enlightenment Through the Eyes of the Class

As Knowledge Commons, let us ask here the three questions we ask about every issue.

In whose hands? Today, in whose hands are education, the media and the production of knowledge? Schools are increasingly being opened up to religious community foundations and private capital. As we described in the Education Dossier, education is ceasing to be a right and becoming a market and a field of ideological investment. Knowledge, meanwhile, is filtered through the algorithms of giant technology companies, according to their commercial interests.

Under whose control? The budget of the Diyanet (the Directorate of Religious Affairs) has overtaken that of many ministries. The removal of the theory of evolution from the curriculum, the introduction of "spiritual counsellors" into schools and the hollowing out in practice of the principle of secularism show who controls the Enlightenment. At the same time, marking an intellectual as a target on social media is far easier and faster than a newspaper's red cross in 1999.

For whose benefit? This is the most important question. Whom does the spread of reaction benefit? A working class that is resigned to its fate, does not join a union, regards claiming its rights as "rebellion" and votes along the ties of sect and religious community benefits capital most of all. Cheap labour, unorganised labour, silent labour. As we wrote in our piece on the start of the school year, the bell does not ring the same for everyone. Nor does reaction harm everyone equally: it leaves in the dark, above all, the child of the poor neighbourhood, the girl, the worker's child.

Why Is Kışlalı's Name on the Streets?

After Kışlalı was killed, a neighbourhood in Çankaya, Ankara, was named after him. In many cities, streets, parks, schools and cultural centres bear his name. In the same way, the names of Uğur Mumcu, Bahriye Üçok and Muammer Aksoy live on in the map of the cities.

What does this mean? The perpetrators' aim was not only to kill a person but to silence an idea and frighten others. With these street names, the people and the local governments they elected said: "You wanted to silence him; we will speak his name every day."

But let us add a warning too. A street name is the easiest form of remembrance. Hanging a sign is far easier than defending what the man on that sign defended. If, in a neighbourhood bearing Kışlalı's name, the school garden has been handed over to a religious community's dormitory, the women's shelter has been closed and children are being sent to work instead of to lessons, that sign is not a commemoration but an irony. We have to keep remembrance alive not on the sign but in life.

Today: The Ambush Has Changed, the Target Has Not

Young comrades, your generation did not live through the bombs of the 1990s. But you live in a period in which the ambush has changed its form.

Today, there is no need for a newspaper headline to mark an intellectual as a target. A social media campaign, an "exposure" list, a troll army is enough.
Today, the war on the Enlightenment is waged not only with hitmen but with curricula, budgets, tenders and foundation protocols.
Today, the attack on scientific thinking comes not only from religious reaction but also from conspiracy theories, "alternative facts" and the technology monopolies that turn knowledge into a commodity.
Today, the erosion of secularism advances not through an explosion one morning but through spaces that narrow a little more every year.

And today, as in the 1990s, those who defend the Enlightenment often feel alone. Breaking this isolation is the task of our generation.

Concrete Tasks

To remember is to do something. Here are concrete suggestions for young comrades to keep alive the memory of Kışlalı and of those we lost in the same chain:

Read, and get others reading. Read Kışlalı's Siyaset Bilimi, Sabahattin Ali, Turan Dursun, Uğur Mumcu, and what has been written on the Village Institutes. Set up a reading group. Reading a book alone is knowledge; reading it together is organising.
Defend the Enlightenment in your own school. Organise clubs, seminars and science festivals to discuss the theory of evolution that has been removed from the curriculum, scientific thinking and equality between women and men.
Build a solidarity network against targeting. When a teacher, journalist, academic or artist is marked as a target on social media, they must not be left alone. Solidarity must be a reflex.
Follow the cases. Follow the files, hearing dates and statute-of-limitations threats in the cases of murdered intellectuals. Demanding a reckoning begins with not forgetting.
Keep the street names alive. On anniversaries, hold small events in the streets or parks bearing the names of Kışlalı, Mumcu and Üçok that tell what that person defended. Turn the sign into a story.
Tie the Enlightenment to the class. Do not separate the defence of secularism and science from the struggle for rights in the workplace and from union organising. The first enlightening words to a worker whom others want to resign to his fate are: "This is not your fate; it is a relation, and relations change."
Hold local governments to account. Ask the municipality of the neighbourhood that bears Kışlalı's name: how much do you spend on our schools, libraries and cultural centres? How many protocols have you signed with religious community foundations?

Darkness Is Not Permanent

Dear Young Comrades,

Looking at this chain, which runs from Kubilay to Kışlalı and from Sabahattin Ali to Sivas, it is easy to fall into pessimism. For a hundred years an ambush has been laid for the light, and those who lay it usually go unpunished.

But let us also read history from its other side. Despite these ambushes, the Civil Code has turned one hundred. The Village Institutes were closed, but the teachers, writers and artists who came out of them enlightened a generation. Sabahattin Ali was killed, but Madonna in a Fur Coat is today one of the most widely read novels in this country. Hundreds of thousands attended Uğur Mumcu's funeral. Kışlalı's name lives on today in a neighbourhood and in dozens of streets. Darkness has never been able to put out the light completely.

Because the Enlightenment is the need not of one person but of a whole people. You can kill a person, but you cannot kill a people's need to think. When this need joins with working people's need for their own emancipation, no ambush can stop it.

We remember Ahmet Taner Kışlalı with respect on the twenty-seventh anniversary of his being torn from us. May his memory, and the memory of everyone we have lost on this road, light our way.

Against the darkness, the light always grows in the hands of the class itself.

Sources

Ahmet Taner Kışlalı and the trial

Related pieces from Knowledge Commons

This piece is published by Knowledge Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. You may share, reproduce and build on it, citing the source.

Topics:Law, State and Politics Philosophy, Science and Theory Culture, Art and Memory

Tags:#memorial #intellectuals #secularism #history #12september #repression #class #turkey