Erdogan’s Turkey: The intellectual underclass is put at the top of the hierarchy

 

Burak Bekdil, one of the bravest of Turkish journalists, deplores the damage done by Erdogan to academic achievement in the country he despotically rules. He recently offered a series of examples – each more absurd or outrageous than the next — of the level of “thought” recently exhibited by devout Muslim “scholars” and “professors,” the kind now flourishing under the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan:

In 2015, Islamic scholar Nureddin Yıldız argued that “working women paved the way for prostitution.” Associate professor Teyfur Erdoğdu told state broadcaster TRT that he regularly meets with Allah and the Prophet Muhammad in his dreams. Vural Bulut, a scholar at the Çanakkale 18 Mart University and head of its media center, called Erdoğan’s opponents “sons of bitches.” Another pro-government academic, Dr. Yavuz Örnek from Istanbul University’s Marine Sciences Faculty, claimed that technology was more advanced in the time of the Prophet Noah than it is today. Hosted by TRT, Örnek said Noah had talked to his son on a mobile phone to convince him to come aboard his ark, and that the ark itself was made of steel and resistant to waves as high as 400 meters. He added that Noah’s ark ran on nuclear power.

In April 2018, Necdet Budak, president of Aegean University in Izmir, ordered his academic staff to line up by the road to greet Erdoğan, who wanted to visit the campus. Also in 2018, Ahmet Ağırakça, president of Artuklu University in the southeastern province of Mardin, proposed that university presidents wear the turban of an Islamic sheik. In another speech, he declared himself “President Erdoğan’s representative in Mardin.”

In November 2018, Professor Ibrahim Emiroğlu, head of the research center at the 9 Eylül University in Izmir and dean of the Faculty of Aviation and Space, told a conference that menstruation was an illness that “must be treated” and recommended that 15-year-old girls be married off. He advised all women to wear the hijab, and claimed the “greatest threat [to society] is secularism.”

In addition to all that academic insanity, Erdoğan’s leadership has prompted university professors to declare that:

• “Universities are houses of prostitution as they bring female and male students together.”

For pious Muslims, there should be no mixing of the sexes in universities. The girls are, even without meaning to be, too seductive, the young men unable to control themselves. Neither the one nor the other can help themselves. Co-education turns colleges into houses of ill-repute.

• “In this country I trust the insight of ignorant people.”

The intellectual underclass is put at the top of the hierarchy, while intellectuals are looked on with suspicion and disdain. Those people who think too much, and question too much, are the enemies of Islam; they are too willing to question authority; they do not sufficiently respect the duty to remain mentally submissive to the texts and teachings of Islam. And fulfilling that duty is the main business of living. Up with ignorance! Down with knowledge!

• “Shakespeare was a crypto Muslim; hence his success.”

Nonsense. In Othello the hero is a Moor who is clearly a Christian convert; he fights for Christian Venice against the Muslims, as indicated by his speech describing his exploits: “Say, that in Aleppo once/Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state/I took by the throat the circumcised dog/And smote him thus.” No crpto-Muslim could have written that.

• “Shaking an unknown woman’s hand is more horrible than holding fire.”

That hand-shaking could lead to much worse: the unquenchable desires of the flesh, on either side, but especially felt by men, who simply can’t help themselves. Islam in its wisdom insists on suppressing contact – such as shaking an unknown woman’s hand –that might inflame passions.

• “Women who exhibit cleavage in dress deserve to be raped.”

Cleavage in dress, again, is intolerably seductive; women must cover up in shapeless, preferably black garments, and ideally, with not a hint of skin showing beyond the face and hands. Otherwise, a woman is simply asking for it, and has only herself ito blame if a man viewing that cleavage – in some women surgically enlared, it might be called silicon valley – is stirred to take her appearance as an invitation to something more.

The same scientific institution that awarded a scholarship to professor Sancar in the 1970s (TÜBİTAK) sponsored and exhibited in 2016 a study on the “prophecy of Muslim saints who can be seen in more than one place at the same time.”

In the pre-Erdogan era of the 1970s, when Aziz Sancar attended Tubitak medical school, the sanity of the secular still prevailed. Followers of Ataturk, backed up by the military, still ruled. By 2016 the lunatics had apparently turned the place into their very own asylum. One example of the institution’s new bent was its sponsoring and exhibiting a “study” on “the prophecy of Muslim saints who can be seen in more than one place at the same time.” Were a younger version of Aziz Sancar now a student at Tubitak, how would he fare in such an absurd environment?

The effect on Turkish academics of the Islamist pill the Turks have been voluntarily swallowing since 2002 is destructive. Expect worse to come.

There is nonsense in all cultures, but it strikes Burak Bekdil, as it undoubtedly strikes all sane people, that there is much more of this stuff in Islamic lands. For Islam itself is full of the supernatural, including the jinn, whom Muslims are taught to believe exist, And Islam stunts mental growth; it encourages the habit of mental submission. A good Muslim does not question anything, no matter how scientifically implausible, if it is in the Qur’an, or mentioned by Muhammad in the hadith. Skepticism is a dangerous mental condition, for if Muslims begin to exhibit a skeptical and questioning cast of mind, the fear is that they will begin to question Islam itself, and that will never do. The favored method of instruction is not to have students question and discuss, but to have students accept whatever they are force-fed by the teacher.

Madrasas are Islamic religious schools where young Muslims learn to memorize, and recite, the Qur’an. Those who manage to memorize the whole incondite Qur’an, with all of its bizarreries and illogicalities, and supernatural beings (the jinn), are celebrated; they are given the title “hafiz” and treated as if they were scholars or professors, when all they have done is memorize a tedious document. It’s as if we were to celebrate as a great mathematician someone who had done nothing more than memorize Pi to the hundredth place. A feat, a parlor trick , but entirely devoid of intellectual prowess. How many thousands of hours have students wasted memorizing part, or all, of the Qur’an? What has such an empty feat done to their mental faculties?

Still worse is the fact that memorization-and-recital is not confined to madrasas, but is now the preferred method of instruction in “secular” schools: read, repeat back, memorize. Do not question authority. Do not be a skeptic. For if you were to start questioning in one area, you might end up questioning aspects of Islam, and that will never do.

Compare Muslim religious education with that which Jews undergo in Talmud schools. Young Jews learn about the possible meanings of texts, the questions raised and discussed by venerable rabbis about those texts. They are encouraged to engage in such questioning themselves What does this phrase, sentence, paragraph, mean? What could it, should it, ought it to mean? There is a constant effort to discuss, debate, challenge, disagree – the exact opposite of the method used in the madrasas. Perhaps that mental exercise helps explain why Jews, who make up .02% of the world’s population, have received more than 20% of Nobel Prizes.

When tens of thousands of professors and teachers are discharged and barred from ever teaching again in Turkey, when their replacements are hired not on the basis of their knowledge or mental acuity or professional achievement, but purely according to their loyalty to the despotic regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, when 567 institutions of higher learning are shut down for good, when more than a thousand Imam Hatip schools are built by the state, when pedagogy reverts from the Western-style education that Ataturk and his epigones promoted, to the rote-memorization method of instruction that is no longer confined to madrasas, but now favored in the regular –i.e, non-religious — state schools as well, little wonder that Turkey’s academic environment has become intolerable to so many who seek to study and work broad. An educational system that encourages memorization, discourages free and skeptical inquiry, demands intellectual conformity, has careers decided on the basis of nepotism, and “who-you-know,”and the perceived depth of your loyalty to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, naturally spurs intelligent Turks of intellectual bent to attempt to both study, and pursue an academic career, abroad.

In 2019, 330,000 Turks left the country to seek study and work abroad – a veritable brain drain of those who cannot stomach the uncertainty, the favoritism, the religious revival, of Turkey under Erdogan today. Many of them are young people. Here, from Arab News, are a few paragraphs on their plight as described by one young academic, Dr. Ahmed Ozturk:

Dr. Ahmet Erdi Ozturk, lecturer at London Metropolitan University, has lived abroad for nine years. He even married and had a child, miles away from his home country and parents. He always maintains that “it is emotionally very hard to be a member of the diaspora.”

When asked, however, whether he would be willing to return to Turkey to an academic post with a higher wage, he politely declines, saying, “There is no stability and predictability even in the academic sphere, let alone in politics.”

Recently, several foreign academics who were called from abroad to teach at Sehir University in Istanbul found themselves jobless and hopeless after the university, founded by Turkey’s former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, was shut down by an overnight presidential decree. The decree followed a longtime dispute between Davutoglu and his ex-ally President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after the former founded his own breakaway Future Party.

An expert on Turkish politics as well as diaspora studies, Ozturk said that people were becoming increasingly disappointed with the widespread nepotism in the country, especially after the economic deterioration.

“Democracy is something that influences daily life,” Ozturk told Arab News. “Young citizens are losing their hopes of finding a job based on their merits if they don’t know any high-ranking people. Many people feel that even their basic freedoms are being taken away from them.”

Burak Bekdil has provided a florilegium of quotes showing the descent into absurdity of Turkish “professors” and universities. He has shown how nepotism and “who-you-know” in the hiring and promotion of faculty demoralizes the deserving; Erdogan’s loyalists fill the administrative positions, and many of the teaching positions, too; this naturally pushes many of the talented abroad. Erdogan’s malevolence is boundless; tens of thousands of teachers and professors lost their jobs overnight, because Erdogan “suspected” that they might be either secularists or Gulenists, and of having been behind the attempted coup of July 15, 2016. He has never produced any evidence to justify these mass firings. He also closed down at least two universities, leaving their faculties unemployed, simply because those universities had some connection with Ahmet Davutoglu, once his supporter and now his political rival.

Though Burak Bekdil doesn’t say it, because he still lives in Turkey and cannot say all that he would wish on the matter of faith, we should remind ourselves that Islam is even more to be blamed than Erdogan’s vindictiveness for the academic malaise in Turkey. Let’s sum up that faith’s effect on intellectual life in Turkey one more time: Islam encourages the habit of mental submission, insists on the unquestioning acceptance of the Qur’an, no matter how puzzling, illogical or incondite its contents may be, discourages free and skeptical inquiry, and promotes reliance on rote learning. These developments are what characterize the re-islamised schools and universities of Turkey today. It’s a bleak picture, with no end in sight. Ataturk would not be pleased.