Hilmi Yavuz, Türkiye’nin Zihin Tarihi, Istanbul: Timaş Yayınları:, 2009, 216 p.

Hilmi Yavuz has appeared before the readers with a brand new work soon after his previous book titles as The History of Islam’s Mind: The History of Turkey’s Mind -An Embracing Discourse on Turkish Culture-.

In his work The History of Islam’s Mind, Yavuz puts his views forward boldly on various issues such as philosophy, Islamic theology, politics and society which have been debated for centuries and even today while at the same  time he offers not only challenging but also quite unfamiliar proposals on several matters concerning the whole Islamic world and Muslim society. Hilmi Yavuz comes to the conclusion that current events have no daily activity plans and on the contrary they take their places in our minds as the outcomes of an ancient process and that so long as the arguments against their claims are reasonable and logical, only then can these issues be reopened to discussion. As a matter of fact, this assertion can be taken as an open-ended challenge as well.

Soon after the release of The History of Islam’s Mind, Hilmi Yavuz published The History of Turkey’s Mind. Within the canon of this first work with a larger framework compromising the context of a structure, in the second work the topics that are once again related to the mental history of Turkey, are built upon private therefore in-depth foundations to enable a discussion atmosphere. At hits point the privacy we have mentioned does not mean a restriction on the author’s world of idea. What we try to mean is that the Ottoman which is an indispensable part of the wide fan he exhibited in his previous work and the cultural structure it shaped have been discussed in this work. That is because if there really exist and Islamic world and a Muslim community, it is impossible to keep Ottomans apart from any events to take place in this atmosphere.

The History of Turkey’s Mind consists of three parts; “The History of Ottomans’ Mind”, “Cultural Identity” and “Democracy”. The first part “The History of Ottomans’ Mind” deals  with issues many modern intellectuals insist on denying even today and even more impose their own unjust perceptions world and therefore turn them into a jigsaw puzzle and this work presents a collection of perfectible formulas with at least describe a solution. These matters that were analyzed occasionally in the past but soon after reaching a certain maturity, were victimized to an orientalist point of view are presented to the attention by Hilmi Yavuz with the privileges of an authentic intellectual. Hilmi Yavuz who placed himself away from orientalist captivity and always advocated the battle in favor of facts, accepted in advance to be the addressee in any type of  evaluations adhered to a constructive approach eliminating the traditional and cultural gaps in between thus he not only described the malady but also presented a cure. The writer expresses this situation such: “Unfortunately the writing on the embracing aesthetical and intellectual heritage of Ottomans is most of the times comprised of repetitive, merely descriptive statements. But actually it needs to be rebuilt in a systematic, conceptual and analytic concept. If that is not achieved, it is not going to be possible for us to attribute the greatness of Ottoman culture not to our intuitional perception but to mental perception.

Hilmi Yavuz who starts his words, “The history of mind is in one sense the history of civilization as well”, emphasizes in particular that the history of Ottoman mind cannot be simply based upon official archives. According to Yavuz, the history of Ottoman mind will be able to reach its original figure after analyzing official archives and also artistic and particularly literary works that have been the outcomes of hundreds of years of work and always have been in touch with live itself. Discussion topics such as Ottoman literature, music, architecture, attitude towards death, approach towards nature, enlightenment, Tanzimat (Reforms) within the own conditions of Ottomans and the world thus he seeks to promote enlightening Ottoman civilization and this its history of mind.

The second part of the work is related to “Turkish Culture”. Hilmi Yavuz who claims that Turkish intellectual life has long been shaped within the framework of “modern civilization level” which can be considered as “a variant of positivist thought” separates one of the biggest problems of Republic ideology; the ‘religious’ one from the ‘national’ one in line with positivist thought. Emphasizing the fact that on “Identity” Turkey goes through a conceptual chaos Hilmi Yavuz states that attempting to separate particularly the ‘religious’ one from the ‘national’ is the outcome of a ‘constraining’ and ‘artificial’ venture. Additionally Hilmi Yavuz puts forward a vital fact concerning identity: In our society identity search or description and classification has always been attempted to be achieved within the measures set by western perception and understanding. In almost every step this point of view however has been regarded as a confrontation between Western and Ottoman aspects: “What comes to mind from Western point of view is the opposite of Ottoman ethos or in other words in the field of culture  Westernism has been taken as understanding the opposite of anything implying Ottomanism. To put this in different terms, Westernism has defined in old Turkish as “mefhum-u muhalif” (opposite perception).

The third and final part of the work is titled as “Democracy”. It is the shortest part of the work and consists of three articles namely “Civil Society or Ideological Tool of State?”, “For the Ones Longing for Single-Party regimes” and “Turkish Jacobinism”. Hilmi Yavuz, in his article based on Althusser, claims that unlike the general view, official ideology does not only prevail in ‘public space’ exact task as the ‘ideological tool of the state’: “The foundations in Turkey that consider themselves as ‘civil society’ organizations are actually not operating as civil society organizations regardless of the fact that they exist not in public space but in private spaces but they operate as the ideological tools of the Stat. That is exactly how they operate, because on an ideological scale they contribute to dominating a certain ‘hegemony’ approach.” Following this detection it is possible to find such a conclusion from Hilmi Yavuz’s ideas: Officially, starting from Tanzimat, in the world of the ones who view Westernizing as a necessity to ignore anything from the past and a rejection pre-acceptance trying to become Westernized, Westernizing cannot be meaningful. It only makes sense within the wheels of a structure that has internalized democracy culture.

To summarize: In this particular work Hilmi Yavuz appears before his readers not as an intellectual but, thanks to the point of view fitting to his enlightened identity, he stands with the privilege of personally watching the transformation his society went through from Ottoman era till the Republic. He exhibits an appreciation model which finds the way to make society a prosperous and self-confident one by not charging it with rootlessness, just like in hüdâ-yı nâbit (a self-produced plant), but through connecting it to a bridge with the past. Although 'organic intellectuals' may dislike the steps that will be taken thanks to this bridge between past and today, it is going to enable us to realize what it means to live on this land. Society lived within itself and also gave life, now the time has come, as seen in Hilmi Yavuz model, for the intellectual who will structure the theory of this life which was actualized in practice. “That is because for the intellectual who, by accusing or denying, chose the easiest way, to reach his intellectual identity with his intelligence is an absolute necessity for the future of not only the intellectual but society as well.

Erdoğan Erbay, Atatürk University, Erzurum.