The Margins of Academia or Challenging the Official Ideology

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter highlights two intellectuals, both “ethnic Turks,” who have challenged Turkey’s huge scientific machines. Their scholarship demolished the credibility of the official, extremely rigid, and radically nationalist “social sciences” as they are practiced, in the past and currently in Turkish universities and research centers. The impact of their work and their intellectual audacity gave birth to new intellectual traditions in Turkey and shook international Turcology and “Turkish studies,” which constitute an important branch of Middle Eastern Studies.İsmail Besṃikçi earned a PhD in Sociology and seemed poised to obtain a position in the Turkish academic establishment. Through a series of sociological-ethnographic volumes published at the turn of the 1970s, however, he chose to show the centrality of the Kurdish issue in the very fabric of modern Turkey. In the second half of the 1970s, after he was fired from his university and spent several years in prison, he directly attacked the Kemalist academic establishment. Besṃikçi insisted that Kemalist power, far from being the initiator of modernity in Turkey, preserved, if not reinforced, pre- or profoundly anti-modern institutions, such as tribal leadership and religious brotherhoods, at least in the Kurdish region.The second intellectual, Taner Akçam, one of the main figures of the radical left in Turkey of the 1970s, was obliged to flee the country. One of his largely unknown first books, published in 1992, was not on the Armenian issue, but on torture and cruelty in the national history. That same year, he also published a path-breaking book on the Armenian issue. Akçam had very few archival resources at his disposal, but he was able to see the deeper sense of what scholars shyly called the “Armenian question”: questioning “1915” meant questioning the very foundation of Turkey, as a state, but also as a country and a society, with all her components, including the Kurdish one, and all her political trends, including the liberal and left-wing ones. Scholars working on contemporary Tukey had to establish the facts, describe what happened in 1915 by taking their distance from official history-writing, and, more importantly, understand how such an act could take place and how such a massive taboo on the genocide could have been institutionalized.