Ottomanism and Fethullah Gülen : From Utopia to Reality

Ottomanism and Fethullah Gülen : From Utopia to Reality

I have a dream, a dream which I share with Fethullah Gülen. Not a religious dream, but a political and cultural one, the resurrection of the Ottoman Empire. This is because I am a Greek and because he is a Turk. We are talking here of a Greek-Turkish affair which leaves outside of the game the West, as well as the East and implicates only the Intermediate Region. Today, this dream is shared by the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Their minister of Foreign Affairs, Ahmet Davutoğlu was a student at Bosphorus University in Istanbul, at the time I was teaching there, spreading my dream of a Turkish-Greek Confederation that would revive the Ottoman Empire. Davutoğlu was influenced by my teaching and today he is spreading the dream all over the area, in Anatolia and the Balkans.

Professor Marcia Hermansen who studied the Gülen Movement, called also the Hizmet (i.e. the Service), wrote in 2007, the following: «Sites generally visited by Hizmet's guests are situated on Istanbul's Asian side, in particular Çamlica Hill. It is unlikely that many of the visitors will pause to inquire about the significance of Çamlica in the history and historical memory of the Gülen movement. In addition to the Turkish perception that the Asian side represents religiosity and tradition, specific associations pervade Çamlica hill. It played a role in Ottoman times as a place of repose and even today the restaurant at the top of Büyük Çamlica takes the form of a reconstructed chalet [köşk] in the Ottoman style complete with poetry inscribed in the Osmanli script adorning the walls. Çamlica is also near Hizmet institutions including Coskun school and the «Academy», which is the intellectual center of the movement. Here Gülen's corpus of lectures and writings as well as other material related to the movement are translated and edited for distribution in multiple languages around the world… Intellectual abis are drawn from the early students of Gülen» (Marcia Hermansen, «The Cultivation of Memory in the Gülen Community», London, paper read in the House of Lords, 26 October 2007, p. 67-68).

Without ever meeting Gülen, 6 years younger than myself, or even knowing his existence in the 1970s, our paths met on Çamlica hill! Here is the mystery of God's actions to have put, side by side, a Greek Orthodox and a Turkish Sunni around a common dream, the dream of Çamlica.

To be more specific: In 1977, i.e. 32 years ago, I placed on the front page of my third book entitled Greece and the Foreigners, the following dedication: «For Çamlica». As the book was in Greek and published in Athens, no one understood what Çamlica meant and I kept the word secret. People thought I dedicated my book to a woman called Çamlica! At the same time, many of my published poems referred to mysterious Çamlica.

One year later, in 1978, at the bottom of the illustrated cover of my fourth book, entitled A Comparative History of Greece and Turkey in the 20th Century, showing the first bridge, crossing the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia, I wrote this sentence «The road to Çamlica», without any explanation. As this book also was in Greek and published in Athens, no one understood again who this mysterious Çamlica was and I continued to keep the word secret.

At the beginning of the 1970s, i.e. nearly 40 years ago, I had climbed up Çamlica hill, on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, symbol of love in the Ottoman tradition. At the top, on the tomb of a Sufi saint was a plain column. Tradition said that if you threw a coin at it- and there was no magnet in the column- and the coin stuck, then your wish would become true. So, I threw a coin and it stuck and my wish was: «Lets have one day -even in the remotest of times- a Turkish-Greek Confederation on both sides of the Aegean Sea that would revive the Ottoman Empire, and when this happens, let my bones be buried near the tomb of the Sufi saint.

As soon as my fourth book was published, Nezih Demirkent, publisher of the nationwide Turkish newspaper Hürriyet, invited me to Istanbul in order to present it to the Turkish press and having translated by him it into Turkish. On this occasion he published, on September 2, 1978, a long article of mine with the provocative title I had personally chosen, on the newspaper first page, saying: «The dream of Çamlica» (Çamlica hayali).

Three years later, while teaching to the then 22 years of age student and presently Turkish minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoğlu, at the Bosphorus University, the details of my Çamlica dream, Ali Sirmen, the well known journalist of the Cumhuriyet newspaper said he wanted me to meetr with Çelik Gülersoy, who was in charge of the preservation of historical sites in Istanbul and was an enthusiastic supporter of my ideas. When we met, Gülersoy said: When I read your famous article on the dream of Çamlica, in Hürriyet, I decided to preserve the top of the hill from constructions. I put up an Ottoman style köşk and took away the central TV and other antennas serving Istanbul, hoping than one day your project of turning Çamlica into the Washington DC of the Turkish-Greek Confederation, could become true. Finally, in 1996, a book of mine was published in Turkish, on the Ottoman Empire, under the curious title, Turkish-Greek Empire.

Ehsan Masood wrote an article in Prospect Magazine, on the 26th July 2008 (issue 148), under the title «A modern Ottoman», referring to Gülen. On October 31, 2007 the Turkish press reported that Gülen had changed the map that was hanging in his room. True, for years, Gülen had hang a map of the Ottoman Empire in his room with the sentence: «You are always in my dreams». But later, he replaced it with a world map and even later he replaced this second map with a third planetarian map taken from outer space. This he did in order to make it clear that the very definition of the Ecumenical Empire that had been the Ottoman Empire is planetarian and ideal, has no boundaries. Ottomanism is by definition planetarian.

One basic element of ottomanism was the institution of Bektashism-Alevism as the backbone of the Ottoman dynasty. Even though Gülen is a sunni he defends the Alevis. In his book Advocate of Dialogue (2000, p.69), he says that the Alevi temples (cemevleri) must be protected and supported. In Ottoman times all temples, Christian, Jewish or Muslim were built side by side and coexisted in peace. He even insisted that Alevi temples should be erected near mosques. He added that the Alevi problem was so serious that if full liberty was not given to them, Turkey was in danger of being dismantled.

The president of the Alevi Cem Foundation, Dr. Izzettin Doğan, in an interview given to the Turkish newspaper Vatan, in 2008, said: «I know Fethullah Gülen. He is a person that I respect. I see him as a thinker and a philosopher who is interested in islamic issues. We have met several times and he has visited me". Another Turkish newspaper, Zaman, wrote on June 19, 2008, that «Gülen has the courage to lend open support to Alevis. Since 1995 he has been an avid advocate of cemevis [the Alevi temples]»

The best way for Canadians to understand what is Ottomanism, would be to compare it to Canadian federalism. With the rise of secularism in the 19th century, people were divided among themselves, hatred of one people against the other brought ethnic cleansing and racism, religion was separated from civil society creating a schizophrenic individual in which the body was separated from the soul. Because a body cannot survive without a soul, religion was replaced by an ideology called nationalism. Borders were drawn everywhere. The multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural, multilingual Ottoman Empire was cut into pieces, i.e. was balkanized and middle-easternized. In present day Turkey, the nationalists which destroyed the Ottoman Empire are called kemalists and secularists, the federalists which try to recreate it in the form of a confederation are called Fethullahcillar.

Ottomanism is an ideology of the second half of the 19th century based on the nostalgia of an embellished past, in the time of the full decline of the Ottoman Empire. It was not initiated by the Turkish element who was living in its overwhelming majority as peasants in the countryside, but mostly by the Greek Christian urban Ottoman elite, called the Phanariots. In Canada, the equivalents of the Phanariots were the French Canadian elite of Montreal exemplified by Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

The Phanariots, even though Christians were monarchists, i.e. supporters of the Sultan and the Ottoman system of government in which they played a leading role at the top of the Ottoman establishment. This nostalgia was based on the utopia of an ecumenical harmonious and tolerant ottoman society, of a lost Paradise destroyed by Western nationalism but which could come back as long as the Russian descent in the Mediterranean could be stopped.

The Ottomanists were opposed to the wars of Independence in the Balkans and the Middle East supported by the West, knowing well that each of these wars created by opposition a counter war of Independence. Thus the Greek War of Independence of 1821, created a century later, in 1919, the Turkish war of Independence which gave the last blow to the Ottoman Empire.

Today, Turkey lives in a state of civil war between the nationalist secular Kemalists flocked around the military establishment and the Ottomanists inspired by Fethullah Gulen under the guidance of the present government of Erdogan since 2002. The nationalist circles in both Turkey and Greece are antireligious and use the notions of neo-Byzantinism in Greece and neo-Ottomanism in Turkey to cover their imperialistic tendencies against each other. But neither Byzantium, nor its continuation the Ottoman Empire was nationalistic and imperialistic.

It is incorrect to call Fethullah Gülen a neo-Ottomanist and the government of Erdogan with its minister of Foreign Affairs Davutoğlu, neo-Ottomans. On the contrary, it was the ultra-nationalist Alparslan Türkeş who was a neo-Ottomanist in the same way that the ultra-nationalist Venizelos in 1919 was a neo-Byzantinist. Both proclaimed their imperialistic dreams of territorial expansion under the cover of the notion of Ecumenical Empire. When, in 1975, I visited vice-prime minister Türkeş in Ankara, I saw in the offices of his party, the MHP, a huge map of Eurasia covered in red from the Balkans to China. The map expressed his dream of Panturkism. I smiled and told him that his Greek ultranationalist counterparts in Athens, who call themselves neo-Byzantinists, would totally agree with this same map. They would just change the colour from Turkish red to Greek blue!

Fethullah Gülen is just a plain traditional Ottomanist who, like minister Davutoğlu, wants to improve relations with all neigbours of the Turkish people, i.e. the Kurds, the Armenians, the Arabs, the Greeks, the Albanians and the other Balkan peoples. He also wants to improve relations with all religions of the Eastern Mediterranean region, in order to recreate, against kemalist secular nationalism, a tolerant, multireligious, multiethnic, multilinguistic and multicultural Ottoman Empire and, why not, bring back the monarchy in Istanbul, as symbol of the unity of this vast Empire. Already, a growing number of intellectuals in Greece, and not only me, are ready to follow in the path of the reconstruction of the Ottoman Empire ( and I am referring, in particular to the well-known Greek theologian University professor Christos Giannaras, who expressed himself in that direction in two articles published in the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini on August 30 and September 6, 2009) with its millet structure of equal religious communities.

In that sense, it is incorrect to compare Fethullah Gülen to the ayatollah Khomeïni. The Islamic Iranian Republic founded by the latter in 1979 can in no way be compared to the Ottoman Empire. Never did the shiite Iranian State from the 16th century on, resemble its arch-enemy the Ottoman Empire. Moreover the Turkish Alevis have nothing to do with shiism, and especially with Iranian shiism.

Fethullah Gülen and the USA

Because Gülen has chosen self-exile in the United States, the Turksih and Greek press often refer to him as supported by Washington which, supposedly, does not want to repeat the mistake of 1979, when it was caught unaware by the return of Khomeïni and the founding Islamic Iranian Revolution. There is no question that the revival of the Ottoman Empire, inspired by Fethullah Gülen, which would regroup around a hard core of the Turkish-Greek Confederation, Albania and Macedonia in the West, Armenia in the East, Kurdistan in the south-East, Syria and Israel in the South, would constitute a solid geopolitical wall against the expansion of Russia towards the south, the expansion of China towards the West, the expansion of Arab fondamentalism towards the north and the expansion of the European Union towards the East. Already, relations of Turkey with Armenia were reestablished in October 2009. But to be supported by Washington does not mean that Gülen is working against the interests of the peoples of that vast Intermediate Region betweem West and East, North and South. On the contrary, nationalism, by splitting into inumerable little states the region, Help the Great Powers to more easily exploit nations.

A most recent positive example of US policy was given on Saturday, October 10, 2009, in Zurich, Switzerland, when in a last-minute intervention, US Secretary of State Hillay Clinton saved the accord between Turkey and Armenia, an historical act of reconciliation which prompted Turkish President Abdullah Gül, in the first Ottoman capital, Bursa, to say, in the presence of the Armenian president Serge Sarkasian, «We are not writing history, we are making history».

The USA are also backing the new prime minister of Greece, George Papandreou, in his efforts to go past the already excellent relations between Greece and Turkey, in building the premises of the future confederation.