The Man Who Dreamed Up New Turkey
Necip Fazıl Summarizes His Political Philosophy
There is a growing literature on the ideologues behind the various nationalist movements on the rise across the world. Russian nationalists are said to be influenced by Ivan Ilyin, in India’s Hindutva movement traces itself back to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Western right-wingers read Renaud Camus, Ayn Rand and others, and Islamists everywhere get the dubious pleasures of Abul A’la Maududi and Hassan al Bannah.
What ingenious mind then, can we thank for the Erdoğan regime in Turkey?
As with most of these things, we should resist the temptation to jump to a single figure. But if, dear reader, someone presses you for an answer, you could do worse than think of Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1904-1983). I expect that I’ll be writing about him in this space every now and then, so consider this post groundwork for future translations and commentary.
Necip Fazıl was a highly combustible mix of vice and piety, privilege and revolt.
He was born into a wealthy family in Istanbul and enjoyed an elite education. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1924, one year after the foundation of the Republic, he was selected among a handful of the young nation’s scholars to be sent to Paris for further education. There, Necip Fazıl gambled and drank away his scholarship within a year (“I never once saw Paris by daylight” he’d always say). Upon his return to Turkey, he began to work for banks and gave lectures on language and philosophy. He became a published poet, writing some of his most popular verse, such as Kaldırımlar (Sidewalks), and was friends with some of the leading artists of the time.
In 1934, he met the Nakşibendi leader Abdülhakîm Arvâsî and refashioned himself as a political thinker, writing articles, poems, and plays that called for a spiritual revival of what he believed was the Turkish-Islamic essence of the country.
He was, and remains, the kind of romantic writer who is especially appealing to young bookish students. A lot of people go through a Necip Fazıl phase early on in their lives and hold on to pieces of his emotional universe decades after they stop reading him.
What then, are Necip Fazıl’s politics? What might be one definitive thing you might read about him?
Thankfully, the Üstad, as his followers called him, had great sympathy for those of us with *ehm*, less than ideal attention spans, and so condensed his political philosophy to listicle format. Below is my translation of this 1939 piece Ben Buyum (“This Is Me”):
This Is Me
Our age is the apocalypse of ideologies. In this age, every person who displays the courage of grasping a pen is forced to lean his most profound analogy as well as his cheapest joke against the measurements of a world view that is known to all. That writer, this cartoonist; that speaker, this mute; that hack, this muff; what is at the basis of all this ruckus? If these screeching and scratching pens were asked:
“What is your world view?” how many, I wonder, could muster up the will to respond?
Thought in limbo, art in limbo, community in limbo, are not substances I understand. It is for this reason that I shall inform my readers of what I am, rather than to wait for them to put together, as if solving a puzzle, cutouts of my writings. These acts of informing, like headings to books containing whole causes, are titles of thought brought down to their last summations.
Asianist (opposed to [zıt] copied Europeanism).
Extreme nationalist - Anatolianist (opposed to thought systems outside of the nation).
Identitarian - Essentialist [Şahsiyetçi - Keyfiyetçi] (opposed to adrift individual rights, to standard measurements).
In property, in favor of limitations (opposed to personal capitalism on the large scale).
In art, thought and science [ilim], isolationist-minimalist (opposed to rootless and rough systems of diagnosis).
With respect to the perfection of thought and spirit, in favor of class structure (anti-democratic).
Interventionist around a single perspective (anti-liberal).
In summary regarding today’s world regimes: from a personal vantage point anti-communist, anti-fascist, anti-liberal. There you have my outline!
I am reporting these things under pressure of the honor of thought and in the manner of headlines. Those who trouble themselves to read me and search for me shall unlock my cells with these keys. Thereby, they shall uncover (how) the informing measurements for (what) they came to be. On the architecture of this (how), I hold the rights from line to epic, from clause to book.
Like a true polemicist, Necip Fazıl sets up his belief system against against the tension of its opposing poles. The parentheses contain ideas he associates with the Kemalist structure of his time, some of which are contradictory: an aspirational Occidentalism, a dangerous proximity to socialism, economic liberalism, individualistic rootlessness and internationalism. Though he was reluctant to admit it, Necip Fazıl was partial to the elitist, top-down nature of the Kemalist state, he simply thought that it should develop in opposition to Western civilization, rather than in aspiration to it.
His vision might sound a little more familiar to us today: a fiercely nationalistic and “Asianist” country where the state (or presumably an oligarchic caste) controls the means of material and cultural production. Society is stratified into strict classes held together by a deferential and collectivistic ethos.
Necip Fazıl stayed faithful to this line of thought and did develop it a bit further, most notably in his theory of the “Başyüce” (a strange sounding word he made up from the Turkic words baş meaning “head” and yüce meaning “holy”/”supreme”). This would be an Islamist leader in the mold of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a hero personifying the eternal spirit of his people. Necip Fazıl penned a series of Başyücelik Emirleri (The Orders of the Başyücelik) in which he stipulated Islamist rules on anything from financial to sartorial regulation along Islamist lines.
Today, Necip Fazıl’s political writing isn’t read nearly as much as his poetry. People in the AK Party aren’t about to look to the Orders of the Başyücelik to guide their policy. But they don’t have to. The politics of the right lives in the reactive universe Necip Fazıl channeled, and the particulars take care of themselves. The extreme centralization and nationalization and social stratification the poet wanted is well apace. Hagia Sophia, which he coveted as the heart of Turkish civilization, is once again a mosque (I wrote about that here). Necip Fazıl is read in schools and public occasions, and since 2014, Başkan Erdoğan gives out the Necip Fazıl Awards personally.
As the Erdoğan regime is declining in popularity, however, Necip Fazıl’s currency is also waning. I know quite a few people who hold on to him as a poet, but recoil at the revanchism in his voice, and regret the politics he has engendered. The personal deficits in Necip Fazıl - the serial gambling and incessant money problems, the self righteousness, the megalomaniac power he wielded over his followers - are no longer seem like the quirky traits of a popular poet. They map a little too neatly on the people who govern the country today.
Bonus:
Watch the now-iconic wrinkled face and raspy voice in the video below. This is Necip Fazıl in his later years, recounting biographical information, reading some of his poems.
I’d say the most popular recording of Necip Fazıl is the below series, where he reads his poems against a backdrop of European classical music. My uncle Fehmi Koru, who was was in MTTB at the time, produced them. Some years back, he was shocked to find an online version where someone had substituted the European music with an Ottoman-style mehter band. He writes here about how Necip Fazıl asked for specific pieces of classical Western music, and how they had to ask a friend traveling through Europe to buy the vinyl records. (As with many Necip Fazıl stories, I believe there were some problems regarding payment as well.) Either way, it goes to show you how the aesthetics of alternative modernity have shifted in the years since, and will continue to shift.
I find it remarkable how one could write a piece on NFK without mentioning his horrificly fascist, antisemitic manifest called "İdeoloçya Örgüsü".