Abstract
Illustrations: Molly Crabapple
Novelist
This period of immense upheaval and radical change was the inspiration for a new short story by novelist Kaya Genç, In the Court of Purity, and a set of illustrations by the acclaimed artist Molly Crabapple.
This period of dramatic lingustic change is currently back under discussion, with Ottoman Turkish now being taught again in schools.
Genç said: “I have spent this year studying the subject intensely and when I came across Geoffrey Lewis’s book The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success, I was fascinated by the history of Turkey’s language reform. Lewis gives a hilarious account of all the committees and figures who led the effort of purifying Turkish from what they saw as ‘foreign words’.”
“Language and script revolutions have done both good and bad: Arabic script absolutely failed to represent Turkish sounds and the change in the script most certainly democratised the literary scene and created a generation of readers fascinated by literature. I think language reform is more problematic: in the hands of Turkish ultra-nationalists the cleansing of language became a very ideological enterprise which cut off writers, like me, from a fascinating literary tradition,” he said.
The novelist, whose book Angry Young Turkey is due to be published next year, said: “I think it is an interesting subject for readers today because Turkey seems to have finally reached a maturity and made peace with its Ottoman past and cultural heritage. Leftists are looking at the late Ottoman era to find their ideological ancestors; Kemalists have realised that Ataturk wrote in Arabic script for a long time and learning Arabic script helps them better grasp his vision. The Ministry of Education has opened Ottoman language classes in high schools, so the new generation will probably be able to read Turkish literature in both Ottoman and modern Latin script.”
In the Court of Purity
One day in 1934, a middle-aged man woke up from a terrible nightmare in the crimson-coloured bedroom of an old Istanbul mansion. For what felt like an interminable length of time he dreamt about a dark court of law that was filled with dozens of prisoners who looked at him with an expression of sad desperation in their coal-black eyes. In the dream, he was a Great Judge to whom was given the power to kill or save those sickly men. Prisoners were placed inside large metal cages at the centre of the courtroom. He could see their long, untrimmed beards and yellow faces; their claw-like hands reached out from the cages and their wet palms were visible from the podium where he sat. Their voices, in contrast, were incomprehensible to him – just a murmur filling the room and spiralling out from the cage, spelling out a message that was inaudible but no doubt addressed to him. From behind the group of prisoners, he discerned a figure who eyed him with an intensity that sent shivers down his spine. Dressed in a blindingly bright red uniform, this man moved his hands self-assuredly and was certainly a man of previous, recently lost, authority. He looked at this glowing prisoner in awe and fear and felt, on his shoulders, the responsibility of deciding his fate – whether he should be saved or perish was entirely left to him. But before he could say or do anything, guards appeared in four corners of the courtroom. They approached the cage, entered it, brought the red-coloured prisoner out, placed a piece of cloth around his head and took him away.
Two hours later, in the garden of Istanbul’s most lavish building, the Dolmabahçe Palace, the dreamer realised what had terrified him in this nightmare that morning. Without knowing it, he had experienced the moment just after the decision, rather than just before. This had become a recurrent nightmare during the last few years as his responsibilities as a man of letters grew. The dreamer lit a cigarette and heard himself tell Abdülkadir, his dear friend who watched him apparently surprised, the following words: “This has become my biggest fear now. It is terrifying to no longer be able to reverse one’s decision.”
“My dear Rıfkı,” Abdülkadir said. “What is there to be so terribly anxious about? As a writer your most serious life decision is to make up your mind about whether a comma or an apostrophe works better in a sentence. I assure you that those unused apostrophes or exclamation marks are not locked up somewhere; nor will they come after you in the future for revenge. Let’s attend this so-called dictionary committee session this morning; afterwards we will have rakı in Beyoğlu and laugh at your silly dreams and fears.”
They started walking on the narrow gravel road that outstretched to the palace entrance. As he looked at it, Rıfkı realised how the zigzag road resembled a long, elaborate sentence with numerous sub-clauses that complicate it. He saw tiny by-roads that connected the main gravel road to different compartments of the palace – he had often wanted to visit those auxiliary buildings during the two years he had spent here: he heard there were other committees in them responsible for different fields, such as archaeology or biology.
Both Rıfkı and Abdülkadir were perfectly dressed in black trousers and jackets; they both had Oxford shoes; once inside they both took off their hats before raising their heads to look at the image of the Great Leader hung on the wall. As they climbed the marble stairs that led to the hall upstairs, the Leader’s eyes followed them. Inside the committee room, where a different-sized version of the same image was hung on the wall, the eyes reappeared and Rıfkı felt safe in their presence.
Rıfkı’s closeness to the Great Leader was an open secret, viewed suspiciously by Abdülkadir and his fellow men of letters. In the early 1930s, Rıfkı has worked as a member of the legendary Turkish Society for the Study of Language and was known as a passionate purifier (tasfiyeci), a term used for linguists and writers whose job it was to find Turkish substitutes for words with Arabic and Persian etymologies. Purity had become the key concept of this decade: in an effort to cleanse Turkish language from all traces of foreignness, purifiers had started a nation-wide effort to find ethnically pure, Turkic replacements for words suspected of having eastern, Islamic roots.
One reason why people were suspicious of Rıfkı was his role as a frequent guest of the Great Leader’s famous drinking parties where he could observe whether words selected by his colleagues went down well with him – he used to report back what he had heard in the morning, “he loves the new word for soldier but hated the word for home”.
1932 had been a busy year for the purifiers. Among other things they had banned the Arabic call to prayer (Allahu Ekber!) in Turkish mosques, replacing it with a Turkish version (Tanrı uludur!). Such reforms, they thought, offered the best way of defeating the Ottoman heritage which, they believed, nobody would be interested in looking at from now on. “Turkish is going to be a language as independent and free as the great Turkish nation,” the Great Leader told Rıfkı not so long ago, “and with it we will enter the world of civilisation at one go, just like that”.
But four days ago, on Thursday, things took a strange turn with the politician abruptly summoning the writer to his palace. There, enveloped in smoke, he seemed very concerned about the purifying business. Many of the words they picked as replacements were strongly disliked by people to whom they were intended to serve, he said.
“We have reached a dead end, Rıfkı. Deleting those words from the language complicates things, rather than simplifying them. People can no longer do commerce on streets… The most basic concepts, like a discount, or a loan, cannot be used simply because people don’t know the new words for them. Our public life has been strongly wounded by our experiment, Rıfkı… What we need to do now is to put an end to the purifying business but do so in such a way that nobody will laugh at what we did in the past. We will keep on talking about the purification process while immediately starting a new initiative to save words on your long list from deletion. We will not say, ‘we changed our mind and decided to keep Arabic and Persian words in the language…’ No, Rıfkı! We will say, ‘we are keeping those words because they are actually Turkish!’”
To this Rıfkı replied with what had seemed to him like the most obvious question one could think of. “But, Great Leader, how can we tell people that an Arabic or Persian word is in fact Turkish? It would be like trying to prove that a monkey is in fact a donkey!”
Rıfkı remembered his daring words as the Committee Leader took his seat on the podium. This tall man then started eyeing the room where anxious linguists were getting ready to voice their defences for words suspected of impurity. On Friday Rıfkı had sent committee members letters about the new line about old-fashioned words – informing them that they would be saved, instead of purged from language from now on – and this must have led to a sense of unease among them judging from the anxious complexions of the men filling the room. The Committee Leader (his literature professor at college; a man he thoroughly respected) was the only person to whom he did not send a copy of the letter because Rıfkı did not want to be seen by him as the Great Leader’s spokesperson.
Rıfkı wondered whether he would be able to save words in the same passionate manner in which he had purged them not so long ago. He walked towards the podium and began his defence of the word hüküm – judgement. The face of the Committee Leader, as he watched his old pupil, was filled with wonder.
“This word, hüküm, is often seen as Arabic-rooted,” Rıfkı said. “Only last week, our dear linguist friend Yusuf Ziya had demanded that it be purged from language. But now, new evidence has emerged that shows that hüküm is among the purest words Turkish has ever had.” Rıfkı took out a little paper from his jacket pocket and read the little paragraph inscribed on it: “Now, according to my research, ancient Turks had this word, ök, that they used to describe intellect. This word was often written as ük. As for üm you must all be aware how it had been used by ancient Turks as a building suffix. Together those two words, ük and üm form judgement, hüküm, which stands for the judgement of the intellect, the very meaning of hüküm! Therefore it would be absurd to purge this most Turkish of words from our language.”
“What about the Arabic root hukm,” the Committee Leader asked in a perplexed voice. “Is it not a more rational explanation to see the connection between the Arabic hukm and our hüküm and conclude that the latter is a variation of the former?”
“It is an explanation which, I have to say, reflects an outre approach to our language,” Rıfkı said, “this is an approach that we need to leave behind… I am calling all committee members to consider the possibility that this combination of the completely Turkish ük and üm words might have predated that word’s purportedly Arabic roots. If Turks have predated Arabs then what on earth can be more natural than our words predating theirs?” These words were followed by a murmur that filled the committee room and spiralled out from the doors.
When Rıfat stepped outside and used the zigzag road to reach the garden two hours later, Abdülkadir smiled at him.
“That was a good speech,” he said. “A very good one indeed. And yet, I don’t think anyone believed in what you said. Everyone knows that hüküm is Arabic. But don’t worry, you have just saved judges and lawyers from the toil of changing the language in all their legal documents to make sure they use the new words.”
“I was surprised that the Committee Leader did not insist on the Arabic connection.”
“I don’t think he could, my dear Rıfkı,” Abdülkadir said before lighting a cigarette. “People say that the Minister of Justice had contacted him this morning and urged him to save hüküm even if you failed to defend it appropriately.”
* * *
May 16, 2015. In the Court of Purity. From The Guardian
An Egyptian court has sentenced the ousted president Mohamed Morsi to death for his part in a mass jailbreak in 2011.
The verdict . . . was announced on Saturday in a Cairo court where Morsi was also facing charges of espionage. As is customary in passing capital punishment, the death sentence on Morsi and more than 100 others will be referred to the country’s top Muslim theologian, or mufti, for his non-binding opinion.
Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, was ousted by the military in July 2013 after days of mass street protests by Egyptians demanding that he be removed because of his divisive policies.
His overthrow triggered a government crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood movement, to which he belongs, in which hundreds of people have died and thousands have been imprisoned.
In May 2014, Morsi’s successor, the former military chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, secured a landslide victory in Egypt’s presidential elections.Before Saturday’s sentencing, Morsi was already serving a 20-year term on charges linked to the killing of protesters outside a Cairo presidential palace in December 2012.
Defendants in both trials were brought into the caged dock on Saturday ahead of the verdict. “We are free revolutionaries, we will continue the march,” they chanted.
Morsi was not brought in, but his co-defendant and Brotherhood leader, Mahmud Badie, was present, wearing the red uniform of those convicted to death after a previous sentence.
* * *
One day in 2015, an Egyptian judge woke up from a terrible nightmare in the green-coloured bedroom of an old Cairo mansion. For what felt like an interminable length of time he dreamt about a court of law filled with dozens of words looking at him with an expression of terrible desperation on their ink-black faces.
In the dream, he was a linguist to whom was given the power to purge or preserve words. The words were placed inside large metal cages at the centre of the courtroom. He could see their shapes and curves; their sick-looking vowels reached out from the cages and their silent consonants were visible from the podium where he sat. Their voices, in contrast, was incomprehensible to him – just an Oriental-sounding murmur filling the room and spiralling out from the cage, spelling out a message that was inaudible but no doubt addressed to him.
From behind the group of those words the dreamer discerned a word, 
, who eyed him with an intensity that sent shivers down his spine. Written with blindingly bright red letters, this was certainly a word of previous, freshly lost authority. The dreamer looked at this glowing prisoner in awe and fear and felt, on his shoulders, the responsibility of deciding the fate of him – whether the word should be saved or perish was entirely left to him. But before he could say or do anything, guards appeared in four corners of the court room.
They approached the cage and entered it.
They brought the red-coloured prisoner out and placed a piece of cloth around his head.
And then they took the word away.
© Kaya Genç
Illustrations by Molly Crabapple