Interview by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
It was a mild April morning in 2009, far from the grief of an untimely parting. I felt a student’s nervousness inside me. It was no small thing: I was going to interview, for the website onlinearabic, our dear teacher Prof. Azmi Yüksel — a man whom the years had carefully made wise and whom his pure love of people had made ever more beautiful, the smiling embodiment of maturity, warmth, modesty and wisdom.
I buttoned my jacket and knocked softly at his door. “Come in,” he said in his usual calm, soothing voice. He was bent over his wide, dark-brown walnut desk, turning the pages of a book on the history of Arabic literature. He wore a navy jacket with brown stripes and, with his sweet coffee-coloured tie with a diamond pattern and his light cream shirt, he was elegant and meticulous as ever. His greying hair, combed back, lent his smiling face a mature and wise air.
Seeing me, he smiled. “Come on, Suçin,” he said. “Let’s do this interview. But careful — don’t make the questions too hard.” I smiled. “Could any question be hard for you, Hocam?” I said. He answered with his usual modest, warm smile. I got my pen and papers ready and asked the first question.
Dear Hocam, how did your career in Arabic language and literature begin?
While I was teaching at the İmam Hatip High School in Düzce, I took the exam the Ministry of National Education had opened for study abroad in various fields, and chose Arabic language and literature. After passing the exam, held at Ankara University’s Faculty of Divinity, I was sent to Lebanon for a year to improve my Arabic, since my field was Arabic language and literature, and attended the Arabic courses for foreign students at the Lebanese University. I also sat in on Arabic language and literature classes at the Girls’ Teacher Training School, the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese University. What I gained in that period set the direction of my development.
We know you did your doctorate in Arabic language and literature in England. How do you find Arabic studies in the West? Could you compare them with those in Türkiye?
As is well known, in those years there were more Arabic departments in England than in our country, and work in this field had begun much earlier there. If we compare the Arabic departments in England with ours, we see many differences. Above all, there is great variety in the academic work done in the field. For example, in the Arabic department of the School of Oriental Studies where I did my doctorate, research could be carried out not only on Arabic language and literature but across the broad field of Arab and Islamic culture. Perhaps we should increase the scope and variety of academic work in this field. Teaching staff in departments of Arabic language and literature or Arabic education, for instance, should be able to research the various branches of Arab culture. Unfortunately, the criteria for academic promotion hinder such work — whereas research in these departments would also be very important as guidance for members of the foreign service.
As is well known, the leading Orientalists in the West always kept these important points in view and tried to understand Arab-Islamic society in all its aspects. Indeed, it was Western Orientalists who edited and published a large part of the basic manuscript sources in various fields, translated some of them into their own languages and taught us the methods of critical editing. Orientalists such as Nallino, Goldziher, Lane and Gibb made great contributions to introducing Islamic culture to the West. It was Orientalists who first published the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Although some Orientalists have been criticised for their perspective on Islam, their contribution in enabling us to look at things critically cannot be denied.
As for undergraduate teaching, Arabic teaching in the West has come a long way. Teaching materials have mostly been developed by them, of course with Arab scholars at their side. Undergraduate study usually lasts three years, but they send their Arabic students for at least one semester to institutions in Arab countries with which they have agreements. The small number of students is an advantage for them here. Moreover, their undergraduate programmes do not have compulsory courses outside the field, as ours do. For our students, there are advantages: we share the same religion as the Arabs and have lived together, so the cultural ties formed over time give them a familiar ear for Arabic, and the abundance of words of Arabic origin in Turkish means they have little difficulty pronouncing it. Yet despite all these advantages, and although our undergraduate study is much longer, we have not yet been able to reach the level of their undergraduates. In our department, for example, there is also a one-year preparatory class, but in later years the share of Arabic courses steadily falls. Because we are a Faculty of Education, our curriculum, set by the Council of Higher Education, is loaded with Turkish-language courses in education. In addition, since students entering the department have recently also been granted the right to teach, the number of students has risen, though it is still not at the desired level.
Would you like to share one or two interesting memories from your studies abroad?
While I was attending the Arabic course in Lebanon, a friend who had come to Lebanon after me went to the sea alone and sunbathed for so long that his shoulders blistered, so he could not come to class for a while. When Dr. Rashad Dergham asked why he was absent and I explained, he advised us to go to the pharmacy and buy rosewater: “If you apply rosewater, the wound will dry quickly,” he said. My friend and I went to the pharmacy, and my friend told the pharmacist in Arabic that he wanted rosewater. But the pharmacist simply did not understand — or pretended not to. The reason was that when saying ماء الورد (māʾ al-ward) he pronounced the Arabic letter wāw like our Turkish “v”. I had understood the problem, but since my friend was older than me I could not bring myself to correct him. In the end the pharmacist said, “Write down what you’re saying.” When he wrote it, the pharmacist exclaimed, “Ah, you want māʾ al-ward!”, pronouncing the wāw the Arabic way and so correcting him. This is meaningful in showing us the importance of pronunciation for expressing oneself correctly in another language.
Another interesting memory is from Durham. My doctoral supervisor, Dr. Austin, was an Englishman who had become a Muslim in his youth. One day during Ramadan, before sunset, I knocked at his door to ask him something and went in to find him smoking his pipe. Knowing he was a Muslim, and feeling a certain closeness but also some hesitation, I said, “Dr. Austin, I thought you were fasting.” “Yes, I was fasting,” he said, “but I have broken my fast — I lit my pipe.” When I said, “But the sun hasn’t set yet; how could you break your fast?”, he replied: “Here the time between dawn and sunset is twenty hours. Should one fast twenty hours out of twenty-four? I took the average and broke my fast.” He said this with great ease and sincerity. We Muslim students there fasted the full twenty hours. Even though I thought he had a point, I could never bring myself to follow his reasoning. I think this is an important sign of how a Western academic approaches things, even one who has become a Muslim.
You have trained dozens of students who now teach at universities, and you have supervised many master’s and doctoral theses. Do you find research in Arabic or in divinity in Türkiye satisfactory?
Since 1979 I have had many graduate students. I run into them from time to time, some of them in places I would never have expected: there are those working in companies, those serving in embassies abroad, those working in various institutions at home. Sometimes we meet and only remember each other when we say our names.
As is known, I started at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography (DTCF) in 1979. At that time, both at DTCF and in the other departments of Arabic language and literature, classical Arabic literature was to the fore in undergraduate and graduate programmes. Apart from a few textbooks, students did not encounter modern Arabic. When I first began working with modern Arabic texts in reading classes, the students liked it very much. Later, modern Arabic gradually gained weight. At the Gazi Faculty of Education in particular, because it is a teacher-training department, contemporary Arabic has always been to the fore. After I came to the Gazi Faculty of Education in 1988, we added a one-year preparatory class to the Department of Foreign Language Education, and we saw that it was beneficial in all four languages (English, French, German and Arabic).
Because we are a faculty of education, graduate work in our department is mostly in fields such as language teaching, linguistics, semantics and translation studies. This is seen as necessary, since work on Arabic teaching began here and continues here. Graduate work on classical Arabic literature is therefore carried out mostly in the other departments of Arabic language and literature.
Taking all the Arabic departments together, we see that graduate work is mostly literature-oriented. Important work has been done recently to introduce modern Arabic literature in Türkiye, but it is not yet very satisfactory. In this respect, though, our department has young, dynamic and valuable scholars with a solid background who have risen to professorship, four of them former students of mine of whom I am proud. The graduate theses they supervise and will supervise will be more research-oriented and will apply the criteria of scholarship.
As for research in divinity, I do not have much to say. I know that young, competent and talented scholars have recently emerged in divinity, but I cannot always follow their work.
Would you like to say something about academic awareness in general? What makes a piece of research “scholarly”?
I attach great importance to academic awareness, and I always warn and encourage young researchers to develop it. I value scholarly research, and this becomes even more important when it concerns Arabic and divinity. There is no room for prejudices and taboos in scholarly thinking; anyone doing scholarly work must be free of them. Many ordinary people believe that Arabic is a sacred language and therefore look on everything written in Arabic as privileged. Yet Arabic is a language like any other. I explain this to my students all the time.
Besides what I have just mentioned, I believe scholarly curiosity is also important for doing scholarly work. Above all, the researcher should pursue a problem they see as a real question — and in doing so they need to grasp how and why they should carry out such research. Writing in order to obtain an academic “title”, or merely for the sake of having written, is in my view a meaningless effort that contributes nothing to scholarship. A researcher who wants to contribute to scholarship should take these aspects into account. Their work should be concise and substantial, and above all it should satisfy the researchers themselves.
I have sat on the juries of graduate theses by some divinity students. A significant number of these theses were far from criteria we could call original and scholarly, chiefly because of certain prejudices stemming from the students’ beliefs. I always explained to them that such concerns were unfounded and that scholarly work must be impartial, and asked them to revise their theses.
We know that much of your work is literature-oriented. To what extent is contemporary Arabic literature known in Türkiye?
In our country, and generally in the West, contemporary Arabic literature attracted the attention of people outside academic circles when Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. True, Mahfouz’s novel Midaq Alley had been translated from English into Turkish and published earlier, but it was out of print and most people did not know of it. After the prize, Arabic novels in particular, as well as short stories and poems, began to be translated into Turkish. Some of the translations were made by specialists in Arabic language and literature: Prof. Rahmi Er translated Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs, for example, and Prof. Bedrettin Aytaç his Khan al-Khalili. Prof. Rahmi Er also wrote Modern Mısır Romanı (The Modern Egyptian Novel), an important work that treated the Arabic novel in Turkish for the first time and is essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. Later, other translations from Mahfouz followed. The Ministry of Culture published Rahmi Er’s Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Literature. Many of Mahfouz’s novels, such as The Day the Leader Was Killed, were translated. Prof. Kenan Demirayak translated Khalil Gibran, and anthologies of short stories and poetry were published.
Beyond Egyptian writers, Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, whom we recently lost, was published in Özdemir İnce’s translation from French. This novel has already joined the classics of Arabic literature, and although he translated it from French, Özdemir İnce showed his skill. Day by day some literary magazines publish selections from Arabic literature, and translations are increasing. The course modern Arabic literature has followed in poetry, prose and drama runs parallel to that of our own literature; some Arab writers who knew Turkish were even influenced by our writers. These literary genres, which came from the West and began under its influence, also began at almost the same time in both — the first periods of translation and adaptation from the West, for instance, coincide with ours. Of course, the Arab world is a vast geography; among its countries, those that stand out in literature are Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, with Egypt leading the way.
In terms of comparative literature we are not yet at a satisfactory level. As translations from Arabic literature multiply, I am sure scholars of literature will turn their attention in this direction too.
Do you have a message for the visitors of onlinearabic?
The large number of visitors to the onlinearabic site shows that interest in Arabic and Arabic literature is growing day by day. Opportunities for those who want to learn Arabic have increased: there are courses they can attend in almost every large city, and the possibilities of listening to and learning Arabic on television and the computer are also wide. The large number of visitors pleases us too. I wish them success.
Thank you very much, Hocam.
Originally published in Turkish on onlinearabic, 2009. Translated into English for this site. View the original (PDF) ↗