Minnatullah al-Abyad – Al-Ahram
Dr. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin is one of the most prominent Turkish critics to have immersed himself in Arab cultural life and engaged with its literary output and with the Arabic language. He graduated from the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Ankara University; his master’s thesis dealt with the fiction of Yahya Haqqi, and his doctoral thesis with the problems and strategies of translation between Arabic and Turkish. He served on the jury of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Arabic Booker) in 2014, and in 2015 as a jury member and adviser to the steering committee of the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and International Understanding. As a translator he has rendered books by Arab poets such as Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish and Khalil Gibran, among others.
For the Turkish critic Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, Arabic is the language of an ancient civilisation and a world language. The problem, as he describes it, lies not in Arabic but in those who use it – and he does not exempt Turkish or Turkish society from this. A language cannot develop on its own; it develops only through its speakers.
In his view, the wider the horizons of a language’s users, the wider the scope and strength of the language. Eastern societies must therefore entrench a culture of creativity – a culture of invention, of saying something new, of expressing the unfamiliar. Creativity in thought will inevitably lead to the development of language.
“I came to love Arabic through Arabic literature,” Suçin says. “At the start of my university studies I was thinking of changing my field, but after reading some of Khalil Gibran’s works in Turkish I decided to continue studying Arabic language and literature. The more I knew of Arabic literature, the more I loved the language. I would try to translate texts by Gibran and Adonis into Turkish. I remember how hard I struggled to understand some of Naguib Mahfouz’s stories in the collection Dunya Allah (God’s World), but all of this made me read Arabic literature more intensively.”
Comparing Arabic and Turkish literature, he sees both shared and differing features. The most notable difference is the continuity of the linguistic line in Arabic, thanks to Standard Arabic. In Arabic literature we may have no difficulty understanding a poem by Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma, unlike Turkish literature, where the language has undergone great change.
Pre-Islamic Turkish literature can be understood only by specialists. Post-Islamic classical Turkish literature has various branches. Divan literature is a high literature produced and consumed by an elite of writers and readers; its vocabulary is a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic, and it is impossible to understand without knowing all three. The language of folk and Sufi literature is more intelligible today. As for shared features, the “Westernisation” of the two literatures took place in similar periods and through the translation of almost the same works.
Suçin also speaks of the Turkish cultural scene, which may be somewhat remote from Arab intellectuals: “If you want a full picture of Turkish culture, you must not fall into the error of interpreting the course of temporary developments. The democratic process in Turkey is nothing new. We have to go back to the era of Sultan Mahmud II, the proclamation of the Tanzimat and the Reform Edict, the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid, and the Republican period.”
He adds: “These are all important stations in the Turkish cultural enlightenment. The Turkish civil enlightenment project mostly moved vertically, from the top down, from the elite to the general public. Today, however, things are completely different: the Turkish people are far more aware of their civil rights, and civil society organisations are still strong.”
Suçin acknowledges that there are undemocratic practices towards some writers and journalists, but he does not believe these cases are organised or that they will last long. We are now in temporary, exceptional circumstances, so it is wrong to comment on the scene solely in the light of current conditions, without taking into account the whole historical path Turkey has travelled in entrenching democracy. Even so, we have a long way to go to close the gap between ourselves and the ideal model adopted by democratic systems in the developed world.
On Egyptian–Turkish cultural relations, Suçin believes that political relations pave the way for cultural ones, and vice versa. Cultural activities have naturally been adversely affected by the strained relations between Egypt and Turkey. At the very least, people have found it difficult to travel between the two countries, and institutions that support culture still find it hard to cooperate with their counterparts in Egypt on joint activities.
“I know many Egyptian academics specialising in Turkish literature and culture who were unable to take part in numerous academic and cultural events because of such obstacles,” he says. “But despite all these obstacles, cultural and literary relations continue, and no political party can block them. The translation output between Turkish and Egyptian literature during the period of tension shows that I am not exaggerating.”
Over the past three years, Turkish translations have been published of seven novels by Naguib Mahfouz, a novel by Ahdaf Soueif, a novel by Sonallah Ibrahim, a selection of stories by Bahaa Taher and two poetry collections by Ahmed al-Shahawy, as well as translations of poems and short stories by many Egyptian writers in Turkish literary magazines.
In return, Dar al-Shorouk has published several novels by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, and Turkish women’s stories have been published in Cairo. As Suçin adds, this means that we translators know that tension between states does not concern us, and that our horizons are far wider than the geographical borders drawn for us. Still, good relations between Turkey and Egypt mean institutional cooperation, joint exhibitions and shared literary events, all of which would steadily increase the translation output between the two countries’ literatures and cultures.
High literature, as Suçin sees it, demands contemplation and distance from the strident political scene, even when a work deals with political content. A writer must keep away from loud day-to-day politics; otherwise he becomes a political throat rather than a literary pen.
Orhan Pamuk, for example, has his political, cultural and civilisational vision in his novels, but he treats it in a literary way that does not harm the aesthetics of the text. His Nobel Prize affected the standing of Turkish literature: thanks to him, Turkish literature opened up to the world, international interest in it grew, and translations of important Turkish writers unknown abroad increased.
His Nobel also encouraged young people to write and create, and he has had a considerable influence on his generation’s approach to postmodern literature. Even so, his influence at home is much smaller than abroad.
Suçin does not believe that most Turks have truly understood Pamuk’s works, because most of them are not easy to consume and require readers who can deal with demanding texts.
Suçin holds that undemocratic authorities do not like the intellectual in the true sense, because the true intellectual is one who keeps his distance from power. The intellectual is usually in opposition to power and critical of it, and this role actually helps power maintain its democratic dynamism. But these ideas have become a kind of “fantasy” in the Arab and Islamic region. Had Noam Chomsky, who harshly criticises the American system, done this in an Eastern country, he would long ago have been in prison or faced the worst kind of treatment.
In general, Suçin does not support religious regimes, that is, political Islam; he views religion, and Islam in particular, from a civilisational and cultural perspective. Religion concerns the affairs of the individual more than those of the state. This does not mean that religion is entirely separate from the individual’s social life: in his view, religion is an individual, civil sphere with social dimensions, but this does not mean that it should dominate the affairs of the state.
Historical experience, and what we are witnessing today in a number of Muslim countries, has shown that entangling religion in the affairs of the state harms religion and state alike. The civil state is one that opens its doors wide so that citizens can express their beliefs and practise their religions in complete freedom, but it must be neutral towards all religions, sects and beliefs. Secularism is an important achievement of human experience in running states; unfortunately, in the Islamic world, and especially the Arab world, the concept has been “demonised” so that the public understands it as “unbelief” – which it is far from. Secularism is a guarantee for all religions, even for those who follow none. This means that no individual or group is excluded in the ideal secular system.
He adds: “When I say ‘secularism’, I do not mean the extreme secularism applied in Turkey for a time, especially in the era of military coups and of governments that were civilian in form but not in substance. That is why I see no bright future for political Islam in view of the enormous accumulated experience the developed world has in practising democracy and secularism.”
He does not believe that Islam in itself is an obstacle for the intellectual and the thinker, but the project of political Islam as a civil system of government will be a failed project. Socially speaking, Islam is not one Islam; there are many “Islams”.
Afghan Islam differs greatly from Turkish Islam, and within each there are many Afghan and Turkish Islams. For eighty years Turkish Islam has shown that it is not incompatible with a secular democratic system. I believe this experience is valuable in itself and deserves to be taken into account.
Returning to prizes and literature, Suçin responds to criticism and accusations that the Booker is politicised or partial by noting that almost all prizes, the Nobel included, face such criticism; but his own experience as a Booker judge showed, in his words, that the prize is entirely fair.
Of the year in which he served, he says: “I can vouch for the 2014 round, when I was one of the judges. The administration was very transparent; its role was limited to arranging our meetings, travel and accommodation and sending us the novels on time. In fact, all the official documents we signed urged us insistently to be impartial, transparent and fair in our assessment, without regard to the writer’s name, affiliations, gender or other characteristics. There was a great deal of similarity between the lists of the five judges, which indicates the integrity of the process. The committee included well-known literary critics such as Saad al-Bazei, Abdullah Ibrahim and Zhor Gourram, as well as Ahmed al-Fitouri, a journalist and a good reader of literature.”
Recounting his experience as a judge of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, Suçin sets out the criteria that guided him: “At first I set a scale to use in the assessment, but after discussing with my colleagues I realised that adopting such a scale to judge a literary work could oversimplify things. I think reading fifty or a hundred pages of a novel, depending on its total length, is enough to get an idea of it. In the end I am a reader. I want the text to arouse my curiosity, its structure to draw me in, and to find events in it that form a plot. A novel must raise questions in my mind about its construction.
If these questions do not arise in my mind as a reader from the first pages of a novel, there is a risk of giving up reading it – which means one of the whistles has blown, signalling that the novel is not successful.”
The translator of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural believes there is a great gap in translation between Arabic and Turkish literature. Most translations from Arabic were, and still are, made through an intermediary language. Many of Naguib Mahfouz’s works, unfortunately, were translated into Turkish from English – with the exception of some fine translations made directly from Arabic, such as Rahmi Er’s translations of The Thief and the Dogs and Adrift on the Nile, and others by Bedreddin Aytaç, Nevzat Yanık, Lütfullah Göktaş and Musa Yıldız.
He describes the translations of Arabic poetry into Turkish as “catastrophic” and “lethal”, which led him to retranslate the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Khalil Gibran, Mohammed Bennis, Nizar Qabbani, Ahmed al-Shahawy and Khulood Al Mualla, with others on the way. Thanks to these translations, Arabic poetry has begun to find a good readership in Turkey. The same applies to the translation of Turkish literature into Arabic.
There is a Turkish project supporting the translation of Turkish literature into world languages, but at present there is no project supporting the translation of Arabic literature into Turkish. Everything Turkish translators do consists of individual, voluntary, non-profit efforts to fill some of the vast gap between Turkish and Arabic literature.
Source: Minnatullah al-Abyad, Al-Ahram Gate, 4 April 2017. Translated from the Arabic for this site.