Is the HDP an ethnic party, a socialist party, or both? Ethnic parties are defined as parties that prioritize “the interests of a particular ethnic group.” Such parties can have other items on their agenda but their focus stays on the interests of the ethnic group the party tries to appeal to. We can add some further attributes to ethnic parties. Such parties can nominate candidates belonging to different ethnic groups but the majority of their candidates tend to be from one single ethnic group. Finally, the respective ethnic group also makes up the majority of the party’s constituency. The HDP satisfies all three attributes and, hence, can be seen as an ethnic party. Nevertheless, it is not the party’s only attribute.

The HDP is also seen as a socialist party. The party shies away from such a self-identification in its electoral manifestos but implies it with its emphasis over “class struggle.” The party also tends to choose one of its co-leaders from socialist parties. The former co-leader Figen Yuksekdag was previously the leader of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP) and joined the HDP after a deal between the ESP and HDP. One of the current co-leaders, Sezai Temelli was also formerly active in another minor socialist party, the Freedom and Solidarity Party (ÖDP). Apart from its socialist discourse and its co-leaders representing minor socialist parties, the party also forms electoral coalitions with Turkey’s socialist parties. Most recently, six socialist organizations some of which are political parties, declared their support to the HDP. In return, the HDP nominated leading figures of these parties for the June parliamentary elections.

Nevertheless, the HDP’s ethnic and socialist characteristics are not balanced smoothly. As the party embraces a greater deal of socialist rhetoric, it distances conservative Kurdish nationalists from the party. As a final sign of this process, the HDP has formed an electoral coalition with minor socialist parties of Turkey but failed to do so with minor ethnic (Kurdish nationalist) parties. Since the PKK has a great deal of leverage and control over the HDP, it helps to follow what the PKK’s leadership thinks about this policy.

Mustafa Karasu, one of the PKK’s politburo members, has recently explained why the HDP does and should take this path. According to Karasu, the Turkish metropoles will help the HDP to be successful in the upcoming elections in June and, hence, the HDP needs the votes of the Turkish left more than the Kurdish nationalist votes, which are seen more or less granted anyway. In order to increase the HDP’s appeal to the Turkish left, the PKK is likely to avoid sending suicide bombers to Turkish metropoles during the one-month period before the elections and will follow a low-profile stance until the elections.

The HDP, on the other hand, is likely to propagate for “peace” and avoid making bold gestures for the PKK and its jailed leader Ocalan. Such a temporary shift worked well in the June elections of 2015 and is likely to be tried once again for June 2018 elections. Yet, the HDP’s flirt with Turkey’s leftist constituency is also pushing some conservative Kurdish nationalists away from the party. For instance, HDP’s Diyarbakir deputy Altan Tan left his party and will run for Saadet Party in the upcoming elections. He justified his choice by referring to the HDP’s decision to form an electoral coalition with the “marginal left” but refuse to do so with conservative Kurdish nationalist parties such as Hüda-Par. The upcoming elections, hence, will show whether the HDP and PKK will be able to appeal to the Turkish socialists without distancing conservative Kurdish nationalists.

In order to understand the intellectual activities of the late Husamettin Arslan, his character needs to be evaluated. He was interested in multidimensional analysis and had multiple fields of interest. For this reason, he wasn’t systematic, but a little scattered. It is important to know the milestones of his life, from his childhood to his death, in order to make sense of his spirit, quests and his “return home.” We can’t explain his tremendous effort to translate works while working as an academic without talking about his father’s work discipline. Considering the fact that he was aware that he had to perceive life, culture, ideology and any other issue from his own standpoint, these consequences became more important.

In this respect, he once said the following: “Our social and historical practical lives (or praxis) determine our theories, problems and the resolution of these problems.”

Political consciousness, ideology and the aftermath

Throughout his childhood, he took long walks with his father at sunrise. It’s probably due to this that he always preferred sunrise to any time of the day. While he was on the road at 5 am in the morning, his father’s recital of a folk song would accompany the singing birds: “I wish only a wish, O Almighty/Never let me lean on the vile.” Is there any need to imagine the rest? It is obvious that this work discipline is the most precious characteristic he had inherited from his industrious father.

He met with his first “modern dress,” a black school uniform with a white collar and a military hat with a huge visor when he was six. He was exhilarated when he acquired his unofficial school report after attending school without registering for a year. As a child of a family supporting the Democrat Party, he never understood why the village’s imam, Molla Kamil, supported the Republican People’s Party.

In 1963, he encountered one of the first products of modern technology – the battery powered radio. He always remembered that his father listened to the 1 pm broadcast from this radio, which only two families possessed in the entire village. As the situation in Cyprus became increasingly dire at the time, no one would make the faintest noise in the house during the radio broadcast.

Arslan acquired his first “modern political consciousness” from his primary school teacher, who replaced his father in terms of authority. We may call it the unexpected and inexplicable domination of certain moments over human memory. In fact, his teacher told stories about Adnan Menderes and the Democrat Party, which are later known to be false. This encounter was probably the earliest source of his works and speeches on political consciousness, in which he undertakes the role of a social intellectual who observes the world from his de facto standpoint.

When Arslan finished primary school, he left his father and stepped into a world unknown to those in the village. His life truly began with public boarding school. After Tunceli Training School, Arslan went to Ankara. His father always bid farewell to him with the same words: “You know our condition. Work and study accordingly.” Arslan had said that his youth was spent in an interfile social circle due to the fact that he was inflicted with “ideological cancer.” Indeed, he was a “radical, pedantic and a fervent ideologue” at a time when people suffered from contracted mindsets.

Years later, he discussed ideology as a contested, conflicted and possibly unsolvable modern issue with Terry Eagleton at what he called the “center of the universe.” Arslan’s expression of ideologies, which attempt to replicate the functions of religions today, not being an issue for those who lived in the Middle Ages or the Pagan world, was closely tied with his own experiences. Meanwhile, he stated that he was in agreement with Eagleton in terms of his thesis “the end of ideology,” which advocates the idea that ideologies became absolute in Europe after the 1950s, as the welfare state satisfied the needs of the poor and working classes.

During the hard times in which people dug their heels in, he became part of the movement dominated by obedience and loyalty, and which excommunicated those with comprehensive ideas. While he was studying at the History department at Hacettepe University, Arslan was obsessed with the issue of regime. During these years he was in opposition to everything and believed that if the regime were to change everything in life would be perfect. Meanwhile, his father always told him: “These efforts are in vain, leftists or rightists alike.”

After having completed his master’s thesis on Contemporary History of Turkey, he changed his fields. At the Faculty of Literature at Istanbul University, his doctorate dissertation was on the “sociology of knowledge” and then the new sociology discipline, “sociology of science,” which were under the fields of General Sociology and Methodology.

‘Epistemic Community,’ which made ripples across the fields of philosophy and social science, showed that he was on a very specific, meticulous and precious path to knowledge. A prominent part of his translations was directed towards consolidating the stance against scientism, which his afore mentioned book made a breakthrough. Of course, his readings on philosophy, which became his sole intellectual hobby after the 1980s, played a great role in this. We should probably underscore that he believed hobbies lasted longer than duties. According to Arslan, if history and philosophy are not studied together, sociology is nothing but a technology. For this reason, he defined sociology as the “philosophy of society.” Indeed, sociology is “social philosophy.” For this reason, he always advocated “philosophical” sociology over any “orthodox” understanding of sociology. He strode on the streets of intellectualism with this mindset. It’s not in vain that we’re talking about an attained success.

An oasis in the intellectual wasteland: Arslan’s translations

A social scientist had drawn similarities between translation and sowing couch grass: “Once it’s rooted, you can never get rid of it.” Indeed, translations, especially those after the 1980s, had a crucial role in our cultural life. However, despite its value and the effort spent, the act of translation never obtained the reputation it deserved in our world of thought. Indubitably, this is also true for the whole world. Despite the increase, the numbers of translated texts still remain inadequate. Many crucial philosophical texts were only translated into Turkish during the 2000s, and there are still many others which are yet to be translated. For instance, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which is deemed to be one of the most important philosophical texts, wasn’t translated into Turkish until the 2000s. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks is yet to be translated.

Considering all of this, it is easier to understand the value of Husamettin Arslan’s translations and his sacrifices. As a translator on the verge of rediscovering philosophy and social sciences along with rendering these disciplines as part of a greater destiny, Arslan gained his reputation by translating works including the most distinguished ones on Heidegger. He emphasized the importance of translation and translated many works from English to Turkish. By doing so, Arslan brought to the Turkish reader numerous books on philosophy and sociology.

Life teaches us the following: the beginning determines the end. Life goes on as it has begun. Therefore, it’s important to start strong. Looking at Arslan’s biography, we can see that he has emphasized the importance of translation since the beginning of his academic career.

“Turkey is a good mill. It grinds all, valuable and worthless alike,” said Husamettin Arslan. Arslan’s emergence as a translator was in the late 1980s. After many years in which hope was consumed by disappointments and realizing that his consequent translations did nothing but serve other intellectual circles, Arslan found his own way – the Paradigm – which are verified by his relatives and the chronological listing of his works.

Because of its content and approach, the distinct Epistemic Community became a sensation especially among intellectual circles. It still continues to be cited by numerous academic and non-academic works. Arslan always insisted that the intellectual class in Turkey was a monopoly. In this respect, it’s definite that the critical intellectual circles in Turkey have learned a lot from his translations and works. So, let me say this about the politics of translation: Tell me the translations you’ve read, and I’ll tell you what you’re not.

Praised by Arslan, Terry Eagleton claimed that the cultural clash in the world began after the Cold War. Meanwhile, Arslan was aware that Turkey had been going through a cultural clash since the beginning of the country’s modernization. As a Turkish intellectual, he grasped that one of the most essential issues of the country remained unsolved in the face of the following question: “How can we be ourselves while modernizing and adopting modern ideas?” In this respect, Arslan was the elder version of late Mehmet Kucuk, as they were both translators who admired postmodernist thinkers. This is a fair comparison considering the fact that Arslan left ‘Epistemic Community’ while Kucuk left ‘Contingency Theory’ as their legacies.

Arslan believed that Terry Eagleton, who had a Catholic background, would have a better chance of understanding Turkey. More, he deemed it important that Eagleton defined himself as a heterodox, thus, a traditional Marxist. Yet, Arslan was unable to agree with Eagleton on postmodernism. He never refrained from saying the following about Eagleton: “How can we remain ‘socialists,’ ‘democrats,’ ‘conservatives,’ or ‘rightists’ in a world in which postmodernists exist and where Derrida wrote numerous books and Lyotard’s books are still being read? How can we be leftists when Foucault’s works are here? We cannot. We cannot live in spite of thinkers called ‘postmodernists.’ I wonder how Eagleton could continue to be an old-school Marxist in spite of Derrida, Foucault or even ‘postmodern Marxism.’”

Years later, Husamettin Arslan understood that his father, who gained all his knowledge with the hardships of life, had a fragile heart. When he started to realize that he was transforming into his father after 35, his intellectual interest deviated. For instance, he asked whether Novalis’s “all returns are to home” referred to becoming your own father. He experienced that sons always tried to become something else with the energy bestowed by youth. However, also saw that those very sons began to transform into their fathers when their energies were depleted by the hardships of life and personal obstructions. In this sense, it’s possible to summarize Arslan’s two characteristics with two Russian novels: Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Russia is synonymous with literature, but we failed to create it. We have to think about this: first with Arslan’s ‘Baban Olsun…’ article, which talks about his father, and second through his translations. Of course, we’ll have a better opportunity in understanding this when his journals, which reflect the search for perceiving the world through an ontological lens, are published.

The objects surrounding our daily lives are not just pieces of particular shape and color meant to perform a particular function. Objects are texts that convey meanings. They are the instruments of emotion and ideology. Therefore the narratives built through the usage of social and cultural objects can not be treated as objective or innocent. They are filled with the makers’ bias: ideology, motives or sensation. Television dramas and films are like dreams. Elements belonging to disperate contexts or situations can be combined together along with human beings from disperate backgrounds. A story can be woven through this manipulation that is far away from reality or makes the idea of reality obsolete. Yet, in these represented or imaginary stories, objects and their combinations become metaphors, open to interpretations. Hence, in the light of above statement, visual media plays two important roles: it reflects as well as shapes the society. Here we comparatively examine two television serials. One is set in Turkey (Huzur Sokağı or Serenity Street), and another is set in Pakistan (Khuda Aur Mohabbat or God and the Love). Representation of Islam, Islamic symbols and women are at the centre of the two narratives.

“I did not start wearing hijab before because … ,” says Feyza (Selin Demiratar), the character of a young Turkish girl who wears miniskirts, visits late night parties and drinks occasionally, to her beloved, Bilal (Kutsi). Feyza belongs to a rich corporate family where the concept of hijab exists as a dressing for the poor, ignorant and backward people, thus having no place within the realm of a “modern” family.

“… because I always had a feeling that if I begin wearing hijab I would be doing it for you, not for God. Now I don’t care whether you are with me or not. I have found my world now,” Feyza tells Bilal, a man who comes from a modest family and defines every aspect of his life in keeping with religious guidelines. Feyza utters these words after going through a series of hardships and deception at the hands of her own family members and friends. As she prays in silence calmness befalls her. Prayers give her peace that she has found absent all through her life. Now in this new world bowing her head to God liberates her from all the sadness of past and fear of future. Even Bilal, her beloved, who in fact had opened the gates for her to this new world of spirituality becomes insignificant to her. Such is the overpowering influence of this new life.

http://thenewturkey.org/the-journey-of-a-soul-ayse-sasa/

These lines describe what lies at the heart of the narrative of the Şenol Sönmez directed Turkish television serial, Huzur Sokağı. Few things in this message set Huzur Sokağı apart from its Pakistani counterpart, Khuda Aur Mohabbat, directed by Saud Raheem. First, it establishes that religion is to be appreciated as a ‘consequence’, not cult or authority. Second, compromise between love and God, rich and poor is not completely impossible, as represented in Khuda Aur Mohabbat. Third, within a social setup woman’s identity does not have to necessarily be overshadowed by religion, which has historically been deemed as proprietorship of man. The two serials, though unrelated, hit the screen around the same time in their respective countries – Huzur Sokağı in 2012 and Khuda Aur Mohabbat in 2011.

The relationship between religion and modernity

Both Huzur Sokağı and Khuda Aur Mohabbat have a socio-historical context in Turkey and Pakistan. The two countries are Muslim majority and the debate between Islam, secularism and modernity has existed ever since the two states were formed in the first half of the twentieth century. More specifically, since the 1980s the debate gained more salience in Pakistan as well as Turkey, with a particular focus on women. In Turkey, the demand for the right to wear the headscarf in public places, like schools, public offices and universities, was raised as the secularist republican rule had become ever more oppressive in that regard. On the other hand, through Zia-ul-Haq’s “Islamization” process in Pakistan new parameters were legislatively drawn curtailing women’s rights. The two television dramas capture these two opposing debates involving Islam, women’s rights, and human rights.

Huzur Sokağı represents a complex interplay between religion and modernity. It rejects modernity in its Western form, which promotes individualism and divests a human being of spirituality. It completes this “modernity” by infusing a spiritual element – that is religious values – into it, and it revitalizes the power of a sokak or street. Thus an individual is no more simply a corporate machine, but a human being, a social animal who identifies himself/herself within a neighborhood. The food cooking in one kitchen can be shared by the entire community. So Huzur Sokağı emphasizes molding of the existing social order to make it conducive for all the social agents irrespective of their beliefs, gender and economic status. It does this by putting the individual at the center. Conversely, however, Khuda Aur Mohabbat reflects the rigidity of the social structure in which an individual is merely an object that serves this structure.

For a century now structuralists and post-structuralists have been arguing about the arbitrariness of meaning of symbols and words; the same word or object can mean different things in different settings. This is exactly what the two serials exemplify. The headscarf and abaya, traditionally a Muslim dress, for instance, assume two different types of meanings within the setting of the two television serials under discussion.

The power of ideological symbolization

Huzur Sokağı’s hijab, analyzing the character of Shukran (Sinem Ozturk), signifies wisdom, self-respect, patience, politeness and prudence. The hijab of Khuda Aur Mohabbat, on the other hand, is a symbol of an overarching authority — a mix of religion and patriarchy. It not only segregates but also blocks. Apart from being a symbol controlling identity of a woman, the hijab of Khuda Aur Mohabbat, which also extends to the face, allowing only eyes to be visible, acts as a wall that solidifies the difference between male and female. Throughout this drama serial hijab has a central role that cements the male-female difference.

However, perhaps for the first time in modern Turkey, a television serial has such an extensive visibility of the hijab and abaya, yet there is no conscious focus on this dress. Huzur Sokağı’s increased exposure to the Islamic dressing may be attributed to the changing ground reality of Turkey. After the lifting of the ban on headscarf in Turkey, the visibility rate of headscarf throughout the country has gone up. The portrayal of women, with and without headscarf, involved in normal exchange of social life, is an assertion of the need for different sections of the society to intermingle and coexist with each other in the new Turkey.

Its focus is on the complex features of characters – wisdom, shallowness, recklessness, foresight, morality/immorality, politeness and so on – that cut across the ideological and identity boundaries. In the process, not only is the social gender difference obliterated but the secularist-conservative divide also becomes insignificant; one is not promoted over the other. For instance, Bilal, the lead male character, who is depicted as very religious, self-respecting and authoritative, falls in love with Feyza, who is quite unlike him. For Bilal, the condition to be in love with Feyza and get married to her is not to transform her to a pious woman. This is not even a point. Even Bilal’s own teenage sister, Rezaan, doesn’t wear a headscarf and sometimes wears miniskirts. Still Bilal loves and cares for Rezaan as an elder brother would do. Though it is Bilal who, after their father’s demise, acts as head-of-the family, he never imposes anything to the family members. He acts as an obedient and respectful son to his mother.

The narrative and symbolization of Huzur Sokağı is integral to the Turkish government’s ideology in trying to redefine Turkish identity, i.e., advocating the creation of a culture of cooperation, rather than competition or confrontation, among different social and ideological groups. In a society like Turkey there has been a raging antagonism between extreme/strict secularist policies of past regimes at the cost of those who were surviving their religious tradition in the country’s remote corners.

Huzur Sokağı also attempts to serve as an educational platform which sends clear socio-cultural signals. It does not obliterate the “secularist” discourse to promote a “religious” one (as some scholars tend to see them as two binary opposites). It is simply redefining the secularist discourse to broaden its circumference in order to become more inclusive. Khuda Aur Mohabbat, on the other hand, is a spectacle of tragedy. An individual is trapped in a structure, whose rigidity gives him/her a choice between death and submission. The individual is an object whose emotions, feelings, thoughts and desires are subject to structural regulation.

The Social Divide

When two people – Imaan (Sadia Khan), a girl from a poor and religious family and Hamaad (Imran Abbas), a boy from a modern, rich family transcend their class boundaries and fall in love with each other, the end they meet is death. Even changing sides does not help Hamaad: he forsakes his rich family to become equal to his beloved and begins to pray, but then it is the girl’s father Molvi Aleemuddin (Salman Shahid) who refuses to accept this marriage, signaling the social stigma, entrenched inequality between the two families and “illegitimacy of love marriage in Islam”.

The uncompromisability of the social classes so vividly illustrated in Khuda Aur Mohabbat evokes a high degree of emotion. The narrative and mode of representation can be interpreted as a general signifier for the most of the post-colonial South Asian cultures, including India and Pakistan, the two most populous nations of the region. Within the boundaries of these countries two unequal societies exist side by side. While one is defined by its economic status – a highly westernized elite who predominantly occupy governmental positions, the other is defined by its poverty and religiosity.

Due to poverty and massive population states in Pakistan and India have not been able to exert their authority to the peripheries of the countries. Consequently, in the absence of any support from state apparatuses, large masses of population find refuge in cultural and religious rituals. It is the local bodies at village level and, in some cases, tribal bodies, that regulate the social life through religious or cultural decrees. Weak state institutions find it hard to reach out to the people at the periphery. While the elite are guided by their economic status, those at the bottom adopt religion and traditional rituals as an authority guiding social behavior. This overwhelmingly resulted in religion becoming a source of power, which became capable of justifying patriarchy. Molvi Aleemuddin represents this authority in Khuda Aur Mohabbat. The serial symbolically captures this convolution.

Islamic symbols like hijab and beard, in the past two decades especially, have assumed an extremely negative connotation. Comparative analysis of Huzur Sokağı and Khuda Aur Mohabbat opens a window to see the artificial nature of human perception about symbols: meanings of symbols are not natural; they are produced through social interaction. Therefore, anything wrong about Islamic symbols is only a matter of human perception, which can change as well.