"As Time Passes" is a book by late Turkish philosopher Teoman Duralı in which we witness episodes from his life, beginning with his childhood and extending to his later years, and read his striking reflections on the era through those episodes. In the book, through Duralı’s family and his family’s friends, we also encounter a vivid historical narrative of the period and its details. When we look at the life episodes presented in this book, the most striking aspect is his deep immersion in life itself and his being, in the fullest sense, a man of conversation. In his own words, "Conversation was the crown jewel of social life.”

His father – an important bureaucrat of the republic – maintained close dialogue with his circle, which enabled him to better understand his era. His father was among the first to be sent abroad and went to Germany to study engineering. From his return onward, he undertook highly significant duties. His life journey, which began in Türkiye's Zonguldak, later continued in Ankara and finally in Istanbul. Beginning to work at an early age drew him more deeply into life. He was never a successful student. It was a difficult period of education: "I lost four years in secondary education. I was at university for two years after graduating. Another year went by like that – making five. After entering university, I took another break while moving from the first year to the second – six. A total loss of six years.”

Two things particularly attracted Duralı: learning new languages and letting himself be carried away by the flow of life. Knowing many languages and being familiar with nearly all the world’s languages, Duralı pursued his curiosity wherever life carried him, moving along that path without resistance. Although his fascination with the seas and with becoming a captain disrupted his schooling, he crossed countries to satisfy this curiosity, and in the places he went, despite financial hardship, he worked at any job without complaint while never withdrawing from his surroundings, consistently remaining at the center of conversations. In other words, throughout his life, he journeyed not from the book to life, but from life to the book. For example, when he was assigned to teach in Elazığ, he did not confine himself to a university-home routine; instead, taking risks, he traveled extensively throughout the region, engaged in conversations and built friendships.

Because the focus of the never-ending evening conversations in their home was politics, he had the opportunity to hear all the dynamics of his era’s political currents from different voices. As he himself states, he is a good listener. He witnessed the developments, dislocations, impasses, and searches for new directions in the Republican period from the very center, owing to his father’s position and especially his uncle’s political identity. Moreover, since the elders – remnants of the late Ottoman world – were themselves people who had lived through both the Ottoman era and the transition to the republic, this testimony was highly layered. His uncle lived in Istanbul and wrote for the newspaper Vatan. Their move to Ankara following his father’s election as a member of Parliament further diversified this experience of witnessing. Thanks to the very different circles of his great-uncle and his elder brother, he lived within an extremely wide social network. For example, Turkish intelligence official Hiram Abas was a very close friend of his brother. He stood at the center of a milieu frequented by the bureaucrats, politicians, writers and academics of the period. Writers Kemal Tahir and Aziz Nesin, former Foreign Minister Mümtaz Soysal and photojournalists Ara Güler and Coşkun Aral are only a few examples from this circle. Duralı offers a striking description of philosophers: "The philosopher gathers the dust floating in the air and extracts from it a concrete piece.” In much the same way, within this vast environment he inhabited, Duralı gathered the dust in the air and expressed his testimony of the era in a highly concrete manner throughout the book.

In the 1940s, the social landscape of Türkiye appeared sharply divided into two groups: "civil servants" and "peasants." While civil servants lived relatively comfortable lives, the peasants – who constituted the vast majority – struggled to survive amid deprivation. These were two worlds so alien to one another that, while the people battled poverty, civil servants inhabited a markedly different reality. Moreover, while these two distinct worlds coexisted, the past – especially the Ottoman period – was constantly disparaged, and the burden of present difficulties was laid at the feet of the Ottoman legacy, particularly Sultan Abdülhamid II: "In private lessons – not so much in small gatherings but certainly in schools – throughout my entire childhood, the Ottomans were spoken of negatively; publications were the same. History and civics classes, for instance. There was constant denigration. The so-called period of stagnation – everything after the 17th century – was treated as worthless. Especially the late period. Just as anti-Hitler sentiment was cultivated there, anti-Abdülhamid sentiment was cultivated here. We always learned of Abdülhamid as a devil, the 'Red Sultan'; that is how he was presented. I must have been in high school when, for the first time, I heard (writer and poet) Necip Fazıl (Kısakürek) speak appreciatively about Abdülhamid – I was stunned.” Different political currents, too, were in agreement on the question of history: "The common point on which both sides converged was hostility toward Turkishness – toward history, toward the past. Where does our past begin? In 1920. There is nothing before that.”

Duralı’s emphasis on Abdülhamid recurs throughout the book: "One of the greatest figures in our history – indeed the greatest – Sultan Abdülhamid II possessed an extraordinary state consciousness whose origins I have never been able to fully explain.” Elsewhere, he states, "With his positive aspects, Sultan Abdülhamid is the founder of today’s Türkiye.” He places particular emphasis on the emergence of Turkish identity and linguistic consciousness during Abdülhamid’s reign: "The heroes of the War of Independence were all men shaped in the Abdülhamid era. For better or worse, a consciousness of Turkishness also begins to emerge during Abdülhamid’s time. Abdülhamid attempts to construct a very interesting synthesis: the idea of bringing together Turkish identity and Islamic civilization. He also takes a very important step in this regard. He made Turkish the official medium of communication of the Ottoman state. Turkish is established as dominant throughout the Ottoman geography.” Because, as he puts it, "language is the spiritual and cultural treasury of a society. To eliminate the language is to destroy the society.”

According to Duralı, during the period of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, there existed, as noted above, a dual structure composed of a small group of civil servants and the large masses (peasants). While the masses remained distant from power and did not fully embrace the reforms, a similar duality had also existed in the Abdülhamid era – yet with an important difference. In that earlier period, the people stood with Abdülhamid, whereas the intellectuals and the bureaucratic class opposed him: "The upper ranks of the state and the people became one, while the intellectual and bureaucratic circles moved to the other side. A very striking picture emerged. That intellectual and bureaucratic group grew immensely powerful – and Abdülhamid himself had a share in their strengthening. Although he opened schools and educated the youth, he could not steer them in the direction he desired. In the end, the people and Abdülhamid were defeated; those who advocated Europeanization and modernity prevailed.” The educated strata and the civil servants were aligned with the People’s Party, and this pattern, he suggests, persisted over time. Just as they opposed the Democrat Party and its leader, former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, they have also now opposed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It seems that, since the Tanzimat era, these lands have never fully escaped this divided structure.

Moreover, with Germany’s loss of strategic ground – which had long influenced Turkish politics – the nationalists lost, and the Westernizers gained the upper hand: "There was a fierce struggle between the nationalists who were close or inclined toward the Germans, and the Westernizers and communists. The policy of balance that had begun during Mustafa Kemal’s time moved, under Ismet Pasha, toward giving greater weight to the nationalists. The likelihood of a German victory in the war was seen as very high. Yet after the war began in 1939 and especially following the Germans’ catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, the balance in our country changed completely: the nationalists were knocked down, and the Westernizers began to rise markedly.”

Since, in the case of Türkiye, the state was not founded by the people but rather the nation, through its language and religion, formed the state, intellectuals and civil servants came to occupy the center of this strong state authority. Consequently, language and culture were once again reshaped from above, severing the connection with history and leaving the people without memory: "What they forgot is this: when you abandon Islam, you also depart from Turkishness – and this is what in fact happened. The Left, the Republican Türkiye, moved away from Turkishness. We were never able to explain this properly. Should we remain Muslim? If you wish, do not remain so. But if you do not, you also lose your Turkishness. In medieval Europe, after the emergence of Islam, they did not say ‘Muslim’; they said ‘Turk.’ Read Luther – you will see. He constantly speaks of the Turks.” In the later pages of the book, he expresses this point even more clearly: "What a tragic misunderstanding. When you give primacy to Islam, you neglect your Turkishness; when you make Turkishness the center of gravity, you abandon Islam. Yet the two are obliged to complement one another.”

On the other hand, within the dominant secular European civilization of the modern age, no sacred element remained that could pose an obstacle. Anything that might have constituted a barrier was either domesticated or eliminated. According to Duralı, secular European civilization was transformed by adding economics (capitalism) to philosophy and science, giving rise to what he calls an Anglo-Jewish civilization. In this period, science formed a very powerful alloy with technology, generating a new momentum. While these transformations were taking place globally, in Türkiye – just as late Professor Idris Küçükömer pointed out in "The Alienation of the Order" – there were continual oscillations between statism and capitalism. Moreover, attempts to break free from dependency ultimately ended in coups. What is more, Western-oriented intellectual and bureaucratic circles, he argues, tended to overlook the fact that the ultimate beneficiary of these coups was always the United States: "When the coup of March 12 took place, our leftists celebrated – they practically danced with joy. I remember the writings of (journalists) Çetin Altan and Ilhan Selçuk: ‘At last it has happened; our army has returned to the Atatürkist line; from now on we will defeat imperialism,’ and so on. Then we look and see – it turns out it was a coup designed by the United States.”

Duralı’s anger toward the left is quite pronounced, and he regards it as a subcontractor of imperialism: "We saw, especially, that the left functioned as a subcontractor of imperialism. That accursed Anglo-American-Jewish imperialism had set up such a clever game. Those whom we thought were being directed from Moscow and Russia turned out to be managed along the London-Washington axis, operating under their command. It was so on March 12, and likewise in the events after Sept. 12.” Moreover, he argues that leftist circles dominant in the press and publishing sector consistently undermined the work of governments: "Secondly, the most important affliction confronting Türkiye was that the leftist subcontractor networks inserted by Anglo-Jewish imperialism continually wore down governments. The media organs, schools, and the instruments of advertising and propaganda were in their hands. Outside of military periods, political authority in Türkiye was extremely weak.”

In this period, society was, in his view, profoundly degraded in the realms of culture and its connection with history. Duralı characterizes what occurred as a "cultural genocide”: "Because the historical genetics of an entire society were altered and a ‘cultural genocide’ took place – this is a term I use; I do not recall whether I saw it elsewhere. The most painful, or most dramatic, aspect was, as I said, that we changed the script we had used for nearly a thousand years overnight. Yet our script, like every script and every language, is a reflection and expression of civilization. When you change that script and language, you also dissipate the civilization.” Consequently, new generations have grown up largely unaware of the past and of their historical background: "The new generation – my own and the one just before me – had been stripped of all background and no longer retained any connection with the past; indeed, it had become completely alien to our history.”

For this reason, in the face of the deep alienation he perceived, Duralı searched for someone who knew both these lands and the wider world – someone who could, in his own words, "bring the two shores together”: "The first founding rector of Elazığ University was local – someone who knew that culture and those conditions from within, who had grown up in them, yet like a fish in the sea, unaware of the wider world. The other type – the embassy undersecretary, the ‘monsieurs’ as Tayyip Bey once described the foreign service types – men like Erdal Bey knew the world and had internalized Europe’s bourgeois culture, but they knew nothing of Türkiye. The man who would bring these two shores together never emerged.” Thus, during these periods, Türkiye, he suggests, "was thrown into disarray in the hands of people who did not truly know the country.” In many ways, Duralı himself was such a figure who brought these two shores together. As editor Ayşe Yılmaz, who prepared the book for publication, puts it: "He was a world, a scholar, a friend. ... He lived philosophically with humility and embraced death standing upright.”