No, I am not going to kibitz with my two cents’ worth (maybe less) about abortion-related issues in the United States. Strange enough, the American people, as adherents of the most secularized religion in the world, do have such cases. In contrast, the people of Islam, the most ecclesiastical religion (if this can be said of Islam), seemingly have no qualms about disrupting life as it starts in a mother’s womb. So, again, strange, but it is not the issue I have in mind right now.
The question growing in my mind is neither political nor religious but social. So let me tell you a little about how this socio-philosophical issue started re-growing in my mind. First, suppose you followed last week’s “obituaries of the media elders” website (that is my timeline on Facebook). In that case, you know the passing of Orhan Erinç, an “ustad” (or “Ustaz” if you prefer the Persian honorific title for an expert in his or her area) of Turkish journalists. He was a member of the “old school”; he had been everything one could be in a newspaper organization: a reporter, an editor, a manager, and finally, the publisher of Cumhuriyet – which means “Republic” in Turkish, the oldest newspaper in Türkiye.
It was founded by an Ottoman publisher in the (literally) early days of the new regime; the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, named it. It has always been staunchly Kemalist, even when the proponents of the ideology turned into a fusion of civilian-militaristic-intellectual-secularist pro-coup tutelary putschists. I know that this is a mouthful, but it simply denominates groups that forcefully intervened in the civilian political system three times; first, they murdered a prime minister and two of his ministers and jailed all the members of Parliament supporting the government. Later on, those U.S.-supported coups turned out to be less bloody; but they were coups.
Our Orhan Ustaz was a professional to the end, not a mastermind behind those military coups, nor a supporter of them, quickly and professionally managing a left-leaning or populistic newspaper after he was fired from Cumhuriyet. That was how I got the opportunity of working with him in one of those populist newspapers that could very well be placed in the realm of “yellow journalism.” He could edit an ode professionally to a pro-Kemalist coup or an ode to a famous singer with equal understanding and brilliance.
That was the background information to what I am about to quote as the personal life philosophy of “Orhan ağabey” – as we all who knew him called him emphatically our “elder brother.” Oral Çalışlar, also a veteran journalist and his long-time co-worker, reminded me of his farewell article for Orhan Erdinç titled “Nasılsın?” which asked how he was doing. Orhan ustad would respond by saying, “Mecburen yaşıyoruz; mecburen öleceğiz.” (We are living as we’re obliged, and we’re compelled to die too.)
I, too, remember Orhan ağabey saying it. It was a shortened version of a philosophical mantra: “We were born by chance; we are forced to live; and we will die compulsorily.”
The adverb “mecburen” (which underlines an obligation), imported into Turkish and Persian from Arabic, is one of the multisense words with a rich meaning. The Arabic root of the word is “jbr” (force), but the poetic usage of Arabs, Persians and Turks made it denote a large plethora of situations and conditions. “Compulsorily” is on the one end of its meaning spectrum, and "forcedly" is on the other. Sometimes you are happy that whatever is happening is “faintly” accepted; sometimes, it could happen “coercibly.”
I am not sure why, among all things that one should think of about Orhan Erinç, this clumsily expressed joke of answer as a placeholder for “Well, I am OK. How about you?”: “Mecburen yaşıyoruz” stuck in my mind after reading Oral’s article.
I don’t know whether we exist by chance. My good Jewish friend Chaim Neustadter would object this forcefully: If our existence is just luck, a simple coincidence, not as a result of a divine design, then everything he did to keep his Auschwitz-survivor dad alive in an incredibly secularized Maryland hospital in America, would be meaningless. But most of the time, we don’t know the mind behind that design, its reasons for it; we perceive it as empty, “like a martin to his gourd,” on its own accord.
If I don’t know why I am here now, then I keep living haphazardly; not one day would (or should) be different than any other day. And, as Orhan ağabey said, one day, we die compulsorily.
The Arabic language has introduced another word to Turkish: for the reasons that we cannot reckon with, we call them not reason but “Hikmet,” a hidden cause. Some people would say that even if you perceive a raison d'être for something, you still don’t know its real “Hikmet.”
Orhan ağabey was on this earth for a reason; I witnessed that he did not live compulsorily in vain. But yes, about the end, we do die whether we like it. He was a good teacher. He could have taught more; however, “Hikmet” is about the timing of his death.
If we listen to American author Ralph Waldo Emerson or Sufi philosopher Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, when they remind us that when we were born, we were crying and everyone else was smiling; but we can live out life so at the end, we would be smiling entering the next and final phase of our existence, those we leave behind would be crying.
May all those teachers who departed while we are still here for a reason may rest in peace.
