Acquittal in Giresun

In the preceding article we saw how İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was brought on the seventh of December 1925 into the grip of the extraordinary jurisdiction that the regime had unleashed against the resistance to the Hat Law, and how he, a scholar who had spent his whole life within the law and in the company of his books, was destined to answer before one of the Independence Tribunals, namely that of Giresun, the old port town on the Black Sea under whose jurisdiction the protests of the surrounding regions had been brought. We saw then also on what the accusation rested, namely on a book that he had lawfully published in 1924, a good year and a half before the Hat Law existed, with the permission of the Ministry of Education, and we established that in that ordering of the times lay the whole untenability of the charge, for a man cannot possibly be accused of inciting resistance against a regulation that at the time of his writing had not yet been promulgated. The article closed with the announcement that the first court to judge his fate, the tribunal of Giresun, would come to a verdict that, on the one point on which the law could not possibly bear the accusation, would acknowledge its untenability, and that would thereby, for a brief and deceptive moment, raise the hope that justice would yet take its course. It is at that verdict, and at the bitter manner in which it was granted to him and in the same moment taken from him again, that this article takes its beginning.

The courtroom on the Black Sea

In the course of December 1925 İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was brought before the tribunal that held its sessions in Giresun, and it is important that one set sharply before one’s eyes the nature of the court before which he appeared, for it was not a question of an ordinary criminal judge who weighs the evidence and hears the defence within the safeguards of an ordered procedural law, but of an Independence Tribunal that had been established in the turbulent years of the national struggle to punish treason and desertion with the hardest hand, and that now, long after the war had been fought, was brought out once more to break the resistance against the hat. Such a court united in itself the powers that ordinary law carefully distributes over different instances, for it was at once accuser, judge and executioner, and its sentences could, without any review being possible from a higher instance, be carried out at once, so that a man who was brought before it knew himself in the hands of a power that could dispose of his freedom and his life without his being able to appeal to any shelter of the law.

The town in which this court held its sessions lay far from the capital where the name of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had been made in the years of his İstanbul learning, and it lay likewise far from the Anatolian interior where he had been born and formed, so that he found himself before his judges in a region that was foreign to him and that in these months was itself stirred by the hat protests. The judges who heard him did not see before them the scholar of standing who under the old empire had been appointed inspector of the medreses and whose judgment had weighed in the highest circles of the religious sciences, but a suspect who had been brought before them within the framework of a reckoning that the regime had spread out over all Anatolia, and it is against that background, in a courtroom that resembled an instrument of governance more than a seat of justice, that the scholar defended himself against an accusation whose core he had already seen through at his arrest.

The men who judged him

About the composition of the tribunal that heard İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ in Giresun, a great caution befits the historian, for the tradition that has grown around his last months has not always held to the demands of reliability, and it has added to the events in Giresun particulars, about the name of the presiding judge and about a personal grudge that is said to have determined his judgment, that upon closer testing cannot be substantiated with certainty and that we shall therefore not present as established fact. What the historian can say with more right is that the court was manned by men whom the regime had charged with the trial of the hat protests and who derived their authority from the extraordinary power of the Independence Tribunals, and it would be a form of falsification of history to fill the gaps in our knowledge with the firm designation of a single judge whose personal motives are said to have determined the outcome.

It is rather in the working of the court as such, and not in the disposition of a single judge, that one must seek the forces that determined the fate of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, for the tribunals were not the independent organs their name suggested, but instruments of a regime that would tolerate no contradiction of its course, and it is in the tension between what the judges according to the law had to acknowledge and what the regime demanded of them that the peculiar outcome of the affair in Giresun is to be explained. The judges stood before an accusation whose inner contradiction came so openly to light that even an extraordinary court could not bear it on the decisive point, and they had to choose between the demand of the law, which imposed on them the acknowledgment of the untenability of the charge, and the will of the regime, which demanded the conviction of the scholar, and in that choice, as will become clear, they took a remarkable decision, and one displeasing to the regime.

The defence of the scholar

When İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ answered before his judges, he disposed of a defence whose strength lay not in the eloquence or in the dexterity of the pleader, but in the simple and irrefutable truth of the facts, and he needed to add to those facts nothing but the clear ordering that brought their inner logic of itself to light. His book, Frenk Mukallidliği ve Şapka, the imitation of the Europeans and the hat, had appeared in 1924, in the years when the Republic had just been proclaimed and the caliphate had just been abolished, and it had been printed with the permission of the Ministry of Education, which is to say that the competent authority of that same state which now prosecuted him had examined the work before its appearance and had approved it, so that he had not merely acted within the law but even with the express blessing of the authority that now had brought him before the court as an agitator.

The core of his defence came down to an inescapable reckoning of time that no judge, however subject to the will of the regime, could deny without doing violence to reason itself, for the Hat Law had been ratified in parliament on the twenty-fifth of November 1925, and the protests that the regime ascribed to his book had taken place in the late autumn of that same year, while his book had been printed more than a year earlier, at a time when there was as yet no talk of a law on the hat and when no one could foresee its existence. How, ran the question to which the accusation had no answer, could a writing have incited the resistance against a law that at the moment of its appearance did not yet exist, and how could a writer be held responsible for protests that broke out more than a year after the publication of his work, against a measure of which at the time of his writing he could not possibly have known that it would ever be promulgated.

A treatise, not a call

Beside this irrefutable reckoning of time İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ adduced a second pillar, which concerned the nature of his book itself and which weighed no less heavily than the first, for the accusation rested not only on an impossible chronology but also on a false representation of what he had actually written. His work was no pamphlet that called the population to disobedience against the state, and it contained no exhortation to resistance, no slogan that could have inflamed the crowds on the squares, no word that incited the reader to a deed of revolt, but it was a scholarly treatise on a principle of Islamic jurisprudence, composed in the language of a scholar who addresses his fellow believers and not a rebellious throng, and it treated the question whether the Muslim who adopts the outward customs of the non-Muslim thereby sins against the principle of teşebbüh, the becoming-alike to those who stand outside the faith.

It was in that book, in other words, a question of a reasoning within the transmitted jurisprudence of the Hanafi school, of the weighing of a religious and cultural principle that the Muslim scholars had treated for centuries, and not of a political deed directed against the state, and it was precisely that distinction, between the setting forth of a doctrine and the inciting to a deed, that the accusation had to obscure in order to keep itself standing. İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had neither the courage nor the inclination to disown before his judges what he had argued in his book, for he stood behind every word he had written and he saw in his writing no crime but the fulfilment of the duty of the scholar to instruct his fellow believers about the demands of their religion, yet he pointed out with emphasis that the setting forth of a doctrinal principle was something entirely different from the inciting of a crowd, and that the law he was said to have undermined did not, at the moment when he wrote, exist.

The society from the vanished years

Beside the book the regime had added to the accusation a second element, which it drew from a more distant past, namely the memory of his leadership of the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti, the society for the elevation of Islam that had arisen in İstanbul in the years of the occupation and of which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had in a later phase, after Mustafa Sabri Efendi ﵀ had been raised to Şeyhülislâm, held the chairmanship. That society belonged to an era that differed in all respects from the present, the era of the occupied empire in its death throes after the armistice of Mudros, when the Allied powers held sway in İstanbul and the future of the Muslims of Anatolia hung in uncertainty, and the circumstances under which it had existed no longer resembled in anything those of the established Republic of 1925.

Before his judges İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ could point out that the society had long since been dissolved, that its existence belonged to a vanished episode, and that it was unjust to connect a man on the ground of a function that he had held years before in an entirely different world with protests that had taken place in December 1925 in another region and for another occasion. That his role in that society was moreover judged differently by the sources, and that the deeds the regime ascribed to it could not without more be charged to his person, made the second pillar of the accusation no less unsteady than the first, and the judges who wished to weigh the matter honestly stood before a charge that consisted of two parts, of which the one concerned a book that had broken no law because the law did not yet exist, and the other a society that already belonged to the past and whose circumstances had nothing to do with the hat protests.

The burden of the reckoning of time

It is important to recognise that the defence of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ did not rest on a denial of what he had done, nor on the pleading for mercy or the abjuring of his conviction, but on the simple demand that the court take the facts as they were and not as the regime wished to see them. He did not ask for forgiveness, for he had done nothing that required forgiveness; he pointed only to the impossibility that a book of 1924 could have instigated a revolt against a law of the end of 1925, and to the difference between a scholarly treatise and a call to resistance, and he thereby placed the judges before the choice between the acknowledgment of that truth and its deliberate violation in the service of a predetermined outcome.

In the courtroom of Giresun there thus came to the fore the peculiar severity of the facts themselves, for however the judges might be disposed toward the scholar, they could not undo the reckoning of time, and they could not read from the evidence what the evidence did not contain, namely that the man who stood before them had incited the protests of December. The accusation needed, in order to remain standing with any appearance of validity, a connection between the book and the protests that the facts could not supply, and on the decisive point, where the law demands a proven deed and can tolerate no surmise about a distant influence, the charge fell apart under its own weight, and the judges of Giresun, however extraordinary their authority, saw themselves obliged to draw from it the conclusion that the law imposed upon them.

The acquittal that changed nothing

And so it came to pass, in December 1925, that the tribunal of Giresun handed down a verdict that for a moment seemed to confirm the course of the law and raised the hope that justice would do its work, for the court acquitted İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, and it declared him by its verdict of beraat innocent of the accusation that had been brought against him with regard to the hat protests. It was a verdict that acknowledged the untenability of the accusation on the point on which the law could not possibly bear it, and that, however one judges the motives of the judges, did justice in its outcome to the facts and confirmed what the scholar had maintained from the first moment, namely that a book of 1924 could not possibly be held responsible for the events of December 1925. For the span of a breath the man who had been brought into the grip of the extraordinary jurisdiction stood before the law as a free and innocent man.

Yet the hope that lay in that verdict was of a cruel brevity, for the acquittal did not bring him the freedom that it ought, by the letter of the law, to have brought, and after the verdict he was not released from his captivity but held in detention, so that he shared the peculiar and bitter experience of a man who is declared innocent by a court and nevertheless remains in chains. The regime did not let the acquittal stand, and it was not prepared to tolerate its conclusion, the release of the scholar, for the decision it had taken in this affair had not fallen in the courtroom of Giresun but had already beforehand been taken in the council chambers of power, and the verdict of a tribunal, however lawful, could not undo that decision. What the law had granted was in the same moment taken away again by the will of the regime, and the scholar who had just been declared innocent found himself after his acquittal in a captivity no less firm than before.

A verdict overruled by the will

In this course of events, in which an acquittal remained without consequence and a verdict was overruled by the political will, the true nature of the power under which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ found himself in these months comes to light more sharply than in any conviction, for a conviction one may, however unjust, still explain as an error of the judges or as a mistaken weighing of the evidence, but an acquittal that is ignored unmasks the power that ignores it as a power that considers itself in no way bound by the law. The regime had maintained the form of a trial, it had brought the scholar before a tribunal and let him defend himself, but when that trial produced an outcome that did not please it, it simply set the outcome aside and held fast the man whom its own court had just acquitted.

It is in this bitter contradiction that the deepest injustice of the whole affair reveals itself, for it shows that the fate of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was determined not by the law but by calculation, and that justice was for the regime not the goal but at most an obstacle, a form that one observed as long as it served and that one set aside as soon as it threatened the outcome one had fixed beforehand. A state of law distinguishes itself from an arbitrary power precisely in this, that it honours even the verdict that displeases it, and that the acquittal of a suspect is for it an irreversible fact that binds power hand and foot, but the regime of the Independence Tribunals knew no such binding, and the acquittal of Giresun, which in a state of law would have had to open for the scholar the gate of his prison, meant for him nothing more than a postponement of the reckoning that had already been devised elsewhere.

The bearing of the scholar toward a freedom denied him

How İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ inwardly processed the cruel contradiction of his condition belongs to the hidden matters that the historian may approach only with great caution, and it would be a form of falsification of history to fill the silent hours in which he learned that his acquittal did not bring him freedom with invented scenes or with words that the sources have not left us. What the tradition holds with some unanimity is that he bore the bitter turn of his fate with the same composed steadfastness that had marked his whole life, and that he allowed himself neither to be drawn by the acquittal into a premature hope, nor to be driven by the absence of his release into despair, for he had already in his younger years, when in 1913 the unjust banishment had befallen him, learned how greatly a state that places power above the law can play with the fate of an innocent man.

The equanimity with which he received a freedom that was at once taken from him again was not the indifference of a man who holds life cheap, but the orientation of a scholar who sought his hold not in the accidental shelter of his circumstances but in that which no power could take from him, and who had laid the disposal of his fate in the hands of his Lord ﷻ. He knew that the acquittal of an earthly tribunal, however lawful, was not the last instance before which man has to answer, and that the justice on which he relied was not that of the courts of Ankara or of Giresun, but that of the Judge ﷻ before whom all the power of men would one day render account, and it was from that trust that he drew the strength neither to rejoice in the acquittal nor to despair at its disregard, but to accept both with the same calm as decrees that came to him from a higher hand.

The difference between freedom and vindication

Whoever considers the fate of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ in these days comes upon a distinction that history seldom brings to light so purely, namely the difference between the freedom that a man receives from his fellow men and the vindication that in truth belongs to him, for freedom was granted to him in Giresun and in the same moment taken from him again, but the vindication, the fact that a court, however extraordinary, could not have done otherwise than acknowledge his innocence, remained his and belongs to him to this day. The regime could keep the gate of his prison closed to him, and it would soon carry him to another tribunal that paid no heed at all to the acquittal of Giresun, but it could not undo the fact that the first court to judge him had found him innocent of the accusation for which he had been brought before it.

Therein lies, in retrospect, a meaning that the moment itself could not yet reveal, for the acquittal of Giresun stands in history as a testimony that even under the heaviest pressure of the regime the facts did not let themselves be wholly bent, and that there was a court, established by that regime and manned by its own men, that could not hide the untenability of the accusation and that did the scholar the justice that power denied him. That his acquittal did not avail him and that he would nevertheless travel the road to the gallows takes nothing from that verdict of its meaning, for it proves that his conviction, when it finally came, did not flow from the law but from the will, and it places beyond doubt that the man who would later be put to death in Ankara had been held innocent by the first judges who heard him.

What the road to Ankara foretold

When one surveys the events of December 1925 in Giresun, what strikes one in the first place is the bitter irony that the law in this affair did indeed speak but was not heard, and that the acquittal granted to İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ opened no gate but slammed a new door behind him, for the regime, which would not tolerate the verdict of its own tribunal, had already decided not to release the scholar but to bring him before another court, where the outcome would be left less to the accident of the law. The acquittal had not disarmed but provoked the regime, for it had shown that a court that weighed the facts honestly could come to no conviction, and precisely for that reason the affair had to be taken away from the judges who had judged it according to the law, and transferred to a tribunal that lay more firmly in the hand of the government.

So İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was on the twenty-sixth of December 1925, a few weeks after his arrest and shortly after the acquittal that ought to have given him back his freedom, carried away under guard from Giresun and set on the road to the capital, to Ankara, where the tribunal was seated that in the years of the young Republic had become the most formidable of all the Independence Tribunals and whose men had already shown in countless cases that from them no acquittal was to be expected for whoever the regime had branded its adversary. He left the Black Sea region as a man who had been acquitted by the law and was held captive by power, and he travelled, in chains and under guard, to a court where the verdict that awaited him would flow no longer from the weighing of the evidence but from the will of the regime.

What awaited him in Ankara, the tribunal under the men who upheld the name of the Republic with the hardest hand, the renewed accusation to which no acquittal was any longer attached, and the verdict that would at last decide upon his life, is the subject of the next article. There we shall follow the scholar from the port town on the Black Sea, where the law had still acquitted him, to the capital where power would condemn him, and we shall see how a man who had been held innocent by his first judges preserved before his second judges the dignity of one who knows that the outcome already stands fixed and who therefore no longer pleads for his life but leaves his fate to the decree of his Lord ﷻ.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography; for the trial at Giresun, the acquittal of December 1925 and the transfer to Ankara on 26 December 1925].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the data on his last months, the course of the trial and his bearing during the captivity].
• Mustafa Armağan, İskilipli Atıf Hoca and related essays on the Şapka affair, Timaş Yayınları (İstanbul, 2008) [for the acquittal at Giresun and the subsequent transfer to Ankara as a characteristic example of a judicial verdict overruled by the political will].
• Ergün Aybars, İstiklâl Mahkemeleri, Bilgi Yayınevi (Ankara, 1975) [the standard work on the Independence Tribunals, their extraordinary powers and their action against the hat protests].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th ed., 2017), pp. 166–205 [for the Hat Law of 1925, the hat protests and the political context of the young Republic].