Transfer to Ankara

In the previous article we followed İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ to the tribunal of Giresun on the Black Sea, where, after his arrest of the seventh of December 1925, he had to answer for the accusation that his book on the hat had fanned the resistance to the Hat Law. We saw how that tribunal, after weighing the charge on the one point on which the law could not possibly sustain it, arrived at an acquittal that acknowledged the untenability of the allegation, for the book had appeared a good year before the law and with the permission of the competent authority, so that no reasonable person could reproach him with having called for resistance against a regulation that did not yet exist at the time he wrote. That acquittal, the beraat in the language of Turkish law, should have meant the end of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca’s ﵀ ordeal, for a court that had weighed the evidence and followed the chronology honestly had reached the only verdict the facts allowed, and in a state where law had stood above the will of those in power, he would after that ruling have returned in freedom to his books and his family in İstanbul. Yet the regime, which had proclaimed the scholar the very emblem of resistance and wished, in his downfall, to set a warning before the whole class of the ulama, was not prepared to let that favourable ruling stand, and instead of granting him the freedom that the tribunal of Giresun had accorded him on the matter of the hat protests, it kept him in chains and resolved to send him to the capital, where another tribunal, that of Ankara, would try him anew and on different grounds. On the twenty-sixth of December 1925 he was carried away under guard from the Black Sea region, bound for Ankara, and it is with that transfer, and with what awaited him there, that this article takes its beginning.

The winter journey to the capital

The transfer of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ to Ankara took place in the last days of December, the very heart of the Anatolian winter, when the highlands of the interior lie buried under the snow and the roads linking the coastal region to the central plateau wind through frozen passes and across deserted plains, and it is not difficult to imagine the hardships under which a prisoner made that long trek in that month, from the Black Sea region to the young capital that the regime had established in the midst of the Anatolian land. The sources have left us little about the particulars of that journey that can be established with certainty, and it would not befit the historian to adorn the scene with invented circumstances about the stages, the night lodgings, or the guards who accompanied him, for what we know with certainty is the date on which he was delivered from the grip of one tribunal into that of another, and the significance of that transfer weighs more heavily than any imagined particular.

What may be said with good ground is that the transfer itself was already a pointer to what awaited him in the capital, for a state that does not accept the favourable ruling of its own court and sends the acquitted man in chains to a second tribunal thereby makes it known that it is not seeking a verdict but a particular verdict, and that the outcome of the second trial was already settled in its intent before the first session had opened. The man who in the medrese of his youth had learned that knowledge of the religion is a trust that one is bound to hand on undamaged was now led across the wintry plains of Anatolia, away from the harbour city where the law had for a moment still been favourable to him, toward the city where the law had ceased to be the measure, and that trek through the snow was, in hindsight, the last journey of his life that led him not to the gallows but in its direction.

Ankara as the focal point of the new order

The city to which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was brought was not the venerable İstanbul on the Bosphorus, the old capital of the caliphate with its mosques and its centuries-old houses of learning, but Ankara, an until-recently unremarkable Anatolian provincial town that the regime had made the focal point of its movement in the years of the national struggle and that, after the founding of the Republic, it had raised to the rank of capital, precisely because it lay far from the old order and was wholly bound up with the new. In that city sat the Grand National Assembly that issued the laws of the Republic, and in that city were the men who governed the land and who, in the Hat Law and in the persecution of its opponents, imposed their will upon the population, so that whoever was brought to Ankara as a suspect entered a world that was in everything the opposite of the world in which the scholar had been formed, a world in which not reverence for transmitted knowledge but obedience to the state had become the highest virtue.

For an İstanbul scholar of the old mould, the transfer to Ankara therefore meant more than a change of court, for it carried him to the nerve centre of the power that was dismantling his entire world, the power that had abolished the caliphate, done away with the system of the medreses, and driven the laws of Islam out of public life, and it was before that power, in its own capital and in the shadow of its own assembly, that he had to answer. The court that awaited him there was not merely one of the many tribunals that in these months tried the protests in the provinces, but the tribunal of the capital itself, which stood closer than any other to the men of the regime and which received from them its commission and its direction, so that the transfer to Ankara in truth meant the delivery of the scholar to the very body that the regime bound most closely to its will.

The nature of the Independence Tribunal

To understand what awaited İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ in Ankara, one must take account of the nature of the tribunal before which he would appear, for the İstiklâl Mahkemesi, the Independence Tribunal, was no ordinary court in the sense in which an ordered state administers justice, but an extraordinary institution that had been called into being in the years of the national struggle to punish treason, desertion, and rebellion with the greatest speed and with the hardest hand. These tribunals had arisen out of the emergency of the war, when the young government in Ankara held that the ordinary course of law was too slow and too cautious to break the resistance to its authority, and they had received from the Grand National Assembly a power that would have been unthinkable in an ordered state under the rule of law, namely the power to judge without the safeguards of ordinary criminal law and to have their sentences, the death sentence included, carried out without any higher body being able to be asked for a review or an appeal.

That very last feature made the tribunal the formidable instrument that it was, for whereas in an ordinary course of law the verdict of the first judge can be submitted to the judgement of a higher court and the condemned man has a last refuge in the appeal, there the ruling of the Independence Tribunal was irrevocable and beyond any defence, so that the man who stood before such a tribunal knew that the word of these judges would be the last word over his fate and that no body on earth could revise it any longer. The tribunal united within itself the roles that in an ordered state are carefully divided among different institutions, and it judged with a swiftness that all but effaced the distinction between a trial and a retaliation, for the short span of time that elapsed with it between the accusation and the punishment left for the weighing of the evidence and the hearing of the defence only the semblance of a space.

A political instrument in the garb of the law

What made the tribunal of Ankara in these months into something other than a court that seeks after truth and justice was the close bond that tied it to the political leadership of the land, for the men who sat in the tribunal were not independent judges standing above the parties, but deputies from the circle of the regime, men who owed their position to the movement and whose judgement bent to the will of that movement. The tribunal was, in other words, not an institution that exercised the law independently of power, but an extension of that power itself, an instrument by which the regime granted its opponents the semblance of a trial while the outcome was already fixed in its intent, and whoever was brought before that tribunal entered not the hall of the law but the arena of political reckoning, clothed in the garb of a court.

In that distinction lies the whole tragedy of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, for in Giresun he had stood before a court that had still weighed the evidence and that, however extraordinary its powers were, had reached an acquittal on the matter of the hat protests because the facts allowed no other verdict, but in Ankara he would stand before a tribunal whose outcome was determined not by the facts but by the will of the regime, so that his legally unassailable defence, that his book could not have undermined the law because it had appeared a good year before that law, would here weigh as little as a feather against a sword. The scholar who had lived his whole life in the conviction that truth possesses its own force and that a sound line of reasoning also persuades would discover, in the hall of the Ankara tribunal, that against a power which seeks not truth but its own will, the sharpest reasoning loses its force.

The men of the tribunal

The tribunal that was to decide the fate of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was presided over by Ali Çetinkaya, a man who would remain known in the history of the young Republic by the nickname Kel Ali, and who in the years of the regime had earned a reputation for implacable hardness, for he was not the man to yield to the considerations of the law when the interests of the movement to which he had bound his career demanded a different verdict. Under his presidency the tribunal of Ankara had in these months grown into the most formidable of all the Independence Tribunals, and the men who came into contact with the hat protests knew that an appearance before the tribunal of Çetinkaya was an appearance before a judge who seldom inclined to leniency and who understood his commission as the breaking of the opposition to the course of the state.

Beside Çetinkaya sat in the tribunal the members Kılıç Ali and Reşit Galip, both men of the movement who owed their place to their loyalty to the regime, and the office of prosecutor was filled by the accuser Necip Ali Küçüka, whose task it was to formulate the charge against the scholar and to demand the punishment that the regime expected of the tribunal. Together these men formed the court before which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ would have to answer, and it is important to establish that none of them was an independent magistrate who grounded his judgement solely on the evidence and on the law, but that they all belonged to the circle of the regime and that their administration of justice followed the direction that the political leadership of the land indicated to them. It was not the judges of an ordered state who saw the scholar before them, but the executors of a political will, and into their hands his fate had been laid in a manner that had little to do with the justice toward which a court is bound to strive.

The gulf between these judges and the scholar

Between the men of the tribunal and the scholar who stood before them yawned a chasm deeper than that which usually lies between a judge and a defendant, for İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ represented everything that the regime wished to push aside, the transmitted learning of Islam, the world of the medrese and the caliphate, the reverence for a knowledge handed down from generation to generation, while Çetinkaya and his fellow members were the men of the new order that was dismantling precisely that world. Their encounter in the courtroom was therefore not merely that of a court and a defendant, but that of two irreconcilable worlds, and the verdict that these judges would pass on the scholar was in truth the verdict of the new order upon the old, a verdict that already lay embedded in the politics of the regime and that in the hall of the tribunal needed only to take the form of a sentence.

Whoever places the names of these men beside the name of the scholar, and considers that they were the ones to judge him, realises that the outcome of this trial arose not from the evidence but from that opposition of worlds, for it was unthinkable that the men who had helped push through the Hat Law and who punished the resistance to it with the noose would leave untouched the spiritual father of that resistance, as they saw him. The acquittal of Giresun, which rested on the weighing of the facts, could not hold in Ankara, not because the facts had changed, but because the judges had changed, and because the men who now judged him served not the truth but the will of the regime.

The session of the twenty-sixth of January

It was on the twenty-sixth of January of the year 1926, a scant month after his transfer from Giresun, that İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ appeared before the tribunal of Ankara to answer for himself, and on that day the hall of the tribunal staged the spectacle of a trial whose outcome, judging by all that had preceded it, had already been decided outside the hall. The accuser Necip Ali Küçüka read out the charge and demanded a punishment of three years, and in that demand, which in relation to what was to follow seems almost moderate, lies something that casts the whole affair in a curious light, for had the tribunal followed the demand of its own prosecutor, the scholar would have got off with a prison sentence of three years and not with death. That the tribunal would in the end far exceed that demand and impose the heaviest punishment the law knew shows that it let itself be guided not by its prosecutor but by a will that stood above the prosecutor, and it makes the demand of three years an indication that even within the apparatus of the regime the grounds for a heavier punishment were so thin that even the prosecutor did not dare go further.

The session of the twenty-sixth of January was not the event of a court that seeks the truth and forms its judgement at the close of an honest weighing, but the public display of an outcome that was already settled, and whoever wishes to retell the course of events honestly must guard against the temptation to embellish the session with invented speeches and imagined exchanges of words, for the sources have left us no reliable verbatim account of the session that would justify such an embellishment. What tradition reports to us with good ground is the date of the session, the demand of the prosecutor, and the one telling decision with which the scholar answered the course of the trial, and it is at that decision that we must now pause, for it sums up within itself the whole bearing with which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ went to meet his downfall.

The awareness that the verdict was already settled

As the session proceeded, it must have become clear to İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ that he stood not before a court that would weigh his arguments, but before an instrument of the regime whose outcome was already determined, and that discovery set before him a choice that no man makes lightly, namely the choice between continuing a defence that he knew would bear no fruit, and the silence with which he would acknowledge the futility of that defence. For a scholar whose whole life had stood in the sign of the word and of reasoning, the giving up of his defence was no small step, for it meant that he laid down the weapons with which he was accustomed to serve the truth, the sharpness of his reasoning and the force of his argument, before a tribunal that did not wish to hear them.

And yet there was in his decision not the least cowardice or despair, but rather the opposite, for he understood with the clarity of a man who saw through the essence of power that a defence before this tribunal would not serve justice but would only strengthen the semblance of a fair trial that the regime needed, and that it was more worthy to keep silent than to collaborate with his words in a display whose outcome was fixed beforehand. It was not the resignation of a man who had given up hope, but the composed steadfastness of a man who had placed his fate in the hands of Allah ﷻ and who knew that no reasoning, however sound, could save him from judges who served not the truth but their will, and that his only fitting answer to such a court was the silence with which he tore its mask from it.

The refusal to conduct any further defence

When İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ saw that the verdict was already settled and that the tribunal was no seat of the law but an instrument of politics, he refused to conduct any further defence, and that decision, however simple in its outward form, is the most eloquent thing that tradition has preserved for us of his last days, for in that refusal lies a judgement that cut deeper than any speech. By denying himself any further defence, the scholar pronounced, without a word, a verdict upon the tribunal that judged him, for he thereby made it known that he did not recognise the court as a body that sought after the truth, and that he refused to collaborate in a trial whose outcome he already knew and whose nature he had seen through.

It is of the greatest importance to understand this refusal rightly, and not to confuse it with indifference or with the surrender of a man who had lost his courage, for it was the opposite of that, a deliberate and well-considered decision of a scholar who held his dignity higher than his life and who was not prepared to acknowledge the justice of this tribunal by defending himself before his judges. It was, moreover, the crowning of the steadfastness that had marked his whole life, for the man who in Giresun, when the law was still favourable to him, had relied on his unassailable defence, namely that his book had appeared a good year before the law and so could not possibly have undermined it, understood in Ankara that this same defence, however sound, no longer possessed any force before this tribunal, and he refused to repeat it against judges who were guided not by the truth but by their will.

The contrast with Giresun

Whoever places the session of Ankara beside that of Giresun sees in full sharpness the difference between a court that weighs the evidence and a tribunal that executes the will of power, for in Giresun the charge had been tested against the facts and one had come, on the matter of the hat protests, to the only conclusion that the chronology allowed, namely that a book from 1924 could not possibly have called for resistance against a law from 1925, while in Ankara those same facts, that same chronology, and that same untenability of the charge could avail nothing against a will that had already determined the outcome. In Giresun the law, however extraordinary the tribunal’s powers were, had done its work one last time; in Ankara it had ceased to be the measure, and the scholar, who saw through the difference between the two with the clarity of a trained mind, drew from it the only conclusion that a man of his dignity could draw, to wit that there was no point in pleading the truth before judges who did not wish to hear it.

In that contrast lies the bitter core of his fate, for the legally unassailable arguments that had won him the acquittal in Giresun counted for nothing in Ankara, not because they had become less sound, but because the judges who had to weigh them no longer served the truth but the will of the regime, and precisely in that awareness lies the dignity of his silence, for he refused to keep up the pretence that an honest defence could still achieve anything where the outcome had already been decided outside the hall. The man who had held all his life to the conviction that truth possesses its own force struck, in the hall of the Ankara tribunal, against the limit of that conviction, against the point where truth stands powerless before a power that will not acknowledge it, and his answer at that limit was not despair but the steadfast refusal to collaborate in the lie.

What the tribunal would pronounce

When one surveys the course of events that carried İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ from the harbour city on the Black Sea to the hall of the tribunal in the capital, what strikes one first of all is the bitter reversal in which his fate unfolded, for the man who had been acquitted in Giresun because the facts allowed no other verdict was not set at liberty but sent in chains to Ankara to be tried anew, and the tribunal that awaited him there was not a court that would weigh the evidence but an instrument of the regime whose outcome was already settled before the first session had opened. The session of the twenty-sixth of January 1926, with the prosecutor’s demand of three years and the scholar’s dignified refusal to conduct any further defence, was not the end of his ordeal but the second-to-last step on the road that would lead him to the gallows, and it left, for anyone who had seen through the nature of the tribunal, little doubt about the outcome that awaited him.

For the tribunal of Ankara would not content itself with the three years that its own prosecutor had demanded, but would within a few days pronounce the heaviest punishment the law knew, and it would in doing so detach the charge from the hat about which the book had been written and base its grounds on the general reproach that the scholar had acted against the order of the Republic, a reproach broad enough to drown out every legal objection and to give the impression that it was not the hat but the security of the state that was at stake. In the first days of February 1926 the tribunal would pronounce the death sentence, and what had hung in the air in the hall of the twenty-sixth of January as a fate decided in advance would thereby become the cruel reality that the scholar had already foreseen in his silence. How that verdict fell, and how İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ went to meet the noose in the heart of the capital with the steadfastness that had marked his whole life, is the subject of the following and final article, in which we shall follow the scholar from the hall of the tribunal to the square where his life would end and where his memory would begin.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography; for the transfer to Ankara, the session of the tribunal, and the composition of the court].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the biographical data of his last months, the journey to Ankara, and the course of the trial].
• Ergün Aybars, İstiklâl Mahkemeleri, Bilgi Yayınevi (Ankara, 1975) [the standard work on the Independence Tribunals, their extraordinary powers, the absence of an appeal, and the composition of the tribunal of Ankara under Ali Çetinkaya].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 166–205 [for the Hat Law, the hat protests, and the political nature of the persecution in the young Republic].
• Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, John Murray (1999), pp. 416–447 [for the role of the Independence Tribunals in the regime’s action against the resistance surrounding the Hat Law].
• Hakkı Uyar, “Tek Parti Dönemi ve İstiklâl Mahkemeleri”, in the journal literature on the early Turkish Republic [for the legal basis of the tribunals and their function as a political instrument].