İsmail Beşikçi, the ‘Socrates of our time’
Title: İsmail Beşikçi
Subtitle: The Socrates of Our Time
ISBN/EAN: 9789083452647
Author:Gurbuz, Îbrahîm
Publicaties: Shanidar Publisher, Kurdistan Chronicle
NUR-code: 630
Perhaps no non-Kurdish intellectual holds as profound a place in the Kurdish consciousness as İsmail Beşikçi. This deep admiration is well-founded, allowing Ibrahim Gürbüz, the author of the current book, to aptly refer to Beşikçi as the ‘Socrates of our time.’ For decades, Beşikçi stood as the sole Turkish academic voice championing the existence of the Kurdish nation in Northern Kurdistan. He boldly challenged the Kemalist political, academic, cultural, security, and military establishments of Turkey, confronting their denial of the Kurdish reality. Beşikçi confronted the systematic and institutional racism and fascism in Turkey a stance that even many Kurds hesitated to adopt.
His unwavering commitment led to personal sacrifices: the loss of comfort, economic stability, dismissal from his academic position, and being branded a persona non grata within Turkish academia. He was perceived as a dangerous gadfly, challenging the entrenched notions of Turkish identity and citizenship, and as an apostate Turk who debunked the racist myths propagated by the Turkish state to justify its cultural and linguistic suppression of Kurdishness. Above all, until the early 2000s, İsmail Beşikçi was renowned as the Turkish sociologist and scholar who spent most of his adult life in prison to defend Kurdish existence, defying both state policies and the Turkish nationalist consensus that viewed such advocacy as infidelity and abomination.
Dr. Kamal Solemanî
