Texts Guiding the West I

The 16th century Ottoman intellectuals were unaware of the radical rise of various scientists, including Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and Brahe, who upset the Western view of the world and the universe, and who paved the way for the European Enlightenment. The first translated products presented to Ottoman society, which is considered to have entered a process of Westernization with the Reforms of 1839, introduced various philosophers, including Voltaire, J.J. Rousseau, Fenelon, Fontenelle, Montesquieu, to Turkish readers but overlooked the works of such rationalists as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; economists such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx; lawyers such as Herbert Spencer and Frederich Nietzsche; and scientists such as Francis Bacon.

Alev Alatlı – compiler

Born in İzmir in 1944, Alev Alatlı went to high school in Tokyo, Japan. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in and a Master’s Degree from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee) where she studied with a Fulbright scholarship. Subsequently, Alatlı studied philosophy and continued her doctoral studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, with focus on Theology, Thought and the History of Civilization. She returned to Turkey in 1974, and worked as a lecturer in the Department of Economy of Istanbul University, and as a senior economist in the State Planning Organization in Ankara. She has conducted joint psycho-linguistics studies with the University of California (Berkeley). Alatlı published a magazine entitled “Our English” together with Cumhuriyet Newspaper, and later served as the vice president of the Turkish Writers Cooperative (YAZKO).

Works: In 1985 and 1986, her translations of Edward Said’s “Covering Islam” and “The Question of Palestine” were published. She was honoured with the Medal of Freedom by Yasser Arafat while he was exiled in Tunisia for her works describing the Palestinian case. Her first published copyright work, “Despotism of the Intellectuals”, was followed by “Jasmines Smoke No More!” in 1985. The “Torturer”, which received the Writers Union’s “Best Novel of the Year” award, was published in 1987, and was the lead of the following quartet “Is there anybody out there?”. This quartet includes “Viva la Muerte” published in 1992, “Nuke Turkey!”, “You Sure Made Me a Prey to the Wolves” and “OK Mustafa, Turkey is Dealt With!”, published in 1993. “Resist Your Fate, Incorporated” was published in 1995. A small prose-verse essay entitled “September 1998” published in 1999 was followed by “Schrödinger’s Cat, Nightmare” in 2000 and “Schrödinger’s Cat, Dream” in 2001.

“Mercy, Not Enlightenment!”, the first volume of the novel sequence “On the Footsteps of Gogol” was published at the end of June 2004, and was followed by other novels in the series entitled “World Watch” and “Eyy Uhnem! Eyy Uhnem”. In 2004, working with Şehabettin Yalçın, she translated the work “The Most Certain Way” penned by Tunisian Hayrettin Pasha.

She has published four more books, being “If Not Now, When?” (2002) – a compilation of Alatlı’s essays and diary articles, “Person Should be Able to Say No” published in 2005, “Remember! Your Past is Your Future” published in 2007, and “Turkey and the World with Alev Alatlı”, as a compilation of her interviews, published in 2003.

In the field of Political Sciences, she wrote “No Comment” in 2008 and “You Are Not Alone” together with Ayşe Kulin, Liz Behmoaras and Nurşen Mazıcı in 2009. “All Great Minds Don’t Think Alike” published in 2009 and “The Day I Shut Down Hollywood”, published in 2009, are her most recent books.

She is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cappadocia University, and is a Member of the Board of Trustees and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the İlke Education and Health Foundation.