MİT President İbrahim Kalın spoke at the STRATCOM Summit:
“One of the fundamental problems of the Islamic world, including Turkey, is unfortunately that it is unaware of its own story. It cannot think with its own conceptual framework. It cannot speak with its own words. Yet, something that you do not name is not yours. A story whose name you do not define is not your story. Even when you use your own words while following someone else’s grammar, you are not truly using your own language.
What is not told as a story remains nothing more than an event. Experiences only become lasting narratives when they are turned into stories. That is why, as the ancients said, the art of tahkiye, the art of storytelling, is extremely valuable.
Storytelling is not an ordinary task. Storytelling is not a trivial matter. Storytelling is a serious endeavor. If you have a story, it means you have something to say, you have a narrative to share.
When constructing the language of this narrative, the conceptual framework you reference while telling your own story is extremely important. That is why we must rediscover and rebuild our own conceptual set and our own linguistic world to tell our story. I should also emphasize that this is only possible through the proper definition of knowledge, the accurate depiction of truth, and the construction of the narrative on sound foundations.
At this very point, despite all the attacks of the darkness of enlightenment, despite the distortions of capitalist consumption models and the culture of exposure, we will continue to protect and liberate our mind and heart against them.
Against dullness, we will uphold ijtihad (independent reasoning); against corruption, we will pursue reform; against stagnation, renewal; against fragmentation, unity; against statism, an innovative tradition; and against inertia, revolutionary values—thereby constructing a new narrative and a new future for ourselves. We will remain vigilant against games of enemy creation and foil their schemes.
As Turkey, we will continue our path without separating knowledge from truth, truth from existence, power from justice, story and narrative from meaning and direction.
Our primary effort and endeavor will be to convey our story in a universal language, while recognizing and understanding that our story is not only the story of this group, that faction, this region, or this city, but a story of our entire geography and of all humanity—and to share it with anyone willing to listen, anyone with a heart and mind to understand.
That is why we will construct our story, tell it, and share it—so that our story may also be enriched by the stories of others.”
