“Small is Beautiful” was one of the most important and most pompous slogans of the 1968 movement.

It is an expression that recalls the importance of everyday politics during a period when almost everybody was after “macro analyses, revolutionary transformations, great generalizations and theoretical abstractions.”

Small is beautiful, because it is not enough only to look at the structures to appreciate the politics and see how the ruling government works. It is also necessary to understand the individual, even the ones regarded as the most ordinary.

Small is beautiful, because the studies of micro historiography, for example, examining the history of an individual, a family, a city or collecting unwritten histories, are crucial.

How is it possible to understand the human without understanding history!

How were the ordinary men and women influenced by these historical transformations and how did they feel?

History necessitates progressing inch by inch, not by attempting to attain dramatic results; it requires asking little questions, and combining the parts.

Small is beautiful, because change is not something that is hidden in a romantic future, continually postponed and then accomplished in a wink of an eye. Change starts here and at this very moment, in our small family, and with our small contributions.

Small is beautiful, because the individual has the capacity to influence.

Had they been interested in Sufism, the pro-1968 movement people -- followers of the “small is beautiful” slogan -- would have expressed themselves better.

Small is beautiful, because the human is the most valuable creature; he/she has the core of the universe on his/her face.

The essence is the human, and he is the most meaningful book to read.

The most beautiful definition of Suffism may be a source of inspiration:

“Our purpose is to seek the expanse of the heart and seek life in us. Once a man of religion, pastor of a small church in California surprised me when he said, “There is something common between writers and the clergy.”

We’re both human.

It is to understand human pains, expectations, and sorrows.

To look at matters from a wide angle and make generalizations, some tend to ignore the individual.

The politicians, academics and even historians… Let them discuss by using macro generalizations, numbers and abstractions.

Principal task of both the clergyman and the man of letters is to approach the matter from the viewpoint of the individual in the first place, and then through man’s lens.

The way in which history is taught in Turkey leaves man in the background.

When we review the transformation of the Ottomans until the foundation of the Turkish Republic, our understanding of history will inevitably change.

Viewing the biggest social changes through the eyes of an Armenian architect, an Albanian traveler, a palace concubine, a member of a religious sect, a Jews trader, a calligrapher, a satirical poet…

Only then can we understand there is no single or absolute way of reading history.

Headlines like “So-and-so in the Ottoman Empire,” undoubtedly, could turn into rude generalizations.

And this could lead to sheer inability to see, instead of seeing as is the case with every generalization.

Then one can’t stop asking, “Which period of the Ottomans do you mean?

Which territory of the Ottomans are you referring to? From whose perspective of the Ottomans?

These kinds of questions are being asked and each time the answers are different; they do not cause huge tremors.

As this is the case, it would be wise to progress by following the small fragments inch by inch, instead of making besieging and devouring deductions.

Instead of haphazardly analyzing an empire that extended control over such vast areas of the world, both in time and place, and was viewed differently in the eyes of thousands of subjects in thousands of diverse ways, and then swallowing it like a pill, let our knowledge remain at its current level for a while and let this knowledge be scattered like particles of dust.

Maybe, we will at least be able to learn how little we know about our past.

Small is beautiful…

07.14.2006