Why is Alparslan Kuytul both an important and a valuable figure?

In his article of 29 August 2026, the Karar columnist Salih Cenap Baydar takes up Alparslan Kuytul not through a court file but through a function: how the sense of justice wears away in a society, and what opinion leaders are good for against that wearing away.

The frame of the article

For Baydar the sense of justice is innate in a person but does not turn into awareness by itself. The more a society normalises string-pulling as "getting one's business done", favouritism as "looking after one's relatives" and bribery as "speeding things up", the more that sense wears away. What stops the wearing away is opinion leaders who can bring themselves to lose their own safety and comfort in order to defend a right: they make visible the moral intuition people feel inside themselves but cannot name.

The writer puts names from history and from today into this frame — from the prophets to Martin Luther King and Rachel Corrie, and, from Turkey, names who defended someone else's rights by going beyond the bounds of their own quarter. He places Kuytul in this line as a new name moving in the same direction, with the reservation that "it is still too early to add him".

The point he finds distinctive

That Kuytul defends justice not in a secular language of human rights but in the language of faith. This takes the idea of justice out of being a political discourse imported from outside and turns it into a moral obligation rising from within the society's own world of belief — and, in the writer's view, it also makes the effect harder to break.

The part that concerns this archive directly

The last section of the article describes, in a pen from outside, the reason this site exists. Baydar says that in order to neutralise an objection of conscience, centres of power discredit the objector instead of dealing with the objection itself: the aim is that the question should cease to be "Is what he says true?" and become "Who is this man?". He recalls that the accusations about Kuytul should be looked at with this eye, and that as long as there is no final court ruling the presumption of innocence holds.

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