That is all too normal, because the police haven't yet found any evidence that can reveal the identity of the bombers. All that we know is that they cold-bloodedly targeted ordinary people, including four children. Indeed they were evil enough to set up a trap designed to harm as many people as possible. The first bomb in a trashcan was a small one, which just attracted people to the scene. Five minutes later, the real bomb, which was a big pack of dynamite covered with nails and put in another trashcan, went off. And the street was covered with body parts. Along with the 17 dead, 150 people got hurt.

How Do We ‘Know'?

All we know right now, as I have said, is that the bombers were ruthless, wicked killers. We can of course try to guess who they were, by reasoning on circumstantial evidence and the history of terrorism in this country. But there is no way to “know” who the perpetrators were.

But in Turkey, almost everybody “knows” these things. After all such acts of terror, “terrorism experts” make analyses by asking, “Who benefited from this”? Then they build a seemingly logical explanation on who must have been “behind” these crimes. Yet, of course, the logical explanation they bring is heavily loaded with their own political views. Nationalists almost always find the “finger” of “foreign powers who want to destabilize Turkey,” although I have never been able to figure out who those powers are. Secularists try hard to find some Islamist connection, which they see as the root of all evil. Pro-Islamic commentators, including liberals and some left-wing democrats, take the complete opposite line and accuse the “deep state,” which tries to block Turkey's democratization by striking fear in the hearts of citizens.

I often find myself close to this third line of thinking, because I think that the “deep state,” along with its current manifestation named Ergenekon, is a real threat. But I don't agree with the habit of piling all unsolved acts of violence to the criminal record of the “deep state.”It is, like other analyses by “terrorism experts,” an ideologically guided way of looking at things.

Then there is of course the most usual suspect of terrorism in Turkey: the PKK, or the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party. Unlike some ultra-left commentators, who refer to the PKK as “the guerilla,” I think that it is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. If the PKK were only fighting the Turkish Armed Forces, then it could have been defined as a guerilla force. But there have been many instances when the PKK deliberately targeted and killed civilians — Turkish people on the streets of major cities, or even the Kurds who refused to support their cause. Therefore, yes, the PKK is a terrorist organization which is evil enough to perpetrate massacres like that of last Sunday. That's why, since the moment I learnt about this bombing, the PKK has been on the top of my likely-to-be-the-perpetrator list. An Islamist organization hasn't looked convincing, because Güngören is quite a poor and relatively conservative neighborhood, and Islamists terrorists could have found much more convenient targets in cosmopolitan Istanbul.

Yet I can't certainly say, “it was the PKK” either. Actually the speakers for the organization have repeatedly rejected any role in this. I still think that a splinter group in the organization might have been responsible, and their goal might have been to provoke “Turko-Kurdish tension in society,” as some commentators argued in the media. But this is still just a theory.

Yet again, some parts of the Turkish press have been very certain about this PKK connection. The day after the bombing, the huge headline of Hürriyet, one of Turkey's top-selling papers, read: “Civilian massacre by the PKK.” Again, I don't know how Hürriyet “knew” that it was an act of the PKK. A more factual headline could have read, “Bombing in Istanbul, PKK is suspect.” But we Turks don't like such vague and indefinite sentences. We want certainty. And if there is no certainty, we create it by filling the gaps between the facts with our presuppositions.

A Fact-Free Mind

Which brings me to a deeper problem with the Turkish mind: In this country, facts are not too important. What really is important, and unchangeable, is the presuppositions in our mind. When we look at facts, we often interpret, arrange, or even sometimes deny them according to the judgments we have made much before, regardless of those facts.

Ottoman intellectual and bureaucrat Sait Halim Paşa (1863-1921) wisely pointed out this problem more than a century ago. “In the eastern thought,” he said, “our mind always shapes things; but things do not shape our mind.” Another way of putting this is to say that the scientific method, in which pre-existing knowledge is always checked with, and modified according to, facts, is not well-established in “eastern” societies, including Turkey.

What is most funny is that most of those who would claim to be “Westernized” in this country actually desperately lack the scientific – or, to use a better word, empirical – way of thinking. What they have done with their “Westernization” was to adopt Western “way of life,” but not way of thought. They replaced the fez with the bowler hat, as they traded one belief system (Islam), with another one (Kemalism). To date, although the rhetoric of “science and reason” has always been on their lips as a sacred mantra, they have actually remained hopelessly dogmatic.

One bad result of dogmatism is that it blinds you to your own ignorance. You simply don't accept that you don't know certain things, and their real explanations could be contrary to what you would have assumed. At the end of the day, you are both an ignorant and arrogant person, who cannot be persuaded by any fact-based rational argument. Your mind passionately shapes things; but things never, ever, shape your mind…