Mehmed Şevket Eygi

Mehmed Şevket Eygi was born on 7 February 1933 at Ereğli, in Zonguldak province on the Black Sea, the only child of his family. He was educated at Galatasaray High School in Istanbul, where he learned French, and won a place at Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science in 1952, graduating in 1956. He worked as a translator at the French Cultural Centre in Ankara and for two years at the Directorate of Religious Affairs, and served as private secretary to the scholar Ömer Nasuhi Bilmen. {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-en} {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-tr}

In 1957 he and ten friends founded the magazine İslam, his first publishing venture. From 1966 he published the daily newspaper Bugün, which became one of the best-known Islamist papers of its period; the Quran teacher Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan was among its supporters. On 16 February 1969 Bugün carried his article "Cihada Hazır Olun" ("Be Ready for Jihad"); that evening a crowd attacked a left-wing march in Istanbul in the events remembered as Bloody Sunday, in which two people were killed and around two hundred injured. Eygi denied responsibility for the violence, and later won a defamation suit against the journalist Soner Yalçın, whose book Bay Pipo had attributed the day's organising to him. {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-en} {cite:source/zeytinburnu-mehmed-sevket-eygi}

Facing prosecution, he left on the hajj in 1969 and stayed abroad some six years — in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Beirut and Germany — until the cases against him lapsed; he returned to Turkey in 1974. He went on to publish or write for Yeni İstiklal, Büyük Gazete, Son Havadis and Son Çağrı, and from 1991 until his death he wrote his column in Millî Gazete, the paper associated with the Millî Görüş movement. The courts sent him to prison several times over his articles, including in 2002 and 2006, on convictions recorded as incitement and demagoguery. {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-en} {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-tr}

Eygi wrote as a declared defender of the Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jama'a: a municipal memorial volume by people who knew him records that he rejected religious reform and "light" and "moderate" Islam and held to the Ahl al-Sunnah as the saved sect, and one of his own books is titled Ehl-i Sünnet'i Savunuyorum — "I Defend the Ahl al-Sunnah". The same body of writing carried, over decades, antisemitic conspiracy theories, including writings on Dönmeh (Sabbatean) themes and Holocaust denial; German interior-ministry reports of 2010 and 2011 and the researcher Rıfat Bali document these positions, as does scholarship on Turkish antisemitism. {cite:source/zeytinburnu-mehmed-sevket-eygi} {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-en}

He never married and had no children. He died in an Istanbul hospital on 12 July 2019, of heart disease; funeral prayers were held at Fatih Mosque on 13 July, attended by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan among others, and he was buried in Merkezefendi Cemetery. He left his library of more than 45,000 books to the Nation's Library at the Presidential Complex in Ankara. {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-en} {cite:source/wikipedia-mehmed-sevket-eygi-tr}