VISIONARY MAHMUT ASMALI SPEECH
Honourable Minister,
Honourable Members of Parliament,
Distinguished members of the protocol,
Esteemed representatives of our civil society organizations,
Esteemed members of our press,
Ladies and gentlemen
and dear young people who light the way to our future,
I greet each and every one of you with respect, affection and love…
Welcome, you have honoured us.
First of all, I pray to Almighty God that our MÜSİAD Visionary Summit, which we are holding for the fourth time as the Independent Industrialists and Businessmen Association under the theme “TAKE NOTICE”, may be a means of goodness.
Distinguished guests, everything begins with taking notice…
The Muslim scholar El-Cezeri, through his works that are marvels of engineering, took notice that the first robotic and simple machines could be built, and thus laid the foundations of today’s software systems.
The astronomer Ali Kuşcu raised his head to the boundless sky and took notice of the solar system and the stars, becoming the means for the opening of the space age that shed light on science.
The genius of medicine, Avicenna, known to us as İbn-i Sina, invented anaesthesia, and the operations of the modern age began to be performed without pain.
Hz. Mevlâna took notice that reaching everyone from seven to seventy would come about through the language of the heart; his work, the Mesnevi, is still taught today as a scholarly source in many universities of the world.
Our Nobel laureate Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar took notice of that small detail in DNA, and a new era began in cancer research.
They are the pioneers… They dared, they developed and they changed the world… Because they took notice!
While the transformation and development in human life have been advancing rapidly in the 21st century, they have also left different effects on each one of us. Concepts such as technology, digital, global and innovation have now become a part of our lives, and their effects have been reflected in the way we live. And these effects have become the means by which we Take Notice of the newly established world order.
Distinguished Participants,
With the virtue of Hz. Adam …
The endurance of Noah…
The loyalty of Abraham…
The fidelity of Ishmael…
The sincerity of Moses…
The patience of Job…
The generosity of Muhammad…
The delicacy of Abu Bakr…
The courage of Omar…
The modesty of Osman…
And the knowledge of Ali…
we envision, and with the spirit of futuwwa we make it our duty to serve every soul.
And so, with this meaning and this understanding, we are together at the 4th Summit of MÜSİAD Visionary!..
As MÜSİAD Visionary, we have set the title of this year’s program as “Take Notice”. Because we know that to take notice means to build the future.
The digital…
The climate…
Enterprise…
We are here to contribute to life by Taking Notice of transformation.
Distinguished Participants,
We are in a period in which we are passing rapidly from the conventional to the cyber realm, in other words to the digital age. Under the influence of information technology and globalization, traditional strategies in marketing practices have given way to digital strategies.
The advantages that electronic commerce offers to the world of the economy increase the desire for shopping carried out in the cyber realm to develop and become widespread. To this day, the most important factor that has prepared the ground for the development of electronic commerce has been information technologies. Innovation in information technologies has been the means for entirely new concepts to enter our lives; with terms such as e-commerce, e-government, e-pulse, e-book, e-school, e-archive and the like, steps have been taken on the path to becoming digital human beings.
It has been clearly seen that the new world order triggered by Covid-19, which has taken the world under its influence, has transformed the digitalization process by adapting it to all industries. The e-commerce sector, which is growing rapidly in the world, now holds an important place in the lives of all of us. In 2020 the volume of global retail e-commerce increased fifteenfold over the last 10 years and stood at USD 4.2 trillion. We want our country to have a large share in this volume as well; that is why we say Take Notice of e-commerce, in short, Take Notice of the Digital.
Distinguished Participants,
Will we be able to look at the one we love and say, “on a spring evening I came upon you”?..
Or will we be able to flow into the depths of our souls with the lines “without you neither the spring nor the summer has any taste”… Are they not the seasons?.. They work upon the human soul, they become inspiration, they become art, they form the colours of life… But unfortunately, our country is losing its quality of having 4 seasons day by day; a tornado can appear in the middle of İstanbul, or snow can fall on Antalya in an unprecedented way; in short, climates are changing, global warming is affecting our lives.
As you know, the Paris Climate Agreement, through a series of practices within the scope of the struggle against the climate crisis, places important responsibilities on our business world.
We as MÜSİAD believe that every living being that has been created has the right to a decent and just life, and that the future of the world’s climate is more important than the interests of a few countries. In this context, saying Take Notice of the Climate, we aim to be a pioneer in order to take on a role in Türkiye’s climate policy with our membership of more than 11 thousand. In order to protect the climate and to look after our world, we as our Board of Directors are putting our shoulder to the wheel and achieving a first. As MÜSİAD, we present our Climate Manifesto…
If it is granted to us, we will share our Climate Manifesto, which we have formed together with our esteemed academics and our advisory board, with you at the end of our Visionary’21 Take Notice Summit. I extend my thanks to our Honourable Ambassador Prof. Dr. Kerem Alkin, to Energy Expert Assoc. Prof. Dr. Sohbet Karbuz, to Prof. Dr. İsmail Ekmekçi, who lectures at İstanbul Commerce University, and to Energy Engineer Doctor Cihad Terzioğlu, who came together and contributed to the formation of our climate manifesto in order to contribute to life and to make the green sustainable; thank you, may you be well.
Distinguished guests…
In this age, the one who Takes Notice succeeds. And where do they succeed? They succeed in trade, they succeed in the digital, they succeed in innovation, they succeed in transformation, they succeed in the field of health; in short, the person who takes notice takes their place in the leading role of the newly established world order.
And we, as the MÜSİAD Visionary family, want our country to be in the leading role in the global arena; that is why we say Take Notice of entrepreneurship — of the start-up spirit…
With our production-oriented sectors, our technological breakthroughs shaped by the Industry 4.0 vision, our entrepreneurs and investors who place advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality, big data and virtual reality at the centre, our employment power made up of our qualified and educated young people, and our women who provide added value to business life, we are walking towards a far more prosperous and brighter future. In this respect too, we want our start-ups to set out from Türkiye and spread to the world, and to create a brand value.
Our esteemed guests…
The sultan of knowledge Hz. Ali says, " Raise your children not according to your own time, but according to the age in which they will live"; because the only thing that does not change is change itself. In other words, everything is in need of transformation. At this point, the age in which our children will live will be different in every sense. All the technological, material, spiritual and working conditions we possess today will be completely different in the future.
We adults, unfortunately, may be unable to pass from past memories into the present day. Constantly praising the past, general sentence structures such as “in our time it was like this… were the old days more beautiful…” have become a habit on our tongues. In this respect too, in order to take notice of our present and our tomorrows, we will change our words and then our thoughts. We will not say “in our time it was like this”, we will say “how will it be in our children’s time, or how could it be more beautiful”; in short, we will transform, we will take notice of transformation.
In our time there was a cartoon called The Jetsons; in The Jetsons we would look at the robots working at home, at the mobile phones, at the characters making video calls with their watches, or at the flying cars, and we would build dreams. Now we are living within the reality of the utopian world we saw in The Jetsons cartoon. That is, as a world too we are transforming in the technological, digital and innovative sense…
A term called the Metaverse has now entered our lives; Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg now defines Facebook as a meta world. Barbados, the island country of the Caribbean, has taken a step to become the first country with an embassy in the Metaverse. The world’s giant fashion brands are putting their clothes on sale in the metaverse world; perhaps in the future, as in the film The Matrix, we will connect with a cable to our avatars in the metaverse and go to completely different worlds… Or in time to come we will hold our Visionary gatherings in the metaverse world; because “the future will come one day” … For this reason too, it is essential for us and for our children that we take notice of transformation as a country.
Distinguished guests…
Like Hz. Mevlana’s compass metaphor, with one foot we stand together with the whole world, while with the other we are like a hearth in Anatolia that holds fast to our constant spiritual values. For this reason too, with our motto “High Technology, High Morality”, we are advancing with confident steps towards our goal of a stronger, more sustainable, more productive and brighter Türkiye.
Setting out from the thoughts of the spiritual figures who built the fundamental values of our civilization, we have an understanding that contains within it knowledge, learning, tradition and innovation. For this reason too, especially for MÜSİAD Visionary21, we say “Let Us Take Notice of Our Values as Well”, and we have the happiness of hosting the psychiatrist Professor Doctor Kemal Sayar and Professor Doctor Sadettin Ökten, who is known for his talks and works on the city and civilization, and especially on Islamic civilization.
Esteemed guests…
As MÜSİAD, we have been advancing for 31 years, drawing our strength from our members. We opened our branches and our contact centres at great speed, and we continue to open them. We have reached 88 branches at home and 81 contact points in 74 countries abroad. With our 11 thousand members operating in various sectors and our 60 thousand companies, we provide employment for 1 million 800 thousand people. With the added value we create, we give direction to the development of the Turkish economy. As MÜSİAD, we are a great family whose members are spread to the four corners of the world. And so, with this strength we grow, and with the inspiration and synergy we draw from our values, we build both our today and our tomorrow.
Our MÜSİAD is a hearth, a school, a voluntary body. And our door is open to everyone who wishes to serve our country and our people…
Esteemed guests…
As all of us know, as a country we have recently been passing through narrow gates. We see with regret that recently an artificial climate of mistrust that is not based on macroeconomic fundamentals is being sought to be created.
We as MÜSİAD stand against every kind of economic climate that is directed by perceptions rather than real economic indicators. The Turkish economy stands firm today, as it did in the past, against all perception manipulations of both domestic and foreign origin.
We believe that our economy, which for the last 20 years has succeeded in achieving an average annual growth of %5.3 without compromising free market conditions, will also come through this process with the lightest damage.
We reiterate that we are the supporter of our new “low-interest-oriented” policy, which we believe will multiply many times over our gains oriented towards production, exports, employment and growth within the New Economic Model whose foundations were laid under the leadership of our President Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
All of us know that interest draws a serious barrier before access to finance and to a large extent prevents the increase towards new investments. Within this framework our proposal as MÜSİAD is that an interest corridor be determined which converges to zero for medium- and long-term investment financing and to the inflation rate for short-term rates. In this way, on the one hand the pressure of the current high interest rates on commercial loans will be reduced to the utmost and the way will be opened for investments, and on the other hand speculative movements on the policy rate will be prevented.
Distinguished guests…
Surely God is the truly All-Knowing, the truly All-Aware. Since we have come into being from the same source, in truth all creation is one great family. How much all of humanity needs this awareness today, is it not so?..
LASTLY…
Our Visionary’21 Summit this year coincided with Şeb-i Arus, that is, with the time in which Hz. Mevlana attained the Truth, which he interpreted as his wedding night. It has been granted to us to commemorate Hz. Pir, who for hundreds of years has been the symbol of tolerance and peace. Indeed, I would like to complete my speech not with my own personal words, but with the words of the sultan of Konya, the khan of hearts, Hz. Mevlana.
“Be like the sun in compassion and mercy. Be like the night in covering faults. Be like flowing water in generosity and munificence. Be like the dead in anger and rage. Be like the earth in humility and self-effacement. Either appear as you are, or be as you appear.”
Saying welcome once again to the Visionary’21 Take Notice summit, I greet you all with affection and pray that our program may be a means of goodness.