Honourable Minister ,
My Esteemed Members of the Board of Directors,
Dear young people,
My esteemed comrades in the cause and companions on the road,
Ladies and gentlemen; I greet you with my most heartfelt feelings and with affection.
From here I extend my love and my respect to my YOUNG MÜSİAD brothers and sisters throughout Türkiye and all over the world.
I pray to Almighty God that our Young MÜSİAD Congress may be a means of goodness.
From its foundation to this day , I thank all my brothers and sisters who have served in MÜSAİD and especially in YOUNG MÜSİAD.
I ask God’s mercy for my brothers and sisters who have passed on to the hereafter.
I already wish success to our friends who will take on new duties at our congress. May God make His guidance their companion. May God increase your striving, your effort, your intellect and the sweat of your brow. May God put neither you nor us to shame.
Now, God willing, we have two years ahead of us in which we will work shoulder to shoulder.. As YOUNG MÜSİAD, I have full confidence that in these two years we will do very fine things together, and even that you, the young people , will push us and make us act with still greater determination. I would like to state this at the very beginning of my words.
My Dear Young Brothers and Sisters,
For a thousand years the lands of Anatolia have been kneaded with the blessed blood of our martyrs. For when a homeland is kneaded with the blood of martyrs it ceases to be mere soil and becomes a homeland.
That is how we made these lands a homeland, and throughout history we have defended our homeland with an unbroken struggle.
Just as on July 15, we continue to defend it altogether, as a whole, together with our nation.
Throughout the history of our Republic the attacks aimed at our homeland, and therefore the struggle we have waged, have never diminished. Even though we have owned these lands for a thousand years, we have constantly been reminded that we would not be left in peace upon them.
When we look back at this entire thousand-year process, a very important matter that we as MÜSİAD have noticed emerges.
Whenever we have been economically strong, then we have been honoured in every field.
My Young Brothers and Sisters,
I kindly ask for your attention.
In no period in which we were not economically strong were we able to be strong in other fields either.
Whenever we have donned the armour of morality and become exemplary business people in the field of economy, then we have been a great state.
Whenever everyone has done his work in the most proper way, whenever we have entered into a constant striving for progress so that our today should not be the equal of our yesterday, whenever our products and our services,
were shown as the standard of quality in the world,
then we have given order to the world.
My brothers and sisters; the sacred memory of our thousands of martyrs in the struggle for existence that we have waged for a thousand years is still in our hearts.
Wherever you go in Anatolia, you will see flags fluttering in the cemeteries.
Beneath every flag lies one of our martyrs. Our martyrs, having attained the glad tidings of our Lord, watch from the spiritual stations assigned to them whether we are worthy of the sacrifice they made by giving up their lives.
My dear Young MÜSİAD brothers and sisters,
In order to protect the trust left to us by our martyrs,
in the economic field, in order to make this country one of the world’s most admired
and most envied economies, we must work very hard,
we must train ourselves in the best possible way.
We must carry ourselves to the highest point both in vocational training and in the spiritual sense.
Engineering sciences, health sciences, social sciences,
it makes no difference in which field they study, our expectation from every one of our brothers and sisters is
that they train themselves in a multifaceted way.
First of all, each of you will strive to reach the utmost excellence in your own field.
For this you will certainly know at least one foreign language very well.
In your own field you will never fall behind your counterparts in the world.
You will be the best engineer, the best doctor, the best merchant.
But at the same time you will not neglect the history and the culture of our country and our nation, nor current developments.
While doing all this, you will be a moral business person and we will never compromise on your spiritual values.
Whatever we do, we will act with the awareness that even if no one else sees us, God sees us.
If you are compromising your values in order to achieve a number of economic successes,
then know that it means we are failing to be worthy of our martyrs and are hurting their sacred souls.
I want to underline this once again in particular.
On this occasion, since the economy is so important for the future of this country,
for this reason you will invite all the young people of our country who possess this awareness to YOUNG MÜSİAD and persuade them to put their shoulder to this cause together with us.
Ensuring that your brothers and sisters too are girded with the same spiritual values is a debt upon your necks as well.
My Dear Young Brothers and Sisters,
To be a member of MÜSİAD is not a choice, it is a necessity.
In order to solve a number of problems that business people imbued with prophetic morality
have experienced in the past in this country and still continue to experience in some areas,
and in order to be a remedy for the troubles of virtuous business people,
this structure, whose foundations were laid 31 years ago, even if it had given nothing to anyone,
would still be a very important fortress, if only for being the voice of Anatolian capital and for instilling the courage to say “we too have something to say”.
You are the children of people who were told “you just be quiet”, who were othered perhaps because of their clothing, perhaps their accent, perhaps the size of their capital.
A choice such as waiting for this fortress to become perfect and only then taking a place in it would not have befitted you; that is why you are here.
Perhaps for this reason alone, may God be pleased with you a thousand times over.
You have become our hope.
You have become the reason for our smiles.
Work in such a way, achieve such things as we could not achieve, that you become our pride.
Young people, we truly trust you.
If you pay attention, when I tell you to be the best at your work, I am recommending not career fetishism but that, together with your career, you uphold your spiritual values and your country and that you serve your country.
Why?
Because you are in our hands and you are on our tongues. We speak of you at every turn. We keep thinking about what we can do so that the generation after us carries this flag even further.
You are in our hearts, esteemed young people. You are held in the highest esteem.
God willing, and this is my prayer to my Lord, you will march, and an entire nation and even an entire ummah will march behind you.
The ummah is waiting for you, the oppressed nations are waiting for you. Whether they are aware of it or not, they are waiting for you.
We want to see you say to those who are aware, “we have come, praise be to God”.
And are there not those who are unaware? Of course there are.
However, I assure you that the moment you appear before them with your lofty morality,
with your perfect way of doing business,
with your being a person of excellence, rest assured that they will gather around you in an instant.
The counsels of Luqman to his son come to my mind,
See how he says:
Do not associate partners with God; God sees and knows even the most hidden of deeds.
Just as you give thanks to your Lord, be respectful to your mother and your father.
Obey your mother and your father as long as they do not associate partners with God.
Perform your prayer duly. Enjoin what is good and shun what is evil.
Be patient with what befalls you. Do not turn your face away from people in disdain.
Do not walk upon the earth in arrogance, do not act with pride.
Be moderate, and soften and lower your voice.”
Yes, I believe that every one of my young friends draws a lesson from these counsels and orders his life accordingly.
Dear young people,
Why did I say the ummah, why did I say the oppressed nations?
Because Türkiye is a country that in every period of its history has assumed responsibilities far beyond its own borders.
Türkiye does not consist of Türkiye alone.
Our ancestors, from the far reaches of South Asia to the depths of Africa,
from the different corners of Europe to Central Asia,
strove everywhere to fulfil these responsibilities. Today we too continue this legacy. That is, the physical borders of our country are one thing; the borders of our hearts are quite another.
As Abdurrahim KARAKOÇ says,
“While flowers bloom in the land of strangers,
Snow is coming to our Land, my brother.
Who drew this border across my heart?
It feels narrow, it feels narrow, my brother.”
That is why the sorrow of the ummah, the sorrow of the oppressed nations
is our sorrow. It must be. We are obliged to this.
Because of the responsibility placed upon us, we cannot remain a spectator to any of our brothers within the borders of our hearts being left in sorrow,
still less to his being subjected to oppression.
Binding the wounds of people in the most remote corners of Africa,
striving to be a remedy for their troubles — there is such a Türkiye now, praise be to God.
But look, think carefully: when terrorist organisations carry out acts in other parts of the world they deserve every kind of intervention, every kind of condemnation, every kind of reaction, yet
when it comes to Syria, to Afghanistan, to Yemen, to Nigeria, do they gain immunity?
Has the conscience of humanity not grown callous in the face of one million people massacred in Syria, most of them children and women? And why is it so?
Because we have not yet attained the days of honour we have dreamt of.
We have come a long way and we continue to advance, but we still have a road ahead of us.
For the American, for the European, for the Chinese, for other countries ;
the geographies of Syria, Iraq and North Africa and the policies they pursue there
may be a tactical instrument that they regard as convenient in terms of their daily interests.
But for us this geography;
is no different from the Black Sea, the Aegean, the Mediterranean, Central Anatolia or our other regions.
Just as, when our mother and father, our child or our sibling move to another house, to another city,
or even to another country, we cannot erase them from our hearts
and we feel every pain they suffer in our own hearts,
these geographies too are the same for us.
The sorrow and the pain of an entire ummah is, for this very reason, because by the command of our Almighty Lord “we are but brothers”,
our sorrow too.
As a component of raising our honour once again to the desired level,
our seeing our advance in the economic field as a cause is precisely for this reason.
We are Türkiye, which is virtually the hope of a boundless geography.
Because we are the Turkish nation, behind which stand the prayers of hundreds of millions of its brothers.
If this honourable stance has a price, we are ready to pay it as well.
Indeed, our state;
as throughout history, yesterday at Çanakkale,
as on July 15, in the Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch Operations,
if tomorrow too it never shrinks from paying this price wherever it is needed,
then we too must act with this awareness in the field of economic development. We will never forget this.
Yes, after every night a morning and after every winter a spring will surely come.
The days promised by the Truth will surely come.
All this effort of ours is to bring tomorrow closer.
It is enough that we hold fast to the values we have inherited from our faith and from our history.
Dear Young People,
As MÜSİAD we walked for 31 years with this faith, and this is how we grew stronger.
God willing, in this new term of administration we will now continue to run without tiring
and we will hand the flag over to those who come after us.
We truly trust you.
As the first step of this, for the first time in this term we have taken two of our friends directly from the YOUNG MÜSİAD administration into the MÜSİAD administration.
Again among other firsts; we have chosen the head of Qard al-Hasan and
the MÜSİAD Women president from among our brothers and sisters who graduated from the YOUNG MÜSİAD school.
%20 of our Board of Directors is under the age of 35.
Most importantly, by amending the Statute, in this term,
our Young MÜSİAD will work directly under the President.
Just as the Master Necip Fazıl expressed with longing, before me
I see a youth that says “Time is mine and space is entrusted to me”.
I see a youth ready to take its place at the very front of the struggle, saying “I am here” without looking to right or left when it is asked who is there,
such a youth I see.
God willing, it is you who will set the stone of our cause, as great as the continent of Anatolia, in its place.
I believe this with all my heart.
I congratulate you all, I celebrate you, I kiss your eyes.
To our esteemed minister who honoured our programme,
to the previous term’s board of directors handing over its duty,
and to all our devoted workers who laboured in the organisation of this programme, I extend my thanks,
and I wish success to my brothers and sisters who have taken on new duties.
May God be our helper and guide, God willing.
I entrust you all to God,
Stay well.
Mahmut ASMALI President of MÜSİAD