İsmet Özel (born 19 September 1944, in Kayseri) is a Turkish poet and writer. Early years Özel is a son of a police officer from Söke. He attended primary and secondary school in Kastamonu, Çankırı and Ankara. He attended classes at Political Science Faculty of Ankara University, and graduated from the French Language department of Hacettepe University. Career Özel published Halkın Dostları magazine with Ataol Behramoğlu. Özel's songs of freedom derived its content from socialism but their structure and symbolism reflected the tastes of the Second New generation movement in Turkish poetry. In the 1970s, Özel developed a mystic and Islamist view which shocked his leftist audience. He worked as a French lecturer in the State Conservatory. He spent all his time writing after he retired. Because of both his interesting character and works, he took an impressive place among his contemporaries. Özel, who published his early poems in 1963, became salient with densely using images and his meticulous effort to choose words. He collected his early poems in the book called Geceleyin Bir Koşu (A Run in the Night, 1966), in which he searches the truth of being human. His attributions about gathering the innovations and experimental sides of Turkish Poetry with social realism and his success to realize it caused to his second book called Evet İsyan (Yes, Rebel, 1969) made big echoes. In 1970, he published Halkın Dostları review with Ataol Behramoğlu. In fact, Ataol Behramoğlu purified his poetry by leaving out crude propaganda and naive didacticism. İsmet Özel, perhaps the most talented of the group, turned to Islam for inspiration, but preserved the revolutionary bravura of his Marxist days. In following years, İsmet Özel experienced great changes in his political and philosophical approaches, and dedicated himself to the Islamic thought. When asked by his friend Murat Belge, a noted socialist intellectual, the reason for his conversion, Özel replied, "a man looks either after his freedom or his security, but he cannot acquire one without the other. All my life has been a search for ontological security. I am convinced that I found this security in the Qur'an. Islam is a healing for me. Those who either have no wounds or are not aware of their wounds will have no need for this healing." However, Özel is convinced that mankind is sick. In Three Problems: Technology, Civilization and Alienation and in To Speak in Difficult Times and