Notes on a Foreign Country Page 5
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AT THAT TIME, American journalists moved to Iraq or Afghanistan, or at least Beirut or Cairo, but Turkey was a country rarely written about in the newspapers, and few people back home, I could tell, thought I had chosen Istanbul for reasons beyond the fact that it was a beautiful tourist destination. My explanation that I wanted to learn about Islam was somewhat true. After seven hundred years as an Islamic empire, Turkey had become a secular republic and, according to the standard history, dispatched Islam from public life. Atatürk had found a way to contain it. For the last eighty years, therefore, the Turks had been wrestling with this secularizing experiment perhaps with lessons for all of us. Wasn’t Turkey the one Muslim country that, in those days, gave hope? Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” seemed more intellectual than martial in Turkey, and I saw the country like some idea lab dreamed up for my benefit.
It’s painful now to recall just how confused we all had been after September 11. The Onion headline two weeks later was “Holy Fucking Shit,” which, I remember, in the magazine office where I worked had offered us a palpable sense of relief, because no one else knew what to do or how to react to September 11, as if emotions came from the memories of other emotional experiences, not from an organic place. The week before September 11, I had been reading David Halberstam’s War in a Time of Peace, which was about the Clinton era—the period when we thought history was over. Halberstam quotes Clinton saying in 1992 to one of his Democrat colleagues: “‘I’ve been traveling around our country for a year and no one cares about foreign policy other than about six journalists.’” The afternoon of the tragedy, my editor bosses—most of them impressively well-read and conscious of the downtrodden—dispatched me to go interview Palestinians because the sight of those towers falling down had made them first think of Israel, which I suppose was then the conflict Americans suspected Arabs might be angry with them about. I was twenty-four and did what I was told. I could only think of asking the people I thought might know Palestinians: the Egyptians who worked at my corner deli. I felt so ashamed of this entire expedition, racking my brain for confirmation that Palestinians and Egyptians had an affinity to each other, something I actually don’t think I knew for sure at the time. The Egyptians said some Palestinians ran another deli down the street, and when I finally tracked them down to be interviewed, they were understandably bewildered. “Our fight is for Jerusalem, not New York,” they said.
In that magazine office, I was surrounded by Berkeley liberals—my politics by then also had swung dramatically to the left—but September 11 made us unsure of ourselves, both disturbed and captivated by the exhortations of revenge emanating from our television sets. There were a few voices at the time counseling caution. One of them was the black writer John Edgar Wideman, who wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine in opposition to the widely supported Afghan war, which he called phony “because it’s being pitched to the world as righteous retaliation, as self-defense after a wicked, unwarranted sucker punch when in fact the terrible September 11 attack as well as the present military incursion into Afghanistan are episodes in a long-standing vicious competition.” Wideman, as an “American of African descent,” could not applaud his “president for doing unto foreign others what he’s inflicted on me and mine.” As an American of African descent, he was one of the few Americans who could after September 11 see anything clearly.
Later the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who had spent years living among Muslims in Islamic cultures as different as Indonesia and Morocco, would observe of that period in America something unprecedented: the construction of a new reality. Of all the “reality instructors” at the time, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis was the most prominent; he would eventually come to advise President George W. Bush on the invasion of Iraq. The central message of Lewis’s historical analysis was that a mysterious decay in the Muslim world had led to Muslim rage at their own impotence, and what had struck the United States in September was the beginning of a “war of the worlds” kind of showdown. Lewis’s historical analysis was designed to match the emotional pitch of the public and political rhetoric, and, in Geertz’s words, “to arouse the West, and most especially the United States, to armed response.”
I did not support the wars, but ignorance is vulnerable to the atmosphere it is exposed to, and without realizing it, I absorbed the same fear of Islam and Muslims, not in a bigoted way, but in the more insidious manner of the well-intentioned liberal mediator. Many of us unconsciously settled for these softer versions of oppression, the kinds that fit easily into the American vision of its place in the world: as guardian and enforcer. I had believed that Islam was something to be tamed, that religious Turks were not to be trusted to choose their own way in life, that in fact all Turks, since most were Muslim, were people who must be restrained—from what exactly I don’t know—and that “Islam” was a thing that I, an American abroad, should be thinking about solutions to, because that’s what Americans always do.
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I WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE, because Turks had long been worried about Islam, and were especially worried the year that I arrived. An election was coming. The reigning prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was a religious man whose wife wore a head scarf. Now one of the candidates for president in the election, Abdullah Gül, was also a religious man whose wife wore a head scarf. This was new, and, apparently, traumatizing. The president’s office had been created in the image of its founder, the secularist, modernist, rakı-drinking, womanizing, trailblazing, ballroom-dancing soldier-statesman Atatürk—a man who in the 1930s encouraged his adopted daughter, Sabiha Gökçen, to fly planes—and so the idea that that office would now be filled by a man who married his head-scarf-wearing wife when she was fifteen was for many akin to national-spiritual death. Political office, it seemed, was not just about politics but about Turkish identity. Erdoğan and Gül promised to preserve Turkey’s secularist character, and instead used the language of democracy, liberalism, and human rights to argue for their own inclusion in political life. But the secularists in the country didn’t trust them. Many of them flat-out hated them. The military, which the secularists (but not leftists like Caner) viewed as a necessary institution, and which had in the past overthrown the government four times in military coups, was threatening to intervene.
“Atatürk was a feminist? His daughter flew planes?” was a typical question I asked Caner. “They seem proud of that. It’s kind of cool.”
“Yes,” he would deadpan. “She flew planes over Kurdish villages and dropped bombs on them and killed people.”
He was referring to the Dersim Massacre of the 1930s, in which the Kurdish tribes of eastern Anatolia had revolted against the Turks, and rejected Atatürk’s demands that their Kurdish region be Turkified. Atatürk, and his daughter, apparently, responded by killing some thirty to fifty thousand of them, thus depopulating the region of Kurds. Caner would not have forgotten about this, because his family was from Dersim. Istanbul’s second airport, meanwhile, was named Sabiha Gökçen.
I would meet Caner often in those days at bars and cafés on İstiklal Caddesi, the city’s main pedestrian artery, where one could find beer, lamb meatballs, bordellos, dance clubs, bookstores, movie theaters, and any number of pimps, thugs, and prostitutes. It was an irrepressibly energetic place, once the Grand Rue de Péra of Constantinople, the European district, now the domain of everyone and anyone, especially the young. I walked up and down it almost every day, trying to settle into some semblance of normal daily life in between Turkish classes and figuring out basic survival skills, like buying credits for my illegal cell phone. These were lazy, privileged days for a twenty-nine-year-old, and out of some guilt and genuine interest I engaged in my full-scale investigation of Turkey, trying desperately to understand everything in a few weeks.
It would be at least two years before I felt comfortable writing anything about it. Turkey’s history was virtually impenetrable at first to an outsider; a doub
le helix of twists and turns sharing few of the same twists and turns, phases and stages, revolutions and themes of other countries. Turkey was both empire and republic, Islamic and secular, democratic and fascistic. The “state” (the military and judiciary) was different from the “government” (Parliament, the prime minister, the local municipalities), which was different from the “Deep State” (a mysterious network of ex-military, intelligence, and thugs rumored to control the country behind the scenes), and each had its own pathologies and trajectories. Its political factions included, over the years, Republicans, Democrats, anti-imperialists, leftists, Maoists, Stalinists, Islamists, nationalists, leftist nationalists, Islamic nationalists, and some group called the Gray Wolves that made scary hand signals in the shape of wolf ears. New political party names seemed to crop up every year: the Republican People’s Party and the Democrat Party, the Justice and Development Party and the Motherland Party, the National Salvation Party and the National Order Party and the National Development Party, the People’s Labor Party and the People’s Democracy Party, the Great Turkey Party and the New Turkey Party. The Communist Party still existed. The so-called Islamist political party embraced the West, and the secularist party did not. The Islamist party was capitalist, the secularist party was not. The country had been America’s and Israel’s staunchest ally, but the Turkish people liked neither very much. The head scarf was banned on university campuses and in government institutions, but you couldn’t drink alcohol within one hundred feet of a mosque. Women had gotten the vote in 1930, you could buy the morning-after pill at the pharmacy, abortions were legal until the tenth week, but only 24 percent of women worked, and most girls seemed to call their boyfriends eighty-two times a day.
Caner patiently served as a human encyclopedia, explaining which newspapers were “nationalist” and which “religious,” and which “liberal” and which “leftist”; what the difference was between a Marxist leftist and a Kemalist leftist; how gay Turks could evade military conscription by providing photos of themselves having sex—but only as a “bottom” because being a “top” didn’t necessarily mean you were gay. As with Sabiha Gökçen, the adopted daughter of Atatürk, the world’s first female fighter pilot, as well as the person who dropped bombs on thousands of Kurds who did not want to be Turkish, every time I learned some new factoid and parroted it back to Caner over coffee, he would return with the factoid’s dark underbelly, as if there were two entirely distinct but parallel histories here, the official one and the real one. What was good in one was almost always bad in the other. I assumed this dual nature was particular to the troubled nation I had chosen, which I regarded with an unconscious but automatic parental concern. But each day my confidence as a journalist, as a person, as a thinker, declined.
Despite my confusion, it was an exciting time. On one of my first Saturdays in the country, thousands, maybe millions, of secularists took to the streets in Istanbul and Ankara and Izmir, waving red flags and protesting the presidency of Abdullah Gül. The protest was a bit like Mardi Gras, or the Fourth of July, without alcohol or beads or men sticking their hands down your pants. “Turkey is secular, and will remain secular!” they shouted. On a dreary highway in a northern Istanbul neighborhood, I watched a woman waving her huge flag, which fluttered violently in front of two women passing in head scarves, who had to flinch to avoid it. “We don’t want an imam for president!” other women screamed. (Abdullah Gül was a businessman educated in London, but no matter.) A woman named Nur Serter, the vice president of the Atatürk Thought Association, told the crowd that the women were lining up “in front of the glorious Turkish army,” according to reports. Türkan Saylan, president of the Association for Support of Contemporary Living, complained during those days that the government was transforming the presidential palace into “the palace of a religious order.” Overwhelmingly, the angriest people were women, who believed an Islamic government might transform their lives. I was reading a book at the time by an academic whose mother went around wearing Atatürk pins and saying, “I have my Atatürk against their veils.” That week, a female think tank writer observed, “If all Turkey’s leaders come from the same Islamist background, they will—despite the progress they have made towards secularism—inevitably get pulled back to their roots.”
The dreaded roots of which they spoke were the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, it was the Turks, not the Arabs, who constituted the world’s imaginary Muslim menace. The Ottoman Empire was a vast multiethnic territory, one in which the intellectuals, the wealthy, and the artisans were largely Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and Jews. Its overlords, however, were the Turkish sultans, or the “Terrible Turks,” and the Western world hated them. One editorial in an 1896 edition of The New York Times, for example, declared that the Turk being “driven out ‘bag and baggage’” was, according to the newspaper, “the inner most desire of all of us.” Americans primarily thought of Turks as Muslims who killed Christians, and when World War I broke out, their sympathies lay with the Christian Armenians and Greeks, whom the Turks were in the process of slaughtering. The Ottomans, who had sided with the Germans, lost the war, and the victorious Western powers eagerly parceled out Ottoman lands to France and Britain in the disastrous way that Charles Crane observed. The Turks, those people who had been stewards of one of the greatest empires in the world for seven hundred years, were offered nothing but a stump of land in Anatolia, surrounded by enemies, with no access to waterways, and without Constantinople, seat of its caliphate, urban jewel of the East. It was one of many grand humiliations.
In response, a group of young Turks—soldiers and intellectuals who had long wanted to overthrow the dyspeptic, antimodern sultans, eliminate the caliphate, and draw up a proper constitution—nursed a catastrophic sense of grievance. To Turks in Istanbul, the Western occupiers, as well as the besieged Christian locals, were acting like conquerors who had won the crusades. They believed that Greeks were mocking the muezzin and calling street dogs Mohammed; that British soldiers swatted at fezzes and tore off veils; that the fires in Istanbul’s Muslim neighborhoods were acts of arson. Watching the dispossession of his people in disgust and fury, a Turkish soldier named Mustafa Kemal boarded a ship to Samsun, launched the war for independence, ousted the Western powers, and established the Republic of Turkey.
The only people who hated the Ottoman Empire more than the West were Mustafa Kemal and his Kemalists. Atatürk believed, in part, that the backwardness of the Ottoman Empire had allowed for its defeat by the West. Their self-hatred inspired a renewal. Atatürk (which means “father of the Turks,” a name he took in 1934) created not only a new state but a new “Turk,” one with an identity, history, and philosophy of life strong enough to hold together a nation that did not exist. He drew on the ideas of an ideologue named Ziya Gökalp, who had been working on how to imagine the Ottoman religions, ethnicities, and cultures as one “nation”—“a community of individuals who have in common their language, religion, ethics, and aesthetics, acquired through a common education.” This inclusive worldview would be subject to Atatürk’s revisions. The “republic must be forced through by other means before the opposition had time to unite,” Atatürk said. “A debate on it might be fatal.” Gökalp had struggled to reconcile Islam, nationalism, and modernity, without racial undertones or religious authoritarianism. Atatürk opted for Turkism, a nationalism based on race, and laicism, a social system based on extreme secularism, for which Atatürk would be greatly admired by both Hitler and Mussolini.
The creation of the new Turk was a decidedly undemocratic process. Newspapers were closed, opposition members killed, history rewritten. Islam, Atatürk avowed, was the opposite of “modernity.” It would have to be diminished, not destroyed. Atatürk recognized Islam’s importance in fusing the new identity: they were Muslims after all, and the Christianity of the Greeks and Armenians was seen as a threat to the nascent nationalism. Above all, in communities long directed by their imams or their priests, the secula
r bureaucratic “state” would be privileged over religious leaders. So mosques were seized along with the properties belonging to churches. Sufi tekkes were shut down. Alevism was shunned. Drinking alcohol in public was permitted; buffalo-drawn carts were not. The script was changed from Arabic to roman, and the language dramatically altered to eliminate Persian and Arabic words, rendering millions of people illiterate overnight. Most famously, the veil was discouraged as retrograde, and the charismatic red fez was banned. For weeks, many men in Anatolia didn’t even leave the house, so scandalized were they by the prospect of wearing a Western hat; others wrapped cloth around it and called it a turban; local politicians, upon seeing a fez-wearing rebel in the street, would immediately report him to the authorities. Atatürk deeply hated those conical hats:
“Gentlemen,” Atatürk said in 1927, “it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization. [It was necessary] to accept in its place the hat, the headgear used by the whole civilized world; and in this way, to demonstrate that the Turkish nation, in its mentality as in other respects, in no way diverges from civilized social life.”
The “Turk,” meanwhile, was defined as modern, Muslim but specifically Sunni Muslim, and, most important, Turkic. The cosmopolitanism of Constantinople was deliberately destroyed. “Turkish schoolbooks taught new generations of students to see their distant ancestors as Turkic tribesmen, even if their grandfathers had actually been Salonican greengrocers or Sarajevan tailors,” the historian Charles King writes. “Under the Ottomans, few of these families would have dreamed of using ‘Turk’ to describe themselves. That label was generally reserved for a country bumpkin more comfortable astride a donkey than in the sophisticated environs of Istanbul.”