Lessons Learned...And Mysteries That Remain

Image: (in poor light and no flash) Getting ready to bargain over some excellent fabrics, Istanbul 2006.

I am very fond of Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. You could spend an eternity lost in its mazes, being hounded by professionals who want you to see a rug, a chess set, some unique earrings...and have tea of course.

I've made perhaps five journeys to the Bazaar, and a few landmarks help. At times I feel I can find my way, more or less, by these features: the street of leather-goods, the area with belly-dance costumes, the large carpet dealers. In the end, however, no trip to the Bazaar is like any other. I fight Orientalism impulses to see the shopping experience as some authentic look at "The Mysterious East," because bargaining is bargaining. I'm rather good at it, and if one is persistent, pushing past the tourist fluff and getting a unique and durable gift or bit of decor is possible.

I would shop like that every day if I could. I'm not sure, however, that I'd want to reside in Turkey for more than a year. One lesson that came from my teaching the course, rather like making a new trip to the Grand Bazaar, is that change is a constant feature of contemporary Turkey. While I no longer view Recip Erdoğan as some shill for an Iran-style future in Turkey, I do see him and the AK Party as change-agents, ones that Ataturk would not have tolerated. In the end, what Erdoğan achieves may be impressive to Westerners who might otherwise shun the AK agenda: a modern secular state with Islamic cultural and religious roots.

It would be overly facile to compare that possible future with America's past as a secular state with Christian cultural and religious roots, but some parallels work. America's Founders were careful about the role of religion. My fellow Deist Thomas Jefferson was particularly wary. But wariness is not equal to rejection, no more than head scarves imply an Iran-around-the-corner future for Turkey's secular women.

At times in Snow, I felt that Pamuk exaggerated the influence of radical Islam just to score points with Western readers. Then, just as one turns a corner on a street in the Bazaar to find an unexpected vista down some shadowy street, I recall a passage from Pamuk's Istanbul and wonder how the city, and the nation, ever shook off the burden of ruins and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

They have, and that is the second great lesson I take away from the course and my earlier travels. Pamuk is a self-confessed cloistered intellectual and artist. He feels hüzün strongly because he is a melancholy man. I know Southerners like that. In fact, in Southern writing you might look to the Agrarians of the 1930s to find a similar written-from-defeat approach to art. Conversely, many of the Turks I've known in academia are optimistic, eager, and creative. Their nation has an undeniable energy and a willingness to cooperate that I wish would be the rule in the regions to the east and south of Anatolia. Thus I read Pamuk as brilliant but limited; he does not speak for all of modern Turkey or even to it, in many cases.

A third lesson has been to get beyond the written word to look closely at the other arts. Crossing the Bridge showed more diversity in Turkish music than I'd have dreamed possible. It's easy, when touring Turkey, to fall into the Arabesque fantasies that every belly-dance show promotes. Likewise, it's too easy to be snobbish and only concern oneself with high art, thus ignoring Turkish rock, Turkish TV, Turkish street art.

The new "Young Turks" who make this possible will change their nation again. The mysteries remain, and the largest is how Turkey will stake a place in the world as a major regional power. Another will be how widely the growth in Turkey's economy reverses years of poverty and opportunities lost in many rural areas. Finally, there's the question of the EU; it seems resolved but, in 20 years, could a struggling EU be at Turkey's door, hats in hand, asking Turkey to join?

We'll see. In two years when I again teach the course, I'm certain much of what I've written will be obsolete. Meanwhile, I'm ready for another trip to the Bazaar to see what's on offer.

Not Quite What Pamuk Has in Mind

It would seem that headscarves and peace are not compatible in Snow.

What about in the real Turkey? Here's a piece from The Financial Times about the events of 29 October that left me feeling quite hopeful.

That Twilit Place Between East and West

image: Ankara greengrocer, 2005

When reading Istanbul, one must work through Pamuk's personal obsessions to get at some insights I find compelling about modern Turkey.

On page 169, he notes that Koçu, like the other melancholic writers Pamuk considered, failed to be Western and though he failed in that attempt, his "most beautiful and profound pages are the ones that remain between worlds and (again, like the others) the price he paid for his originality was loneliness."

Pamuk was a precocious but melancholy teenager and young man, and his prose indicates that his personal melancholy continues.

While this offers a key to his thinking and artistry, it also offers an insight into the nation's journey. I was most struck by Pamuk's assertion that Turkey has achieved nothing original, since the founding of the Republic, to rival the West (357).

Other than the still-evolving notion of "Turkishness," I'd say that I can find little to refute Pamuk's claim. Is this another reason he got into so much political trouble?

NYT Op Ed & My reply

You'll want to read Roger Cohen's "Turkey Steps Out." Here's my reply that (I hope) will be approved and posted at the site:

I understand the rage of Armenians and Kurds...my great-grandmother, a Maronite Christian, starved to death in the final years of the Ottoman Empire (along with many Muslim neighbors, I'll add, as food to the cities ran out). But the suffering of those past and present cannot alter the realpolitick of the region.

The West needs Turkey, and the question is, does Turkey need us? I hope so. The talks of further amendments to Turkey's constitution terrify me. The last thing the West--or Armenians in the diaspora or Kurds in the East--need would be an Islamic Republic with Sharia law on Europe's eastern borders. In my trips to Istanbul and Anakara, I've wondered at the frenetic and vibrant night life there. The young people who benefit most from the 7% growth of the economy party, even as they attended universities gated to protect them from kidnapping. But I imagine their counterparts did in Tehran in the 70s. Meanwhile, other young people of modest means listen to the call of the muezzins.

The triple game played by Syria, Iran, and Turkey should also matter more than what has been discussed in many of the comments here. Iraq is likely to collapse into civil war not long after the last US forces leave. How could that disaster end otherwise?

I could see Syria occupying the Sunni triangle in the west, with its probable oil reserves, Iran "stabilizing" the Basra region to gain access to its oil, and Turkey cowing the north into something like Finland during the Cold War. Those Kurds might shut down the PKK havens in exchange for a sweet deal of autonomy and pipeline access to the Mediterranean for all the oil in the north of Iraq.

The only question in that scenario would be how the Saudis, not the West, would respond.

Welcome to the new normal in a Post-American world.

Elif Shafak's Istanbul

After the professor's vitriol about Istanbul, a city he loathes in Bliss, it may do us well to revisit the metropolis with our guide, Elif Shafak.

She focuses on Ortaköy, perhaps my favorite neighborhood (so far) in the vast city.

Embedding the video is not permitted by YouTube, so here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXTmEgb5M2A&sns=em

The 1960s British-spy-show music is rater hilarious, but it's not Orientalist. Well, in a Post-American century, as other nations grow and rival for global attention, perhaps Istanbul will be the next hot spot, as "Swinging London" was in the 1960s during the British Invasion?

Shafak's tour gives me hope that the voices of intolerance and ignorance in Turkey--and at home--won't sound loudest. Having just had a great conversation with an Indian-American I.T. manager about his cosmopolitan travels, I feel confident today that narrow-mindedness will not win out. There's a diverse world out there to explore. Perhaps the type of gloom we see from Livaneli's Irfan may be his perspective and not a prediction for the future of Turkey or the West.

And in Turkey, there's rapid economic growth now. Perhaps it's their hour to shine.

Attacking the AKP

In looking for reactions by Turkish Islamic groups to the Sivas attack of 1993 (described by Jeremy Seal) I came across the Web site for the Center for Islamic Pluralism. The site appears to be sponsored by the Alevi sect of Shi'a Islam.

They have an article critical of the AKP and PM Erdoğan. As with any site with a political agenda, read with a critical and academic eye.

Final Questions about Shafak's Novel

The class was left with many unresolved moments in this text.

Patrick: "how Armanoush learned about her Armenian past and the intimate details that she relates to the Kavancı family."

Caroline: "With three distinct generational chasms how is the past living in the present?"

Rachel: "After the death of Mustafa, why did Asye react the way she did at the revelation of her father? And didn't Shafak give more detail? And what about Asye's relationship with the Cartoonist?" (okay that is three good questions)

Klara: "What happened to the Cartoonist? To Baron B? Petite Ma? And, most importantly, what did Shafak mean by the story? What was the symbolism of Asye having to apologize for the past she did not know at Cafe Constantinopolis?"

Peter: "Did this all really happen? I want Shafak to answer that question. If there is so much magical realism within this text how can there be any truth?"

Peter's question has some metaphysical and moral overtones: given competing stories about the past, some of which are exaggerated or even invented, how do we come to the truth? Can we?