Turkish Awakening (21 page)

The Aegean coast of Turkey is probably best known for the ancient sites of Ephesus, Troy and the seaside resort of Bodrum; this also happens to be the tour route of the annual Turkish camel wrestling competition, which snakes down the coastline every winter, attracting legions of camel fanciers but few Western tourists. I attended a day of wrestling mid-way through the tour, arriving the day before the big Selçuk competition in time for the obligatory pre-game beauty pageant. This contest is a traditional precursor to the main event, and is taken extremely seriously, with a panel of
X Factor
-style judges picked for their camel-related or academic backgrounds. The contestants are not beautiful. They are mighty
wrestlers and do not display themselves to the best advantage at close quarters, in drizzly rain in a town square; however, their owners have spent a lot of time dressing them in glitzy banners and bells, and one old man in the crowd next to me notes that the animal who ends up winning first prize smells faintly of soap. Also, the arch of his neck is very fine.

So much for the peripheral ceremonies: the most beautiful camel wins a new bell, the owners have a booze-up before the big day, and the morning of the big match is upon us. Though a niche spectator sport, camel wrestling attracts a passionate fan base. These camels and their owners are serious celebrities, and old legends feature in black-and-white photographs displayed in ceremonial tents near the festivities. Currently several camels are household names, commanding vast sums from local municipalities for entering their competition because they raise the calibre of the event and the audience volume so significantly. The Rocky equivalent of recent years is Çılgın Özer (‘Crazy Özer’) – he is unbeatable, the darling of the carpet-betting punters, and has a magnificent, personalised trailer in which he arrives with great pomp and ceremony to each event, far outshining the plebeian contestants in their dusty open lorries. His estimated worth is two hundred thousand lira, or around £70,000.

The sport has always had a difficult relationship with the Turkish government. I attended the event with Sibel Samlı and Gizem Selçuk, two Turkish women who are in the process of making a documentary about the wrestling scene; in their search for funding, they have drawn a blank with the Department for Tourism, who are hesitant to back anything which might glorify a rather rough and supposedly barbaric
traditional sport. In fact, the reputation for barbarism is unfair – the wrestling is far less violent than in the times when a female camel was parked alongside the arena to galvanise the male camels into furious, sexually charged battle. Now, the contestants are merely bored virgin males who would probably pick a fight if left to their own devices, as they would in the wild. Biting is forbidden, and the camels broken up if they succumb to temptation – most are well trained. The other controversial element of the sport is the fact that most camels are not bred in Turkey but are in fact smuggled over the border from Iran. This is nicely skated over now, but no one wants it getting into the public eye.

It would seem that cultural efforts both new and old are hampered by the government’s attitude to what it sees as dangerous or embarrassing phenomena. I have to admit that I see the government’s point when it comes to something like camel wrestling, because it is the kind of thing that plays into many Westerners’ preconceptions about Turkish culture. Camel wrestling sounds archaic and weird, and might not necessarily be what you want to represent Turkey in the international arena. Spanish bullfighting is much crueller than Turkish camel wrestling but has managed to enjoy a glamorous reputation until quite recently, when the animal rights-sensitive conscience of the international community asserted itself. Turkey is always going to be more vulnerable to accusations of backwardness, and because of this Turks are more defensive of their practices than, say, Europeans. What could be more ridiculous or outdated than morris dancers with blackened faces stomping around a pagan pole, for example? And yet this tradition is treasured in England as dearly as the
queen by many people, because it is old and therefore worthy of reverence. Camel wrestling is just as old, if not more so, but rather than being universally celebrated in Turkey it is treated like a quirky old cousin whom everyone wants to hurry up and die. Ironically, when I reminisce about my camel-wrestling experiences, foreigners are much more interested than Turks, who look askance. This is a classic example of interest in the Other; reciprocally, a Turk will be much more interested in morris dancing than a native English person.

‘Orientalism’ and ‘occidentalism’ refer to generalisations on Eastern and Western societies, respectively, and are no longer neutral terms. In 1978, Edward Said’s
Orientalism
was published and gave the term a negative connotation; Said argued that most orientalist views simplified and patronised ‘the Orient’ (a patronising term in itself). The Orient, i.e. anything east of Europe, was seen as ‘exotic’ but also as backward, static and inferior to Western society. Likewise, occidentalist views simplify and often demonise Western society – many people in the Middle East associate ‘the West’ with American military aggression, pornography and exploitation, among other vices.

Both orientalist and occidentalist views are in force today, as they were a hundred years ago. In a way, wealthy, secular Turks are the biggest orientalists of all. They may not fetishise the exoticism of the Orient, but they definitely see themselves as belonging to Western society, and see that as superior to an oriental society. They aspire to Western art, or the lifestyles they see in American sitcoms. People living in Europe and America do not have the same level of exposure to life in Turkey but they read about Ottoman history
and come to Turkey wanting to buy carpets, coffee pots and jewellery. Turks want to buy into a lifestyle, while Westerners want to come, see and acquire a souvenir of their exotic holiday. The average German or American tourist will have a vague idea of what they want from a souk, but they will be easily taken in by modern tat, especially if the word ‘Ottoman’ features on the packaging. The range of products aimed solely at foreigners is quite astonishing – pre-packaged baklava that no Turk would ever buy, tacky belly-dancing outfits and dubious ‘love potions’ from the Spice Bazaar. Souvenir shops in London fleece tourists, Turkish and otherwise, for mini plastic replicas of Big Ben and Beefeaters. Both classes of tourists are fair game.

Turkish belly dancers are a particularly good example of how Turks cater to Western taste. The dancers in seedy bars and upmarket bars alike favour a particularly raunchy style of outfit, with the long skirt traditional to the genre cut to the hip to reveal bare legs, spangly stilettos and plunging sequinned bras. This style of outfit was made popular in the early twentieth century by the misguided image that Hollywood had of the stereotypical ‘Eastern Belle’, or the exotic temptress vaguely associated with the world of the
Arabian Nights
. This style – featuring gauze veils and see-through layers – actually had more in common with Western burlesque and vaudeville dancers and certainly not much in common with Middle Eastern belles at the time, who were, for the most part, fully and opaquely clothed when in sight. The ‘Eastern Belle’ style of costume is, unsurprisingly, still popular in Turkey, and brings to mind the Ottoman author Ahmed Midhat Efendi’s sarcastic description in 1889 of a
Turkish woman in the imagination of a Western man: ‘Since her garments are intended to ornament rather than conceal her body, her legs dangling from the sofa are half naked and her belly and breasts are covered by fabrics as thin and transparent as a dream.’
Plus ça change
in the fantasy world of the
oryantalist
.

Nâzım Hikmet was a Turkish poet of the early twentieth century, a romantic communist who spent much of his life in prison for his political views and who was infuriated by the patronising views expressed by orientalists like the fez-wearing Frenchman Pierre Loti. Loti wrote in great detail about his visits to Morocco, Algeria and Turkey at the turn of the twentieth century and wrote a novel about three Turkish women escaping from their harem
called
Les Désenchantées.
It has since been discovered that, during the course of his research for this novel, Loti was actually the subject of a hoax by three bored, wealthy Turkish women, who were probably in Hikmet’s camp of wanting to ridicule misguided notions of the Orient. However, Loti was beloved by most Turks simply for being a celebrated Turkophile, and has been honoured with an eponymous school and café on a small hill in the Istanbul district of Eyüp. In his poem ‘
Piyer Loti
’, a scathing Hikmet opens with a pastiche of the Western stereotype of ‘the East’, conjuring up images of mother-of-pearl slippers swinging off minaret spires, caravans of camels and belly-dancing sultans on silver trays. ‘This is the European image of the Orient found in books printed a million times a minute. Not yesterday, nor today nor tomorrow has there been or will there ever be such an Orient.’ The reality of the Orient, says Hikmet, is naked, starving prisoners dying on
the bare ground, while the region serves as the breadbasket of the West.

This book is a form of orientalism, of course, in that it generalises and objectifies a Middle Eastern country. I am not Turkish enough to have the protection of my nationality when I make sweeping assertions about ‘the Turks’, but I am trying especially hard to understand this country, trying not to over- or under-gloss it. I certainly do not expect a café to be named after me.

These days, thanks to the internet and ease of travel, old-fashioned orientalist views are less prevalent than they used to be, but they do exist in both positive and negative guises. Tourists in Istanbul confess that they are surprised by the lack of souks and the presence of malls and skyscrapers, but are soon mollified by a trip to the Blue Mosque. Worried Londoners ask me whether Turkey is ‘the next Iran’, citing the rise of headscarves like a monstrous plague. The unknown can be both intriguing and threatening, depending on the scope of one’s knowledge and insecurities; it always has been and it always will be. This is true not only of people living in different continents but within the same country, especially when that country is as huge and as diverse as Turkey.

The good old days of the Ottoman Empire were famous for ethnic and religious diversity long before the concept of multiculturalism came into Western vogue. Greeks, Armenians, Syriacs and Jews were all legally protected, self-governing minorities allowed to prosper under Ottoman rule during a time when minorities in Europe were persecuted. Ottoman society may have been organised along ethnic lines, with communities living and worshipping separately, but it was tolerant compared to global standards of the time, and as a result, the architecture and literature of Turkey have the stamp of myriad intellectual and cultural voices from the past. Having narrowly survived extinction in the early twentieth century at the hands of foreign powers, modern Turkey was forged in the fires of nationalism by a group of people whose ambition it was to create a state based upon a single national identity. Sub-national identities were seen as fault lines within society which could be exploited by foreign powers, and were treated accordingly as threats to the state’s existence. As a result, Turkey is more famous today for the expulsion of Greek and Armenian populations and decades of strife with Kurdish terrorists than for being any kind of multicultural utopia. However, over the last decade, the position of minorities has evolved significantly as the AKP has
tried to move beyond the desperately defensive paranoia of Turkish nationalism to promote Turkey’s Islamist identity, in something approaching a return to the Ottoman mindset.

Minorities abound in Turkey, many of them living happy, integrated lives, content with their Turkish citizenship alongside their particular identities as Laz (from the Black Sea area), Circassian (the north Caucasus), Macedonian, Arab or otherwise. Talking to them, I felt I discovered the best legacy of the Ottoman Empire: a tolerant, eclectic community of individuals getting on with each other while retaining the heritage of their ancestors. Others, however, are not so happy, and for them the overt and insistent displays of Turkish nationalism must grate. The difference between the two groups is largely to do with how happy they are to remain as minorities who still identify themselves as Turkish: to be a Circassian Turk, for example, is fine, but to be simply a Kurd is not. Turkish nationalism is a supernationalism in the sense that it is happy to integrate sub-identities, but a direct challenge to Turkishness cannot be tolerated.

One of the few Turkish phrases I knew in my childhood was a jingoistic mantra with the rhythm of a football chant:
Türkiye, en iyi, başka millet yok
(‘Turkey is the best, there is no other nation’). For a relatively young country, the uncompromising nature of its nationalism is not surprising, particularly when an individual of extraordinary influence (Atatürk) has forged the country out of unpromising circumstances and left an evergreen cult in his wake. When I first moved to Turkey I remember being struck by the number of flags flying from private houses, public buildings, boats and cars. Municipal parks boast hundreds of red and white flowers
arranged in the form of a crescent and star, and portraits of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk grace key rings, car bonnets and mobile phone covers. For an English person, the equivalent would be a riot of BNP-inspired decoration, Union Jacks paired with portraits of Churchill flying proudly across Britannia, their numbers doubled on occasions like Guy Fawkes Night. For an American, the displays of national pride in Turkey are probably not so strange.

For Turks, patriotism is as natural as drawing breath, an instinctive emotion independent of political agenda. Political nationalism, while always present, is now at its lowest ebb in decades: the ruling AKP is popularly defined not by nationalism but by religion. By contrast, parties like the MHP (Nationalist Action Party) teeter on the edge of fascism, despite recent attempts to soften their image. Obsessed by the racial purity of ‘true’ Turks, the MHP was originally driven by an ambition to unite Turkic peoples from Istanbul to China in a pan-Turkic empire. In the seventies, its militia-style youth group, the ‘Grey Wolves’ (taken from Turkic mythology), were responsible for tracking and killing leftist intellectuals, including a number of Kurds. After the 1980 coup the party was banned, but today the MHP has thirteen per cent of the vote, bolstered no doubt by dissatisfied Turks reacting both to the religious nature of the AKP and to the outdated Kemalism of the main opposition party, the CHP (Republican People’s Party).

The AKP’s moderate Islamist approach, while diminishing the friction between ethnic minorities, has been seen to create new religious tensions which were less prominent before they came to power. The majority of Turks are Sunni
Muslims, and because of this, in the minds of many Turks, the two are synonymous. This means that non-Sunni Muslims are often seen as ‘the other’, most significantly the Alevis, who are the largest religious minority in Turkey. In May 2013 the government announced the name of the third Bosphorus Bridge – the Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, after an Alevi-slaughtering Ottoman Sultan, Selim the Grim. This drew furious protests from the Alevi community, who pointed out that there was no need to celebrate someone who had massacred tens of thousands of Alevis. Interestingly, the Ottomans considered ‘heretic’ (non-Sunni) Muslim minorities to be of lower rank than Christians, and Selim the Grim famously declared that ‘the killing of one Alevi has as much heavenly reward as the killing of seventy Christians’. I am not suggesting the AKP share this sentiment, but it was shockingly tactless of them to honour the man who said it.

Many people are alarmed by the cliqueish nature of the ruling AKP, whose members belong to Sunni sects which are, to the trained eye, identifiable by the shape of their moustaches, among other things. In Turkey, moustache shape is extremely telling: a long Turkic horseshoe shape denotes a nationalist, while a bushy walrus moustache typically has a firebrand leftist owner. While very religious Muslim men grow moustache-less beards, the moderate Muslims currently in power tend to favour the neatly trimmed
badem
,
‘almond’ model. Some meticulously display the upper lip, like President Gül’s and Prime Minister Erdoğan’s. Others do not. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about religious moustaches to explain the difference, but apparently it denotes their particular Sunni sect. Correspondingly, the way
their wives arrange their headscarves is equally telling to those in the know.

Turkish patriotism may be varied and nuanced by political ideals but it is ever present and ever fervent, something that unites all Turks whatever their voting tendencies or moustache shape. Ever since the birth of the Turkish Republic, the issue of who has the right or, more importantly, the obligation to call himself or herself a Turk has taken on a life-or-death significance. As a consequence, racial minorities – or those who are not willing to call themselves Turks – have been marginalised and in some cases persecuted. This nationalism did not spring out of nowhere; it was a continuation of the survivalist mindset which drove the creation of the republic in 1923. Atatürk was Herculean in his achievements: he won a war of independence against European powers hungry for the remains of the Ottoman Empire, he kicked out an archaic Islamic sultan, built a modern republic from a shattered people and instilled this new republic with pride and vision. He could only achieve this by wielding strong notions of nationhood and the indivisibility of that nationhood, so that Turkey could survive and make something of itself. Turkey is very young, full of promise and the hubris which springs from insecurity.

Atatürk granted equal rights to religious minorities within Turkey and was a stalwart, single-minded secularist. He did not want religion to feature in the public sphere of modern Turkey, but he granted full freedom to private worship. However, he was a believer in the assimilation of ethnic minorities, which quite often coincide with religious minorities, like the Zaza Alevis, who were bombed by Atatürk’s
adopted daughter, the pilot Sabiha Gökçen (after whom Istanbul’s second airport is named), in Dersim in 1937 after they resisted inclusion into the Turkish nation state. Minorities like the Greek or Armenian Christians were seen as incompatible with the popular idea of a modern Turk, being both ethnically and religiously different from the ideal prototype. They were largely removed from Turkey in the population exchanges which followed the War of Independence. These population exchanges involved the expulsion of Muslims from ex-Ottoman territories like Greece in exchange for the expulsion of Christians in Turkey. Only the Christian populations in Istanbul were exempted from these exchanges thanks to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

In 1955, the hypersensitive and eternally unresolved issue of Who Owns Cyprus was inflamed by nationalist tensions on both Turkish and Greek sides, exacerbated by British anti-diplomacy, and quickly escalated into race riots in major Turkish cities. As a result of these riots, huge swathes of not only the Greek population but also the Armenian, Georgian and Jewish minority populations left the country (Armenians and Georgians are largely Orthodox Christians). It mattered more and more whether one called oneself a Turk, because that was seen to be fundamental to the existence of the country itself. In October 1927, four years after the establishment of the Republic, Atatürk gave a speech addressed to the Turkish Youth, warning them that ‘in the future, too, there will be enemies at home and abroad who will wish to deprive you of [your existence]’. Like everything he said, this has never been forgotten, and the reference to enemies at home has been taken to mean anyone without due loyalty to the state – politicians,
poets and journalists included. Today, Turks who dare to criticise Turkey publicly are automatically traitors, the kind of enemies or ‘malevolent people’ Atatürk spoke of all those years ago. This kind of exclusive nationalism was responsible for scratching references to ethnic minorities from constitutional documents in the 1920s and forcing ethnic assimilation in the thirties. It was the product of an ideology that was started for constructive ends and twisted into something destructive – Atatürk’s version of nationalism was a short-term fix. Something new is now needed, a more inclusive and tolerant form of patriotism which is not ethnicity-based, nor for that matter religion-based.

More often than not, the aggressive qualities of nationalism are more evident in diplomacy than in practice. The question of whether or not there was a genocide of Armenians by Ottoman powers between 1915 and 1917 has been endlessly discussed. In brief, Armenia and its supporters claim that 1.5 million Armenians were killed in an attempt to wipe out the entire Armenian population of the time; Turkey claims that three hundred thousand Armenians and similar numbers of Muslim Turks were killed in civil strife during this period but strongly rejects the term ‘genocide’, which implies a concerted effort to obliterate a racial demographic. Both sides demonise the other, after nearly a hundred years and a complete change of regime in Turkey. I see no merit in wielding either ‘recognition’ or ‘denial’ as political or academic weapons, as many have done. The death of these Armenians was a tragedy, and should not be treated as point-scoring fodder by anyone. Turks are masters in self-defence, because that is how they have rebuilt their nation, but paranoia
is part and parcel of such a defensive attitude. They are worried about the possibilities of territorial reparations even at this stage – every inch of ground a Turkish solider has fought and shed blood over is considered sacred ground, and worth any amount of diplomatic wrangling necessary to defend it. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the soldier–martyr in the Turkish psyche; it is even embedded in the flag, which is said to depict the reflection of a moon and crescent in a pool of Turkish warriors’ blood.

The application of this extreme patriotism to a modern-day diplomatic problem may not be right, but some of the calls for recognition of a genocide are just as mulish. Significantly, many of the most strident calls come from the Armenian diaspora rather than from Armenians themselves, mainly because diasporas are often more fiercely patriotic than indigenous populations, and the Armenian diaspora in particular is disproportionately large. Expressions of solidarity come from the most unexpected of sources; in 2011 the American reality TV star Kim Kardashian, whose father is Armenian, petitioned President Obama to formally recognise a genocide (he did not oblige). The French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour is another celebrity advocate for recognition. France already recognises a genocide but in February 2012 President Sarkozy went a step further by proposing a bill to punish the denial of genocide by up to a year in jail and a fine of €45,000. The bill did not pass but talk of it occasionally resurfaces under President Hollande.

There are close to half a million Armenians in France and Sarkozy’s proposal, timed shortly before the general elections in 2012, was widely viewed as a vote-winning ploy. The bill
was needlessly politically aggressive to Turkey and threatened free speech no matter what one’s personal views on the issue. Its announcement had an immediate and dramatic effect on the relationship between France and Turkey: Ankara froze diplomatic relations with Paris and Prime Minister Erdoğan described the bill as racist and Islamophobic. He also accused France of hypocrisy, on the grounds that French troops committed a genocide when they massacred fifteen per cent of the Algerian population in the 1940s. Elaborating on this point, the municipality of Ankara decided to change the name of Paris Street, home of the French Embassy, to Algeria Street, and to erect a monument to the Algerian genocide near the embassy. Turkey has critics on home ground, too, and is similarly hard on them – if not more so. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author, spoke out against Turkish denial of a genocide in 2005, was charged with ‘publicly insulting Turkey’s national character’ by a prosecutor in Istanbul and has been
persona non grata
in Turkey ever since. Cases like this put Turkey and France in a similar camp when it comes to free speech – both governments are insisting that ‘what we say is true, is true, and no one is allowed to say it isn’t’. It is a sad situation which just falls short of being risible because of the implications for free speech in general.