Turkish Awakening (3 page)

Friends in England often ask me whether Turks are gradually getting more religious, or whether the government is imposing religion on them. Neither is true. The AKP is a religious political party and it reaches out to the considerable religious demographic of Turkey. Despite Turkey’s fame as a secular state, there has always been a traditionally conservative majority in the population. Until recently, these people
have been sidelined by nationalist governments and military juntas, but the AKP not only respects religious Turks, it courts them. During the holy month of Ramadan, for example, large posters featuring a smiling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wish passers-by a happy Ramadan in an elegant, calligraphic script. He promises his supporters more mosques and religious schools. Religious Turks feel personally cared for, and secular Turks feel threatened. The AKP are secure in the knowledge that they have the unquestioning support of a huge swathe of the population, and they are not interested in pacifying the rest.

Erdoğan’s ability to polarise the population is impressive – roughly half of Turkey’s 75 million hate him, half love him. That, at least, was the case at the 2011 election; in the light of the protests, the scale has probably tipped against him, although his most ardent followers admire him more than ever for taking a strong line. For many, he is a new Atatürk – a strong, fearless, charismatic leader who has a bold idea of where he wants to take the country, and who also understands his religious base. Erdoğan appeals to ordinary Turks because he comes from a modest background, has a covered wife and worked his way up from nothing. He nearly made it as a professional footballer (giving him automatic kudos), and worked as a bus driver before getting involved in politics. It’s almost as if someone has made up his CV specifically to appeal to the large portion of ordinary working Turks who had previously been ignored by relatively privileged politicians who made them feel guilty for practising their religion, for example by banning headscarves in public institutions.

Republican Turkey’s respect for strong, charismatic leaders
stems from the extraordinary hero worship of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Every Turkish leader since Atatürk has struggled in the shadow of the great man, and many people suspect that for Erdoğan he is a particular nemesis. Erdoğan represents many of the religious values Atatürk tried to eradicate, and on a few occasions has nearly slipped up by showing his true feelings towards the national hero – once he obliquely referred to the notoriously raki-loving Atatürk as a ‘drunkard’. Erdoğan has also surreptitiously reduced Atatürk’s legacy by curbing military celebrations on Republic Day, and by urging his supporters to carry Turkish flags ‘not bearing any other symbols’ (many Turkish flags traditionally incorporate a portrait of Atatürk). Still, Erdoğan has usually been careful not to make his feelings too obvious because he risks alienating the religious nationalist Turks who might otherwise vote for him.

I have worked this out only gradually, and when I first arrived in Turkey I was completely bewildered by the complexity of its politics. I had no idea how to unpick the various threads of religion and nationalism, and Atatürk’s legacy confused me. I needed basics. I would ask myself: what is it that connects Turks, above and beyond their abstract sense of patriotism? What creates a sense of belonging to something called ‘Turkey’? What is concrete?

Sometimes I look at a Turk in the street and think, ‘That woman has rolled thousands of
dolma
[stuffed vine leaves] in her life,’ or ‘That man has consumed hundreds of
döner
kebabs.’ Food is something all Turks share, alongside a myriad of other experiences like the modulations of the muezzin’s call to prayer, the smell of rosewater cologne, the melodies of
songs everyone knows from childhood
.
These things connect people more strongly, more tangibly than convictions of national identity. They are the day-to-day make-up of what it is to be a Turk.

Turks are fundamentally happy to be Turkish, taking delight in shared experiences as well as pride in the concept of Turkey as the best motherland in the world. Alongside the ubiquitous portraits, busts and flags of Atatürk in this country, you will often find his most famous quotation:
Ne mutlu Türküm diyene
, which translates as ‘How happy is the one who can say “I’m a Turk.”’ It is their equivalent of ‘God Save the Queen’, but more individualistic and thus more powerful. It is inscribed over the entrances to army bases and is part of the student oath that every Turkish child has traditionally had to utter, every week. This oath also includes a vow of Turkey-serving ideals and the promise:
Varlığım Türk varlığına armağan olsun
, ‘My existence shall be dedicated to the Turkish existence.’

I once had a discussion with a Turkish friend, Bülent, about the intensity of Turks’ feelings of attachment toward their country, and why this often prevents them from living abroad. Bülent asked me: ‘Do you worry about England when you are away? No. England will prevail, it is not vulnerable like Turkey.’ By contrast, many Turks feel that Turkey is being ruined both materially, for example through excessive construction (as was the catalyst for the protests at Gezi Park), and ideologically, for example by the repression of free speech, reflected in the huge number of imprisoned journalists and the self-censorship of domestic media. Turks who tend towards conspiracy theories are always worried that
Turkey is under attack from foreign powers, as Erdoğan claimed in the midst of the Gezi protests.

Bülent, a twenty-seven-year-old, incurably romantic leftist liberal, is nostalgic for a country he has never really experienced – the Turkey portrayed in leftist songs and poetry – but he still feels strongly that he belongs to this country, and he has the protective attachment of a father towards his wayward child. This is obviously a strange overturning of the normal child–parent relationship of citizen to motherland, especially in a nationalistic country like Turkey, but it somehow works both ways. That is why my mother still, after forty years of living in England, reacts very defensively to any criticism of Turkey. She left it, quite aware of its problems, but she cannot brook any foreign attack on the country that instilled such an indelible sense of owning and being owned.

I have come to realise that the question of Turkey’s identity crisis is a very Western formulation. Westerners assume that Turks are confused about their identity because Turkey is a country torn by contradictions and impossible to pigeonhole. The Western view of Turkey is heavy with clichés, the general line being ‘a nation torn between East and West, treading the line between Religion and Democracy’ (note the Western assumption that the two are a priori mutually exclusive). The clichés have a point, of course, and lead to the legitimate question: in a country so filled with people of widely varied descent, where ethnic minorities are in fact the majority, surely it must be natural for people to question their national identity? The answer is that the racial melting pot of Turkey is, if anything, the
reason
why Turks are so sure about being Turkish. They have to be – it is what welds them all
together in the utopian national dream that Atatürk created, which has been perpetuated for nearly a century through the sheer force of his vision. This is not to say that all Turks agree about the political direction Turkey is going in; that was dramatically demonstrated by the Gezi protests. While they may disagree on politics, I have never met a Turk who is not proud of being Turkish on a fundamental level.

America is a nation of assorted immigrants, a genetically disparate country just as Turkey is, and patriotic in the same way – though not to quite the same extent, because it is not as young and insecure as Turkey is. Every American is proud to call herself an American just as every Turk is proud to call herself a Turk. This sense of belonging is an incredibly important part of their personal identity, but it does not preclude an interest in their particular family heritage. It is precisely because the sense of national identity is so strong in these two countries that people can explore and celebrate their roots.

Every American who has an Irish background will unfailingly tell me all about his potato-digging, freedom-fighting ancestors, and every Turk with Georgian blood will tell me about how her great-great-grandparents left everything to travel to the Black Sea coast of Turkey in the nineteenth century. This heritage is chronologically remote but closely treasured, and the Turkish and American fascination with previous generations is a totally human vanity. Everyone wants to feel connected to their particular past even if they have never visited the country of their forefathers and none of their surviving family has even a hint of the accent. The rapidly developing market in DNA tracing is evidence of
people’s desire to explore themselves, to create an individual backstory which makes them unique.

However, it is only in relative security that people can do this. Ultimately, a Turk is a Turk. Their Arab or Greek or Azeri ancestry is a pleasing flourish to their persona, but not integral to their being. Being Turkish is the fundamental thing, and they feel part of an important whole when they take the oath of allegiance or put a portrait of Atatürk up on their wall, and Americans are similar. It is when people feel uneasy, fearing that perhaps they do not belong, that they try desperately to fit in by obscuring their ancestry. The Turk with Georgian roots boasts of his great-great-grandparents because they have no impact whatever on his Turkishness. He is secure, quite possibly a member of a nationalist political party, as ideologically Turkish as it is possible to be.

Coming to Turkey as a half-Turk was far more complicated than I had expected. My name, for a start, caused just as much bewilderment as it has always done. In England, it was an embarrassment in the state school yard of my childhood, but then became a point of interest in London’s politically correct social circles. In Turkey, the unexpected reaction of people I had just met was scepticism. Inevitably, I would be interrogated: ‘
Türk müsün?
’ (‘Are you a Turk?’) On ambiguous visual evidence and indisputable aural evidence, I was clearly a foreigner of some description, a
yabancı
, so what was I doing masquerading with a Turkish name? I am a peculiar fraud in Turkey – mislabelled foreign matter.

Foreigners are much more of a scarcity in Turkey than in the UK, which is why their otherness is more significant; why would these people accept me as a Turk when I was much
more unusual and interesting as a Brit? A Turkish name became something to be justified, rather than exhibited. I soon realised I couldn’t even pronounce my own name properly; I started practising the way others said it. It was when this happened that I realised I had a lot to learn and change about my self-perception if I wanted to be more than a product of my British upbringing with a quirky name attached. In other words, I had to understand what it means to be Turkish.

As I taxied my way around Istanbul in the first few months of arriving in the country, all these existential musings were yet to come. What struck me initially was the bewildering visual variety of Istanbul, and then further afield, as I explored other areas of Turkey. To understand the social complexities of the country, I first had to get the lie of the land.

Istanbul was a formidable starting point. I caught glimpses of the city in all its uptown, downtown, chic and shabby guises; a kind of complementary slideshow to accompany the running commentary of freely expressed Turkish opinion provided by my driver. This city is both the beauty and the beast of cosmopolitan aesthetic, full of historical treasures, soulless apartment blocks, great sweeps of coastline and miles of urban motorway. Its very variety is overwhelming. En route to work, I would pass by manicured residential
site
s (gated compounds, pronounced as the French
cité
), ancient cobbled alleyways, bustling farmers’ markets and gargantuan shopping malls, ending up in the skyscraping sprawl of Levent – the City. Further afield, on the Asian side of town, a new financial heart is growing on the outskirts of the sleepy suburbs of the city – Ümraniye, so grim and remote as to be a rival Slough. Back in fashionable districts on the European
side, you could be forgiven for thinking you had wandered into Mayfair on the streets of Nişantaşı, which is characterised by Louis Vuitton and Prada stores, a few independent designer
atölye
s
and bejewelled ladies swilling large glasses of rosé outside smart Italian restaurants. Ten minutes south, a very different picture awaits you in the grey underbelly of Dolapdere, where local
bakkal
s (corner shops) provide the only splashes of colour with their crated fruit on pavements patrolled by stray dogs and glue sniffers.

Istanbul is set apart from other patchy metropolises by its trump card: the most spectacular setting in the world. Threaded by the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, dotted with scattered hills and the nearby Prince’s Islands, this city is unrivalled in the majesty of its geography. The most dramatic and uplifting ride in Istanbul is the crossing of the Bosphorus bridge from Asia to Europe – a gradually unfolding view of Ottoman palaces, Byzantine churches, fishing ports and a glittering sea beneath you is quite literally breathtaking and reduces even seasoned Istanbullus to wondering silence. It is during these crossings that I remember why I put up with the frenetic chaos of this city. Living in Istanbul is like dealing with an opera diva: you accept the tardiness and the tantrums because you cannot resist the beauty of her art, a gift which silences the mediocrity of all rivals.

Stepping out of the yellow taxi cab, you are immediately reminded that Istanbul is a city of noise and mayhem. Car horns, endless construction work, artificially magnified calls to prayer and the responding barking of dogs form an unrelenting soundtrack as soon as you open a window or step out of the door. I felt extremely English on arrival, dropped into a bubbling pot of public emotion – angry lovers, bawling street sellers and operatic tramps assailed me on a daily basis. The city teems with approximately 16 million people, and an ever-increasing number of arrivals from rural communities and Western tourists mix with disgruntled indigenous residents, resulting in an inevitable clash of different behaviours. Tensions simmer in traditionally conservative areas which have become newly hip, attracting liberal, often Western crowds who are not always welcomed by the existing residents.

One of my dearest friends is Andrew Boord, who has been living in Istanbul for twenty-five years and is actually now a Turkish citizen (the name on his Turkish passport is ‘Enver Borlu’, the result of a bizarre interview with a senior official who was trying to approximate ‘Andrew Boord’ during the application process). He rents out his flat in Galata, a beautiful, historic part of town which is now popular with musicians and Western journos in particular. Andrew can
command a sizeable rent for his flat from short-term visitors, but the only problem is the crazed xenophobe who lives in the opposite building. This maniac can be relied on to shout abuse at whoever happens to be staying in Andrew’s flat, accusing one French couple of ‘fornicating in broad daylight’ in view of this man’s window. ‘Take no notice,’ said Andrew. ‘He always says that.’ The next day the couple were awoken by a loud thud and went out onto their balcony to discover a large plastic bottle filled with what could only be urine, crumpled and leaking with the force of impact among the flowerpots.

There is nothing Andrew can really do about this man – the police are totally uninterested and luckily the short-term nature of the let means Andrew can juggle tenants without too much trouble. Longer-term residents are less lucky. Amanda and Taylor, two American friends of mine, live in an expensively converted apartment in a run-down part of town, and they like entertaining. Most of their neighbours are religious Turks and are very suspicious of the stream of expat friends who visit the building. One Monday evening I attended a dinner party there; quite early on, someone downstairs complained but no one took any notice. At about 11 p.m., when a few guests remained, Taylor began coughing in what we thought was a theatrically exaggerated manner. Soon, however, everyone in his vicinity was spluttering, with streaming eyes; cries of ‘Tear gas!’ were heard over the mêlée as we fled to a bedroom at the opposite end of the flat. Ridiculous as it seemed, it was undoubtedly tear gas we had inhaled – I knew the tell-tale rasping of the throat – and the most plausible explanation was that a neighbour had left a
canister near the front door to put an end to festivities. The hysteria of the situation somehow took a comic turn and, to spite the party poopers, we remained in the flat, red-eyed but jolly, taking it in turns to gasp at the open window while we polished off the wine. We have since found out from the friendly newsagent that the local branch of the Muslim Association is across the street from this flat, and has a great deal of influence among the neighbours. Amanda and Taylor are considered to be bad influences on their children, in particular. The last tenants of the flat, also foreigners, were beaten up by their irate neighbours and ended up in hospital; Amanda and Taylor are flat-hunting again.

The urine-flingers and tear gas wielders are fairly extreme examples of guerrilla neighbourhood watch tactics, which I cite only to show how strongly some residents feel about what must be an alarmingly swift invasion of people with very different values from their own. I’ve known some London neighbours to get nearly as angry over an unkempt hedge or stolen parking spot. Most of the time my neighbours have been almost overwhelmingly hospitable, taking particular care to welcome me in the same way they would a guest, seeing themselves as surrogate family to a displaced waif with no apparent family of her own. The extremes of neighbourly behaviour – kindly matron versus aggressive, religious zealot – are almost irreconcilable but demonstrate the gamut of Turkish behaviour and ideals.

Less worrying are the squabbles between like and like – for example, the bored and frustrated gangs of Turkish youths who have no real quarrel, but who feel the need to guard their territories over-zealously. I used to go to school in Stanmore,
in north London, and these Turkish gangs remind me of the Ali G types in the rather boring suburbs of London who strut around with oversized hoodies and talk of knives, but who are really grade A students making regular visits to their grannies and taking care to avoid parking tickets. In a similar vein, I have seen puffed-up Turkish youths circling each other and trading insults in Tophane, only to be broken up by their scolding mothers telling them that dinner is on the table and how dare they be late – some of these mother hens don’t even bother to emerge from the kitchen, but scream out of windows on high. The ‘gangs’ disperse immediately, with a few feeble parting shots, and no doubt the same sequence repeats the next day.

Since the 1970s, there has been an extensive migration from rural to urban areas in Turkey, and the greatest example of that is Istanbul. In many ways, this enormous city is a microcosm of the country, containing pockets of quite distinct communities from, say, Urfa, Kayseri, Diyarbakır or Rize, as well as the traditionally ‘Western’ areas of Bebek, Beyoğlu and Moda, which can look like London or New York. In Fatih, a residential, conservative community near the historical area of Sultan Ahmet, the proliferation of burqas and beards has led to its nickname of Little Afghanistan (though the residents are eastern Turks, not Afghans). If I want to visit the area, I wear trousers or a long skirt and top. I do not feel under any kind of moral pressure, as such, but one instinctively does not want to be the oddity, the cultural alien. It is bizarre that a mere five-minute taxi ride from here brings you to Beyoğlu, where you could be forgiven for thinking you were in the West End of London, short skirts and public smooching aplenty.

Whenever female friends come to visit me in Turkey, they generally ask the same question pre-arrival: ‘Can I wear what I like, or . . . ?’ There is always a little note of apology and hesitation, which comes I think from a combination of not wanting to appear ignorant of Turkey’s current state, and not wanting to offend me by thinking my country religious and, by association, backward. The truth is that it is a fair question. The country is a wonderful mix of people and this means that you have to adapt, chameleon-like, to various communities, testing the waters as you go. This is as true of Istanbul as it is for areas in the east, the south and in the depths of the Anatolian Plateau.

Funnily enough, I feel more comfortable in traditionally conservative parts of the country – Gaziantep, Urfa and Kayseri, for example – than in some parts of Istanbul. I think this is due to the relatively relaxed attitude of people in central and south-east Anatolia doing things as they have always done them, rather than in the metropolis, where they are trying to establish themselves as rightful residents, battling against the forces of ugly, secular modernity. There is a kind of belligerent attitude displayed by some religious Istanbul residents which must be a reaction to the proximity of people who are fundamentally different from them – people like me, for example – whom they see as a threat, and who make them keen to protect their pious identity in an ‘us against them’ kind of way. By contrast, traditionally religious communities in the east have the security of majority and are benignly curious about foreign visitors, for the most part.

Until last summer, the annual One Love music festival was held with great success on Bilgi university campus in the
district of Eyüp in Istanbul. It was sponsored by the Turkish beer company Efes Pilsen, and resembled an average British festival in terms of over-eighteens drinking and dancing to various B-list acts. In July 2012, supposedly under municipal pressure, Efes was forced to withdraw its name from the festival and the sale of alcohol was banned, effectively finishing the event. Why? Some people argued that, because Eyüp is an area famous for its mosque, it was not appropriate that an event involving alcohol should take place there. Actually, it had nothing to do with that. An announcement from Prime Minister Erdoğan himself cleared up the confusion: ‘They want all our youth to be alcoholics,’ he was quoted as saying in domestic and international media. ‘For God's sake, how can this happen? How can anyone allow alcohol to be sold on a school campus? Will the student go there to get drunk on alcohol, or find knowledge?’ Strong words, from a strong leader, and widely applauded despite the secular voices of dissent. The prime minister said he had personally called the school’s administration over the matter: ‘I said, “What on earth is this?” And I told them we were upset over this.’

Not only was alcohol banned at the upcoming festival, it is now not allowed at Bilgi at all. Previously popular alcohol-serving restaurants on campus are no longer in business. The once thriving student community – a patchwork of gallery spaces, restaurants and student common rooms – has gone quiet, as have the campuses of other universities.

Aside from sweeping laws governing the sale and consumption of alcohol, there have been a number of specifically anti-alcohol decrees during the AKP’s rule, which remain one of the primary sources of unease among secular Turks
about the direction the government is taking. The decrees usually affect the most bohemian and fun-loving area of Istanbul, the European district of Beyoğlu, and often occur during Ramadan, when Muslims do not drink.

Beyoğlu is a huge area in Istanbul, encompassing traditional neighbourhoods like Kasımpaşa, where Erdoğan grew up, as well as the tourist-beloved bar districts like Asmalı Mescit, Cihangir and Galata. This means there is an unfortunate clash between the jurisdiction of its AKP mayor and the pockets of decidedly secular entertainment. There is an even more unfortunate clash when the prime minister gets involved, which does not happen as often as might be expected, because he has very little reason to go to Beyoğlu. When he does, as happened during Ramadan in July 2011, he does not usually like what he sees.

Ramadan is always very difficult when it falls in summer months, because the days are longer (meaning more time without food or drink for those fasting) and the heat makes it tougher to go without water. Even worse, secular people like to eat outside, which is demoralising for the fasters. In fact, there is an unspoken code in largely Muslim countries that you do not eat or drink on the street during Ramadan, out of respect for others. The areas I mentioned in Beyoğlu – and in particular Asmalı Mescit, legendary place of revelry – are different, being almost exclusively patronised by cosmopolitan, secular Turks and tourists, and indeed composed entirely of bars and restaurants.

In July 2011 Prime Minister Erdoğan was exasperated when outdoor restaurant tables held up his motorcade en route to a whirling dervish ceremony in Galata. Worse, he
was enraged when one of the al fresco drinkers raised an ironic and highly offensive glass to him, or so the bar owners said. A week later, police removed all outdoor tables and chairs from the areas of Galata and Asmalı Mescit, leaving behind a puritanical ghost town in the busiest tourist month of the year.

Despite the local council’s loyal protestations that the tables were removed because the restaurants were transgressing the legal quota for the area, which had indeed been a long-standing dispute, it is too much of a coincidence that the blow fell so soon after Erdoğan’s visit. For one thing, the restaurants all paid a hefty rent to the municipality for each table they used, meaning that those in charge did not have much motive to ban them, and had never done so before. I talked to a restaurant owner in Galata, whose tables were on a pedestrian square and thus completely exempt from the charge of blocking pavement traffic, and he showed me the Beyoğlu Belediye (council) contract he had signed only a month before for the renewal of his table rent. It is difficult to believe that the municipality would suddenly take the decision of its own accord to remove tables without a word of warning. Two years later, the tables are still gone, casting further doubt on the council’s claims; if the requisite fines had been paid, why not put the tables back? Ironically, during the Gezi protests, when police were concentrated up by Taksim Square, many restaurant owners took advantage of the absence of police further downtown to bring their tables out again, and diners could enjoy eating outside once more. This arrangement worked perfectly until tear gas wafting down from Taksim Square forced everyone inside again.

As was evident during the One Love festival incident, Erdoğan makes no secret of his opposition to alcohol and his direct involvement in curtailing its sale and consumption. While the reasons given by the government for the restrictions on alcohol are often health-related, Erdoğan has a way of turning the whole debate into a moral crusade which involves protecting Turkish youth from a tragic descent into alcoholism. There have been many instances in the past decade where he has offered life coaching advice to the Turkish public at large, for example the catchy one-liner: ‘Eat grapes, don’t drink wine.’ He has also declared that the national drink is no longer raki (alcoholic) but
ayran
, a non-alcoholic drink made of yoghurt.

The law of May 2013 restricting alcohol was particularly inflammatory. Among many other things, it dramatically limited the sale and advertisement of alcohol, dictated that bottles of alcohol must carry graphic health warnings, like cigarette packets, and all films or programmes on television must have images of alcoholic drinks blanked out (as on Iranian television), so actors look like they are drinking pixelated blurs. Egemen Bağış, the Turkish minister for EU affairs, defended the law to other EU ministers on the grounds that some parts of it had been approved by the World Health Organisation, such as the ban on selling alcohol from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Bağış pointed out that it was unfair to accuse the AKP of Islamic authoritarianism when countries like Sweden implemented the same rules.