by Suzy Hansen
To further unify the new Turks, Atatürk posited something called the Sun Language Theory, which was, in the words of the anthropologist Ayşe Gül Altınay, “a racialized conception of the history of all civilization [italics mine] at the center of which lay the Turkish race, culture and language.” Even groups like the Kurds, this new history argued, were in denial of their true Turkish identity. Atatürk demanded his people adopt a four-volume history called the Turkish History Thesis, which stated that their ancestors long ago descended from ancient peoples of Central Asia who had migrated to Anatolia, India, and China, where they disseminated their ancient culture. Among their descendants, in fact, were the Hittites of Anatolia, which conveniently allowed Atatürk to lay claim to a land then occupied by Greeks and Armenians and Kurds. Turkish, meanwhile, was declared a language from which many other languages had been derived, including Finnish and Hungarian, which happily connected Turks and Turkishness to the West. The Turks’ most important chapter in history, therefore, was no longer its six hundred years as the Ottoman Empire; Atatürk elevated Central Asia’s significance to marginalize Ottoman and Islamic influence. To make this point, Atatürk moved the capital from grand Constantinople to a terrible plain in Anatolia, closer to the Turks’ Hittite roots. (The writer Christopher de Bellaigue called Ankara “a bare hillock on which to build a new cult.”) Another of Atatürk’s adopted daughters, Afet, set about proving scientifically that Turks—despite their newfound Central Asian origins—were not from the “yellow” race but the “white” one. Atatürk and his band of adopted daughters rewrote Turkish history, and invented a people.
An Ottoman aesthetic that had evolved over multiple centuries would be replaced with a Kemalist one dreamt up in only a few years. Even tulips became suspect. In 1933, scholars of Turkey’s architectural revolution wrote, “Turkish architects today abandoned domes, floral ornaments and tile decoration. They are marching on a new and logical path.” To these modernizers, this path meant mowing down all of the unique artistic techniques of the Ottoman past in order to embrace the bland, modern styles of everyone else in the present. “The temples that the Egyptians constructed for deities or the acropolis that the Greeks built for their Gods … or the fountains and mosques of the Turks,” wrote Aptullah Ziya, an art critic, in 1932, “cannot be the source of art in the twentieth century, when airplanes are hovering in the skies and ocean liners are crossing the sea at phenomenal speeds.”
During my own bewildering initiation days, I spent too much money on a beautiful book about the Kemalist era called Modernism and Nation Building. In it, I read that Le Corbusier, the master of modernism, lamented the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire, even as his own work was celebrated by the young Turks who destroyed it. Le Corbusier had genuinely admired the simplicity of the Ottomans’ aesthetic, their “harmonious culture.” Indeed, I was surprised when I first visited Topkapı Palace, the longtime environs of the sultans, to discover a modest sense of majesty, none of the jewels, brocades, excess, and curlicues of most kings and castles. All of its art and design—its painted miniatures and calligraphy, geometric rooftops and octagonal tiles, soft-domed mosques and proud minarets—struck me as careful and dignified, a civilization of endless busy work and love.
The Kemalists disparaged all of it. They instead built giant concrete slabs of buildings that seemed to squat possessively on the land. The ideology of high modernism, according to Sibel Bozdoğan, “appealed particularly to ‘planners, engineers, architects, scientists and technicians’ who ‘wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct and worldview.’” Many nations embraced high modernism—India, Brazil, Iran—but to the Turks, this modernism did not come with dangerous philosophies from the outside because modernity belonged as much to Turkey as to anyone. A Kemalist slogan at the time was “Being Western in spite of the West”—in other words, being postcolonial but modernizing. Turkey could manage such contortions better than the others because Turkey had never been colonized. For the Turkish Republicans, Bozdoğan writes, “contemporary civilization” was “the universal trajectory of progress that every nation had to follow—a teleological destiny that could not and should not be resisted.”
This destiny meant a new lifestyle for the people as well. In cities such as Istanbul, the new Turkish citizen wore Western-style suits, and Western-cut dresses. Nuanced debates broke out in Parliament about whether to ban the peçe, or cloth that covers a woman’s face; some local authorities simply wrenched off women’s çarşaflar, or sheets, right in the street, “leaving them in their underpants.” In 1931, a Turkish feminist named Nezihe Muhittin published a book called The Turkish Woman in which she wrote, “What was the woman of fifteen years ago but a ‘monster’ both in appearance and in personality?”
This violently transformative period was called the inkilap, or revolution. “What does the word ‘modern’ mean?” someone once asked Atatürk. “It means being a human being,” he replied.
Atatürk was one of the world’s first great modernizers, a word that to me, in 2007, had no historical meaning but a positive connotation that was as obvious as the word “happy.” In Istanbul, Atatürk’s photo was in every shop, every restaurant, sometimes looking like Dracula, other times like Kevin Kline. His statue rose in every square, and people stood still for a minute every November 10 at 9:05 a.m., at the time of his death—just stopped wherever they were and stared ahead like zombies, even if at a green light, even if in traffic, even if walking in the middle of the road. It all struck me as strange, obviously cultish, and depressingly old-fashioned. But after September 11, Bernard Lewis, the “reality creator” in America, the historian of Islam, celebrated Turkey as the model for the Middle East, the one Muslim country that had forged a modern, secularist state of relative stability out of the wreck of Islamic civilization. He proposed to George W. Bush that a contemporary iron-fisted Arab Atatürk could similarly create a secular, modern Iraq, with all new myths and infrastructure. This Turkey was the model for remaking the world in 1923; this Turkey was the model again in 2001.
The Kurds, who did not fit this model, who according to the new nationalist myths had always been Turkish, revolted. Thousands of people died in the war to subdue them, a task aided by Sabiha Gökçen, Atatürk’s daughter—who herself may have been an Armenian orphan—the world’s first female fighter pilot, a fact that much impressed the American newspaper that had once called for the demise of the Terrible Turks. “The advance in little more than a decade from the veil and harem to the air pilot’s helmet and the battlefield,” wrote The New York Times, “is a leap that makes even the Western imagination reel.”
Turkish women had indeed made astounding strides. That their rights had been bestowed upon them by a man, one man in particular, would haunt Turkish feminism and Turkish democracy forever, as would all Turks’ debt to their father-dictator, the man who had saved them from Western rapaciousness, Islamic torpor, even death itself. Atatürk’s ideological descendants—the Kemalists—ruled the country for the next decades, until, it seemed, the very year I arrived. These Turks would also be the ones I would most often meet during my first months in Istanbul.
* * *
I MET THEM through random connections: friends of friends of friends, such as the Google colleague of my college roommate. Most of these people were very wealthy, transatlantic, English-speaking Turks with whom, our mutual acquaintances assumed, I would have the most in common. I would meet them at futuristic malls, eating burgers at French restaurants, where they spoke with almost perfect American accents. I experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance in these places, similar to when I went to American expat parties, of being among American people, speaking American English, laughing at American jokes, but not actually being in America, and thus feeling incomparably lost.
One woman invited me to a pool party in a site—which was a word for an upscale suburb with a gate—outside of Istanbul that to her was so pre
stigious she thought the cabdriver making three hundred dollars a month would know where it was. (He didn’t.) The houses stood five stories tall, with bougainvillea bushes spilling over the gates, Ferraris in the drive, and pools in the back, around which girls sat reading Us Weekly. At dinnertime, Abdullah Gül appeared on television, and the crowd debated his “hidden agenda”: Islamists talked a good game, they said, but harbored a secret mission to take over the world and install sharia law. I noticed, sitting in chairs in the corner, two enormous black-skinned dolls wearing aprons.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But what are those?”
“I don’t know,” the owner of the house said. “They are my parents’.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Do you know what they are?”
They looked like mammy dolls.
“No,” he said. Everyone shrugged. The woman who invited me looked as if she’d rather she hadn’t.
“Do you know where they are from?” I asked. Perhaps these wealthy people had traveled to some African country in which such dolls were a local craft.
Finally, a young man said, “Maybe from New Orleans,” referring to the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina only two years earlier. Everyone laughed.
To be fair, these Turks were callous in the way rich kids can be everywhere, but what I kept being told was that these people, who had spent time in New York or London, were more open-minded than their Islamic counterparts. I was often told that these so-called White Turks would be the ones most “like me.” (And in the sense that they shared the racism of many white Americans, I suppose this was true.) They went to the best high schools and came from Westernized families and were not religious Muslims. They always asked me why I was in Turkey when I could have stayed in New York. “I want to understand the relationship between religion and politics in Turkey,” I would say. They would respond that the Muslims “were ruining the country” or that they “wanted to turn the country into Iran.” One woman told me that the “veil simply is oppression, and I’m sick of quasi-enlightened intellectuals in the West suggesting that it’s a woman’s choice to wear the veil or not—it’s not a choice, they’re coerced.”
Many of them even developed a sign language for their agony, a political pantomime for the head scarf. In the midst of conversations they would drag their two hands around the sides of their face and under their chin. “Everything in Turkey is okay,” they seemed to be saying, “but now we have this.” And with that gesture I, especially me the Westerner, the foreigner, the uncovered free New York woman, was supposed to empathize with their despair.
Instead, I found these secular Westernized, so-called liberal people—my people—difficult to understand, so much so that I found I couldn’t relate to many of their feminist principles, ones to which I ordinarily would have been sympathetic. Their contempt for their culture had a deathly air to it. They boiled with a kind of anger and prejudice that reminded me of the American South. I was reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow at the time, in which he wrote:
No one who’s even slightly Westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better than everyone else and look down on other people—if it weren’t for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women, chopping them all into little pieces.
Such was the central paradox of Turkish culture—liberalism in service of an authoritarian national project. Even feminism at times could be used in service of immorality, violence, and nationalism, as if women had been empowered only so Turkey would be powerful. The irony was that sometimes when secularists or Kemalists talked about “modernity,” they were talking about modernity as conceived by Atatürk seventy years earlier, during the formation of this Turkish Republican identity. To them, the rise of these religious politicians meant Turkey was going backward, back to the beginning, before Atatürk, before the “Turk.” It was not just feminism or antireligious fervor that compelled those women and men with flags to take to the streets, but their very identities as human beings. For these Turks, modernity was a religion in and of itself, and Atatürk their god. That was why girls had his signature tattooed on their arms. The Turks have been brainwashed! I thought. For a long time, I went on like this, believing two key fallacies: that this was my first brush with nationalist propaganda, and that the slavish devotion to “modernity” was something unique to the Turkish Republic, an abstract concept in which we Americans had never needed to engage.
* * *
IN MY FIRST WEEKS, I attended a conference on international press freedom at the Hilton hotel. The Hilton was in a zone of Istanbul seemingly designed precisely for conferences—spacious, monotonous, and full of travel agencies—halfway between Taksim Square, near where I lived, and Nişantaşı, an old, upper-class neighborhood where Spanish leather shoes cost five hundred dollars and Porsches regularly parked outside of cafés. The Hilton was by then one of Istanbul’s oldest modern hotels, with gates strangely resembling a highway toll plaza, and a huge lawn that surrounded the hotel’s modernist hulk of concrete, set far back from the road. The hotel had the shape of a giant 1960s television—a large screen on a small stand—and had the benevolent totalitarian aesthetic of the United Nations. As I drove in, I marveled at how much property it took up, as if it were one of the city’s many military installations, or some other precious piece of state property. When I entered, I felt the strange experience of being home again, a feeling I assumed came from the corporate uniformity of all international brands. Spending time at the Hilton seemed to make it the sort of place that would keep me from understanding the real Turkey, which I would learn someday was the Hilton’s point.
Journalists had come from all over the world to attend this conference on press freedom. I was new to Turkey, but even I knew that the Turkish journalists and thinkers on the panel largely supported the secularist point of view—there was the historian Andrew Mango, who had written a flattering biography of Atatürk; İlber Ortaylı, a historian known for denying the Armenian genocide; and Bassam Tibi, who wrote an article called “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.” The last of them was a man named Ertuğrul Özkök, the editor of one of Turkey’s largest mainstream newspapers, Hürriyet, who spent most of the time insincerely wringing his hands over reader complaints that Hürriyet wasn’t pro-secularist enough, although Caner had told me that Hürriyet was one of the most secularist newspapers in town.
“What can we do?” he said. “We get so many letters saying our paper does not enforce laicism enough. We have all these antigovernment columnists, but readers still complain!”
“Don’t worry,” Andrew Mango said at one point. “You share your problems with Europe, more evolved societies, rather than the Middle East.”
“My generation had a strong republican education,” Özkök said. “We thought the problem with Islam was over!”
“If Turkey has not had a civil war, it’s because the military stopped it,” said Mango.
I had been most disturbed that day by the American journalist who moderated the panel. He had reported from Turkey throughout the nineties, including for The New York Times. When the threat of military intervention came up, to the audience of Western journalists at the international press freedom conference, he intoned: “When I first moved to Turkey, I struggled to make sense of it. A friend told me a story, and it’s a metaphor that I think will be helpful to all of you in understanding this place. My friend said, You have to think of Turkey as a bus. And the people riding the bus are the citizens. And the people driving the bus are the politicians. And any time the bus swerves a little this way or that way, the guardrails are there to keep it on course. The guardrails are the army.”
I was surprised. This was not how American journalists—New York Times journalists—see democracy, I thought; Americans don’t believe that a military, especially one threatening a coup, is a legitimate component of a democracy. I was
only two weeks into the country, and thus knew nothing about foreign correspondents, male foreign correspondents, American male foreign correspondents, the history of The New York Times, the history of U.S.-Turkish relations, the history of the last hundred years. All I could see clearly at the time was a man spellbound by soldiers, and as I left the Hilton through its sad tollbooth, I assumed that this journalist was an exception to the rule.
* * *
ONE EVENING, after I had lived there for about six months, I took a ferry from European Istanbul to the Asian side to meet a Turkish woman for dinner. Those beetle-bug ferries were saturated in a 1970s aesthetic; all faded wood panels, sepia-toned lighting, and mustached men with nicotine-stained faces. Seagulls chased after us and Turks threw pieces of simit to their beaks. Men carried tea in tulip-shaped cups on trays, some sold strange, seemingly homemade, gadgets. Briefly, it felt as if everyone might know one another, or be related; after all, we’d all made the same decision to live in Istanbul. We were a breed, a club, a cult even. As we pulled farther away from the shore, the European side of the city expanded into a thousand new angles; something about the hills and curves and magnificence of the point of view meant that you always felt you were seeing the Old City for the first time. To this day, on those ferries, even in my darkest moments, I feel nothing but complete joy, as if immediately thrust into a state of meditation I cannot achieve on land, or on any other boat—an Istanbul-specific, ferry-bound peace.
Rana—that was her name—met me at the ferry terminal with a large smile and curly hair and an American accent. Her physical bearing was slightly tomboyish, not self-consciously feminine or rigid like that of many of the other Turkish women I saw, or thought I had seen at the time. Rana was open in many ways, and thankfully, since I had by then made few friends, she was open to me—perhaps if only because she had recently returned from New York herself, after a year doing a master of law, and missed it so much, she said, it felt as if her heart were broken. But she also loved Istanbul as much as I did—and she had a car. We embarked on a series of first dates: she took me to the boho coffee shop called Şimdi, where she’d met the love of her life, and to the independent record shop Lale Plak, where she had bought all her Nina Simone records; she showed me her favorite meyhane on the Asian side, where she taught me how to drink rakı the way the tough guys did. She drove me up the Bosphorus to the handsome Rumeli Hisarı, a fortress from which Mehmet the Conqueror had invaded Constantinople, and to a Polish village called Polonezköy slightly outside the city, where we grilled meat outdoors and lay on hammocks. Rana seemed to delight in my childish excitements as much as I did: I was still in the habit of finding everything in Istanbul beautiful or adorable. She took me to her office, an elegant campus overlooking the Bosphorus, where she worked as a corporate lawyer, and pointed out the famous jazz club under the Galata Tower where she had always dreamed she would sing. She introduced me to her two closest friends, men, both of whom were children of leftists, and who, like many of Rana’s generation, had been raised after the 1980 coup to stay out of politics. Their generation was liberal-minded but apolitical, obeying the dictates of a new capitalist economy that demanded large salaries to survive.