Notes on a Foreign Country

by Suzy Hansen

  Rana was cool and independent-minded and loving, and shared none of the prejudices of the White Turks I had met so far. But she, too, had emerged from an almost entirely secularist world: her mother came from a Kemalist, Westernized family, all of which I asked her about ceaselessly.

  “The thing is, my mother tells me that when she grew up in a small town in Anatolia, in the fifties and sixties, girls rode bicycles in shorts and sleeveless shirts,” Rana said. “And now she says, you know, you can’t do that there. You can’t do that anymore.”

  “But why? I mean, who says you can’t?”

  “You don’t feel comfortable. You just wouldn’t,” she said. “You have to consider for a second that conservative religious people are different. Islam never experienced its renaissance, its enlightenment. And when it comes down to it religious people are not as liberal as we are, the way they live compared to the way we do.”

  What Rana was saying was not just the view of Turkish secularists, but the view of Americans as well: these ideas manifested in our discussions about 9/11 in more coded ways. For some reason it wasn’t until I was in a foreign country, a Muslim country in which I passed religious people on the street every day, and where I often found myself agreeing with religious politicians, that I could sense something wasn’t right about the Western view of the world. For Turks, for liberal-minded women like Rana, this debate brought with it much higher stakes, of course: her fear of an Islamicizing country was little different from the fear of a pious woman in a secularist one. Forced dress and behavior was normal in Turkish history. Somehow, though, because in Turkey the force that wanted to restrain Islam was the military, I could see that Westerners, too, were a people who wanted to change people’s lives by force. What was the Enlightenment, what was liberalism?

  Rana knew, too, better than I did, that something had gone wrong in Turkey’s history.

  “You know, I will have these moments,” she said, looking distraught at the memory. “Where I will be driving, and I will see a covered woman, and of course I will stop and let her cross. And I wonder to myself whether that made her feel good that I did that, because women like me, uncovered women, aren’t usually so kind. Another time, it was raining and a covered woman offered me her umbrella. I thanked her over and over because I was trying so hard to make that connection, to show that I appreciated what she did. And suddenly I felt like this must be what it was like in 1950s America, and she is black and I am white.”

  Some time later, we walked down Istiklal and passed a young woman in a fitted, sexy dress, and a tightly drawn head scarf. Rana scowled: “This is what I mean: If covering yourself to hide your sexuality is for Islam, then why is the dress so tight?” Somehow this mode of dress was acceptable to religious people, she explained, but if someone like Rana, a so-called secular woman, dressed in even a demonstrably unsexy way, a religious person might still condemn her for not wearing a head scarf.

  Rana was angry about these complex Turkish social dynamics, but she didn’t support the head scarf ban. My careless readings about Turkey’s “head scarf issue”—my own reflex to control someone’s religion, body, self—had been about something else. My logic was drawn from a fear that Islam was something dangerous, threatening, not a religion but a way of life chosen to resist the modern world the rest of us enlightened folks accepted, a religion that seemed to necessarily lead to violence and oppression, unlike Christianity or Judaism, which, I supposed, did not. Even liberals, even educated people, even New Yorkers—sometimes especially them—had come to believe something was wrong with the religion itself, which in turn could only mean the religion required external restraint, like the “guardrails” guiding a bus full of corrupt politicians. Where I had gotten the idea that Islam should be restrained seemed not difficult to pinpoint: I was influenced by the post–September 11 discourse of the time. But where did I get this impulse to restrain anyone from anything in the first place? I wondered, as if Rana’s analogy to 1950s America had not just been made.

  * * *

  AT THE TIME, one of the White Turks’ greatest fears had been of something called mahalle baskısı, or “neighborhood pressure.” A prominent academic named Şerif Mardin, famous for a groundbreaking book on Islamic movements, had given an interview to a newspaper in which he mentioned the term, setting off a public panic. Secularists seized on Mardin’s mahalle baskısı, described in the media as the steady pressure by religious people on secular people to be more Islamic, as scientific proof of their amorphous fears. In other words, even if Erdoğan did not force you to wear the head scarf, your neighbors will shame you into feeling like you have to. Many Turks interpreted the term, and his comments, to mean that Islam was a disease you could catch, that neighbors influenced one another to be more Islamic, and that people, often girls, felt pressure to conform to these beliefs. It was as if Islam had a unique conformist force to it, its own Jedi magic. Mardin had said:

  There is something called “neighborhood pressure” in Turkey. The “neighborhood pressure” is a phenomenon and an atmosphere very difficult for social scientists to describe. I believe this atmosphere exists in Turkey, independent of the AK Party. Therefore, if conditions are suitable for the development of such an atmosphere, the AK Party will also have to obey this atmosphere.

  Mardin emphasized later that he did not mean that the AK Party was creating neighborhood pressure, but rather that the party would be likelier to submit to it. The secularists, not surprisingly, deduced that an Islamic party ruling the country would mean more Islam for everyone.

  I went to visit Mardin, who lived in the kind of Turkish neighborhood where there would rarely be any pressure to be Islamic. It was another site, or gated community, in the wealthy northern hills above the seaside village of Bebek, where women might jog in half-shirts, and New York–style luxury apartment towers overshadowed mosque minarets. Mardin was old and wore a brace around his midsection. He had the modest wisdom of many aging academics.

  “When I said that about neighborhood pressure, I had been responding to a man who was against the Orientalist elements in neighborhood life, against the people with loose trousers lounging in coffeehouses with their nargile,” he said. “This man was speaking of the neighborhood as a place where ‘backward’ tendencies” were becoming more normal in reaction to modernity.

  But when Mardin responded that there was such a thing as neighborhood pressure, he meant that it was “a state of mind, so to speak, of the people who, without being aware of it, promote a kind of life that is according to them an ‘Islamic’ kind of life. It’s very difficult to apprehend because it’s very evanescent. There is something that is both very cloudlike and at the same time real about it.”

  “So you are saying it is more than a religion?”

  “Modern political science has always taken up religion as ‘religion,’ as a separate topos,” he said. “But neither in the West nor in Islam is this the case. When you try to differentiate Islam from social life, that is a Western way of looking at it. Very recently Islam, society, and science were all things that were integrated in a way which we cannot really apprehend today. The weight of these former relations—that were very warm, very close, where people bonded around Islam—that bond was destroyed. Politics in its wider sense is also a way of making up for this bond which has been destroyed.” What we were seeing now was a “translation of what is missing from society, into politics.” Erdoğan, the AK Party, could be this translator.

  The writer Pankaj Mishra once said that Islam was a civilization in a way Americans didn’t understand, a way of life. Suddenly, I tried to imagine what those years of Kemalism, of modernization and nation-building, of secularization were like. It is difficult to find memoirs of postrevolutionary Turkey in English—memoirs that describe the sensation of being unable to read street signs, of seeing women unveiled, of losing one’s identity and one’s, as Mardin put it, atmosphere and way of social relations. A Mind at Peace, the 1949 novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, is
a rare glimpse of what it meant to experience both external and internal devastation: Istanbul ravaged by war and poverty; entire populations transferred out of the once cosmopolitan city; the loss of superpower status; the new Turkish Republican pressure to banish the rotting Ottoman past from their minds and to subordinate Islam.

  “They’re all orphans of a civilization collapse,” one of his characters says. “What good does it do to destroy previous forms that have provided them with the strength to persevere? Great revolutions have long experimented with this, and they’ve served no purpose besides leaving the masses naked and exposed … What do you think we’ll gain through such a refutation besides the loss of our very selves?”

  Foreign observers at that time also expressed alarm over Atatürk’s radical alterations. Exiled in Istanbul after fleeing Hitler, the German scholar Erich Auerbach lamented in letters to Walter Benjamin that Turkey had much in common with his own native land:

  Atatürk has had to force through everything he has done in a struggle against the European democracies on the one hand, and on the other against the old Muslim, pan-Islamist sultan economy, and the result is a fanatically, anti-traditional nationalism: a renunciation of all existing Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy “ur-Turkey,” technical modernization in the European sense in order to strike the hated and envied Europe with its own weapons. Hence the predisposition for European exiles as teachers, from whom one can learn without being afraid that they will spread foreign propaganda. The result: Nationalism in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic national character. This configuration, which in other countries such as Germany, Italy, and indeed also in Russia is not yet a certainty for everyone, steps forth here in complete nakedness.

  Orhan Pamuk’s idea of hüzün, or melancholy, had its roots in this period, too. “Ours was the guilt, loss, and jealousy felt at the sudden destruction of the last traces of a great culture and a great civilization that we were unfit or unprepared to inherit,” he once wrote, “in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city.”

  But what Mardin was saying was more profound to me: that Islam had been the foundation of their human relations. Mardin, in fact, described this atmosphere with the Turkish word hava, which can mean “atmosphere” or “weather,” but more commonly means “air,” and in that beautiful Turkish phrasing I could see for the first time that Islam had been even more than a civilization. It had been the air they breathed.

  We in the West still seemed to believe the old story of how a man transformed an Islamic empire into a secular republic: Atatürk came along, changed some rules, the people followed. Old Turkish textbooks didn’t portray the suppression of Islam as anything other than a liberation. But I began to question for the first time what it was like to suddenly lose your language, your mode of dress, your idea of the world. My assumption had been that any social revolution that resulted in a country becoming more “modern,” in the American sense, must have been a good thing. In Turkey, not only had this revolution been damaging, but it hadn’t worked. It was strange, I was as critical of the United States as I thought one could be. But at that point, I still had no idea that with even those political views came an unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well.

  * * *

  ATATÜRK’S ERA of nation-building quickly mutated into a period of turbulence and fracture. The decades after Atatürk’s revolution were like skipping records, beginning with an election and ending with a military coup, the country always having to start over and imagine itself again. Turks often explained military coups as a trauma, an erasure, leaving the society disjointed and incoherent. But as I had seen, even in 2007, Western journalists were still touting the military as the country’s “guardrails,” the guardian that kept Turkey on track to democracy. Westerners once believed this, during the Cold War, because of the fear of communism. Now, it was the fear of Islamism, and specifically the fear of Erdoğan.

  In the 1960s, the country’s vast population of poor, pious Muslims, long isolated in remote towns in the east, began flooding the cities, and Islamic brotherhoods urged their followers to find compromise with modernity. Reports from that period describe almost a small invasion of peasants, families from the Black Sea and Adana and Erzurum who squatted in the old beautiful buildings and erected shacks on spots of land. The new atmosphere gave birth to a new breed of politician, as many religious Turks devised ways to be both devout and, in Atatürk’s phrase, “a human being.” Out of that confident generation came Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who was the leader of Turkey when I arrived and who is still as I write this sentence more popular than an Adele song.

  Erdoğan grew up in Kasımpaşa, a blue-collar Istanbul neighborhood near the heart of the city. Like some cross between South Boston and old Italian Brooklyn, Kasımpaşa was a tribal, dangerous place, full of lower-class cowboy-immigrants from the Black Sea who may or may not have belonged to some mafia but definitely could beat you up. The men from Kasımpaşa—they were also called kabadayı, or tough guys—strutted up and down their hillside slope of the city with a particular macho swagger. “Walk behind the prime minister someday,” a Kasımpaşa resident told me. “You’ll see what it means to be Kasımpaşalı.”

  It was possible that this particular vanity, or pride, was very new. In the last fifty years—almost Tayyip Erdoğan’s lifespan—the world of the average Turkish man had been dramatically transformed. He found decent work. He sent his children to college and bought his wife fancier clothes. He still didn’t have some of the rights of his fellow citizens; if you were openly religious, or had a religious vocation, then you were explicitly banned from high-ranking officer positions within the military, for instance. (I once met an imam, who was also a muezzin, who was also the owner of a hostel by a pretty lake in the middle of the country, but what he really, really wanted to be was a commando. Such a thing was not possible in Turkey.) Nor was it possible for women who wore head scarves to serve in many state-run institutions, including Parliament. But more and more people in Turkey were middle-class and pious, and these Turks no longer felt snubbed by the Westernized elite, or by the West. They were spiritually redeemed and politically enfranchised by the rise of Kasımpaşa’s native son, who would morph from a simit seller on the street to the most powerful and independent leader in the Middle East. Indeed, when I visited Kasımpaşa some years later, I discovered Erdoğan cell phone ringtones, Erdoğan shrines, six degrees of Erdoğan separation, and Erdoğan one-upmanship:

  “Erdoğan and I were best friends. Best friends.”

  “My mother was midwife to Erdoğan’s kids.”

  “I am two years older than Tayyip!”

  In his twenties, Erdoğan joined an explicitly Islamist political party that had been led by Necmettin Erbakan since the late sixties, inspired in part by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Erbakan was an upper-class engineer who wore Versace ties, but his acolyte, Erdoğan, appealed to the working class. In 1994, at the age of forty, he was elected mayor of Istanbul, on a platform of clean hands, higher quality of life, and a devotion to municipal services. Even secularists gratefully recall that it was Erdoğan who got rid of the trash on the street corners, improved the water and the transportation systems, and planted the flowers. A journalist who interviewed Erdoğan in those years told me some people nicknamed him the Minister of Trees.

  But Erdoğan terrified the elite by proclaiming himself the “imam of Istanbul” and banning alcohol in municipal buildings. In 1997, he read a poem at a public gathering: “The mosques are our barracks / the domes our helmets / the minarets our bayonets / and the believers our soldiers.” Its author was none other than Ziya Gökalp, Turkey’s founding nationalist intellectual, but Turkey’s generals accused Erdoğan of using the poem as an Islamist rallying cry and sent him to
prison. The military had just led a nonviolent coup against the rising so-called Islamists, dissolving the Welfare Party, closing religious schools, and banning the head scarf on university campuses. Thousands of young women would have to go to college abroad, including Erdoğan’s daughter. His own brief time in prison wrought a marked change, if not in his political philosophy then in his political strategy: he became more acquiescent to his country’s Western-looking foreign and economic policy, to European Union reforms, and, for a while anyway, to the military.