Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  Here, it seemed, was a confluence of racial attributes that produced tall men with high central-Asian cheekbones, light European eyes and the olive colouring of the Mediterranean. They were narrow-waisted and muscular, in close-fitting jeans, small T-shirts and dark jackets. The haircuts were short with cleanly shaved edges and sloping, bristly backs. They walked with a strut, looking ahead, seeming a little vain. The women’s painted faces and peroxided hair took away from their looks. Still, the abundance of idle, well-dressed youth gave the street a heady, sexual character.

  Istiklal, like its youth, was a hybrid: European archways, fashionable shops and stone apartment buildings, with little balconies and pilasters, ran down its length, while its side-streets led into Eastern bazaars, selling fish and vegetables. It had seen better days, then worse days, and now again its fortunes were turning. There were pick-up bars, cafés, bookshops, an Adidas store, nightclubs, gay saunas, health clubs, embassies and offices. Varied music poured into the street from all sides, not just popular music but Sanskrit chanting with hidden techno undertones.

  I had arrived a few days before by train, dropping south from Budapest to Sofia and then to Istanbul, a slow movement through the ghostlands of the old Ottoman Empire. Very little remained of its once deep European reach: in Budapest, a reconstructed, tiled shrine, Europe’s northernmost Muslim monument, dedicated to a Turkish dervish; and in Sofia, the last of its sixty-nine mosques: small and slightly run-down, it sat at an angle to a busy main road with one stone pillar stepping gingerly into the pavement.

  In Istanbul, I was staying in a squat, modern hotel on a central square with a view of the Bosphorus. On the morning after I arrived, I witnessed an amazing scene on the strait’s leaden waters. I had come down to the shore, and next to me a few soldiers and old men sipped coffee at a kiosk doing steady business. Then everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the water. The man at the kiosk turned off his stove and looked too. The soldiers jittered.

  The first horn that sounded over the now quiet Bosphorus was like the moan of a great mammal, an elephant or a whale, in lament of a fallen leader. The soldiers stood to attention and their arms snapped into salute. Then other horns, with the eagerness of the young in a tribe, responded. The traffic behind me stopped. Some pedestrians, new on the scene, froze in mid-step. The city ground to a silence. The minute stretched and the city waited. White gulls circled overhead as if fastened by cords to the ships. The horns faded gradually, and after a few stray sounds lost over the water, the Bosphorus came to life again and, with it, the roar of the traffic behind me.

  It was 9.06 a.m. on 10 November and the man being honoured in the minute-long silence was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern republic of Turkey and the man who had given the state its fiercely secular identity. When Atatürk had founded the modern state in the 1920s, fighting off foreign incursions on all sides, he had shut down the traditional Sufistic centres, thrown out fez and veil, cleansed the language of its Persian and Arabic borrowings, changed the script to roman and abolished the office of caliph. He brought to an end the idea of a sanctifying political authority that had existed in Islam since its founding. It was as if he wanted to break the new state’s cultural links to the larger Islamic world, rendering unto Turkey what was Turkey’s and throwing out the rest.

  My father had mentioned the caliphate in his letter: ‘European countries occupied by Muslims for hundred of years, like Greece and Spain, did not enforce conversion. In fact, throughout history the Jews were protected by the Muslim caliphates and Christians were allowed to flourish.’ The caliphate was part of my father’s idea of a collective Muslim history, which he could possess without faith. It was one of the things – the idea of the great Islamic past – that my small sense of being Muslim didn’t cover. And yet my father also admired Atatürk for his strength and modernising mission despite Atatürk’s break with the collective Islamic past and his creation of a state that was, in its approach to religion, the exact opposite of Pakistan. So, at the very beginning of my journey, with six weeks set aside for Turkey, and with the words of men like Butt on one side and my father on the other – both, in their way, speaking of the great Islamic past – I wished to see how the faith had fared in the state that had broken with Islam.

  The man I waited for outside Starbucks on Istiklal was a young Marxist student who, when he heard of my interest, offered to show me a fuller Istanbul. He appeared a few minutes later with his hands in his pockets. He was short and wide, with dark, greasy hair, intense blue eyes and an erratic, jarring laugh. With Eyup, there were no pleasantries. A quick smile, a hello and immediately down to business. ‘Should we go to this very religious neighbourhood?’ he said, as if it were one of many possible plans. He hailed a taxi on Taksim Square, close to where I was staying, and asked the driver to take us to Fatih Carsamba.

  ‘They are very religious there, and they want to be like Arab countries and Iran,’ he explained. ‘It’s a kind of sub-culture.’ Istanbul was protean. It became another city on the way to Fatih Carsamba. Within an intersection, peroxide Turkish blondes, with lithe bodies, vanished, and stout women, in long, dark coats and beige headscarves, moved down a busy street, selling domestic wares and cheap, synthetic fashions. It was difficult to connect the gaudy advertising, the cars and household goods with the city we had left behind near Istiklal. The buildings were different, newer, but plainer, more rundown. There seemed even to be racial differences; the features here were coarser, less mixed, more Arab somehow. But this area was not a preparation for the religious neighbourhood: it was not a sub-culture.

  We paid the taxi driver and started to walk. And now Eyup and I, in jeans and winter jackets, looked out of place. Fatih Carsamba had made Eyup uncomfortable when he visited it as a teenager, and I soon began to see why. It came on with sinister suddenness. After a gentle bend in an inclining road, we seemed to come under a new law by which all women wore black and, but for a triangular opening for their noses and eyes, were covered completely. The men were in long robes with shaven upper lips and fistfuls of beard. There were bookshops with names like Dua, or Prayer, more bookshops than anywhere else so far, but they all carried the same green and red leatherbound religious books, Korans of all shapes and sizes and defensive pamphlets – Jesus and Islam, Modern Science and Islam, Status of Women and Islam – forestalling the questions people ask. Other shops delivered a steady drone of Koranic readings. Their racks of religious CDs were on display in polished glass windows, just like on Istiklal. Dull-coloured robes with machine embroidery, black on black, navy blue on navy blue, hung on wire coat-hangers in the doors of clothes shops. All varieties of Arab clothing from slinky latex under-veil garments to white skullcaps were available. It was an Islamic facsimile of a modern high street.

  ‘Sub-culture’, I thought, was a good word. It implied an aberration not just from urban Istanbul culture, but also from the traditional Islam of Turkey; it brought out the radical aspect of the new faith. For me, the word suggested punks and hippies, even neo-Nazis. It was a word I would have liked to have been able to use, when I first saw young radicalised British Pakistanis in northern England. There again, people were not simply religious in a traditional way; they were religious in a new way. The religion they embraced constituted an abrupt break from what had come before.

  We were attracting hostile attention and Eyup was trying already to edge me out of the area. I suggested we turn into a teashop and reassess the situation.

  Eyup seemed nervous. ‘Something might happen,’ he said ominously, as we entered.

  A young man with a light brown Islamic beard and a matching robe worked behind the counter. His eyes fixed on us as we came in. He seemed weary and irritated when Eyup ordered tea, as if he had been denied the opportunity to tell us we were in the wrong place. His gaze remained on us as we drank our tea and he went about his chores, wiping the counter and working the till. The hot sugary liquid and the smells from the stove were just beginning to
act against the odourless cold of the street, when my question to the man gave him his chance. I asked him about his dress. Eyup looked nervous, but then translated.

  The man stopped what he was doing and his face darkened.

  When he had finished speaking to Eyup, I could see that the exchange had not gone well.

  ‘He suggests,’ Eyup began, looking for solace in the change of language, ‘that we don’t try to ask any questions around here as there may be a violent reaction.’

  The words landed cold and hard on me, more menacing for issuing from Eyup’s disinterested lips. The man spoke again and Eyup translated: ‘He says, “Our way of life is personal so it’s not right for others to ask about it. The Prophet Muhammad wore these clothes and that is why we wear them.”’

  There was more conversation between Eyup and the man, but when it was over, Eyup did not translate. I heard Pakistan mentioned.

  ‘We should go,’ he said. ‘Something might happen.’ Eyup’s natural calm was disturbed. He was not easily excitable and I was keen to follow his judgement. We said goodbye and the man walked us to the door of his shop.

  ‘What else did he say?’ I asked Eyup.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. ‘We should go.’

  It was early in the day and the street was still waking up. Shops were opening and the women who hovered down the street in their long robes turned their triangular faces to us in puzzlement. I asked Eyup if I could find a place like this in small towns or in the countryside.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘this is not how they dress.’

  The hidden world of Fatih Carsamba fell away as the road sloped downhill. The rest of the city returned and the subculture vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. It was only a hilltop of radicalism, but before it was gone, we were met with a haunting scene. In this environment of segregation and austerity, on a cemented quadrangle surrounded by a high chainlink fence, a school was breaking between classes. The screams and laughter from dozens of uniformed young boys and girls disturbed the morning pall.

  After the muffled threats from the man in the teashop, the sight of children playing was an unexpected comfort. They were occupied in some variation of catch and mixed teams of boys and girls swept from side to side of the playground. The girls were in skirts and the boys in trousers; they seemed entirely at ease with each other, entirely without inhibition.

  Outside their chain-link world, the last shrouded figure vanished over the crest of the hill. I was struck by the thought that these were the children of this neighbourhood. The shrouded figure might have been one of their mothers or elder sisters. Would she have gone to the school too? And, if so, what a strange passage it must have been from this freedom to the violent purity of her dress and the segregation it stood for.

  Then, as we turned the corner, we saw a self-standing structure whose presence here was at once fierce and absurd. About three feet from the ground, placed dead centre on the extremity of the playground, and lost in children’s games was the unlikely, the implausible, the almost chimeric object: a head-and-shoulders bust of Atatürk in smooth black stone, watching over the cemented playground.

  In the taxi, Eyup recounted the rest of what the man in the teashop had said to him. Speaking of Fatih Carsamba, he had said, ‘This is the only place we can live like Muslims so we have to protect that. If someone comes from outside, like a journalist or writer, he can cause problems for us. The police could come and break up the neighbourhood.’ Of his dress, he added, ‘I am dressed like this because the Prophet Muhammad dressed this way. None of our other leaders dressed like that, not Atatürk, not anyone else.’

  At the time, I didn’t appreciate how daring a remark this was. The cult of Atatürk was sacrosanct in Turkey and his forceful brand of secularism, backed by the army, could silence the boldest Islamists. For the man in the teashop to discuss him in disparaging tones, and to a fellow Turk, was a jailable gesture of defiance. It was an introduction to how important physical appearance would become over the course of my journey, especially in regard to Islam’s relationship with the modern world; it was part of the completeness of the challenge the faith presented. It had been a battleground for Atatürk and it was a battleground for the man in the teashop.

  The man had asked Eyup if I was Muslim. Eyup knew only the facts of my parentage and, though he was not a believer himself, he made a leap of reason that others around me would make for the next eight months: if your father’s Muslim, you’re Muslim. He might only have been trying to cool the situation, but he knew that the man in the teashop was forced to accept this information. This level of being Muslim was more important than anything that came afterwards, such as the actual components of your faith. It was primary, built into one’s birth and recognised by all Muslims, religious or not. ‘He is from Pakistan and is a Muslim,’ Eyup had said. The man, obligated by his religion to accept this, replied, ‘If you’re a Muslim, you know that this is how real Muslims dress.’

  Muslims living in a Muslim country with a sense of persecution. The link to the great Islamic past, and the cultural threads to the larger Muslim world, proscribed and broken. The modern republic of Turkey aspired to be part of the European Union. Turkey had been among the most open Muslim countries, but its secularism was dogmatic, almost like a separate religion. The state didn’t stay out of religion, it co-opted religion: it wrote Friday sermons, appointed priests and hounded people it thought to be religious out of the establishment. Why did it have to be so extreme? What threat to his modern, secular republic had Atatürk perceived in the Islamic identity?

  It was the army, along with Istanbul’s educated élite, who had enforced his aggressive secularism since the founding of the republic in the 1920s. At first people had obeyed, but in recent years, as migration from more religiously conservative Anatolia to Istanbul increased, people became emboldened, more sure of who and what they were. The radical hilltop, with its high street refashioned along Islamic lines, was the response of a few, but many more wanted to know why they couldn’t wear their headscarves. They set up centres of business and capital, ‘green capital’, to counter the power of Istanbul’s secular rich. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, was of their ilk. The city was full of women wrapped in Versace headscarves driving SUVs. Islam was coming in through the back door. The army and the bourgeois Kemalists eyed them with deep suspicion.

  But what was really meant by this reassertion of Islamic identity? What cultural wholeness had been lost and what would it take for the world to be whole again?

  I don’t know what my time in Turkey would have been like had I not met Abdullah. Months later, when I recalled his agony, so difficult to match with his plump face and soft manner – I never forgot that before he gave himself to the faith, before he was penalised for being from a religious school, he was almost a business student. And though he studied Arabic and religion, unlike Beeston’s Islamists and religious students in other Muslim countries, he studied them as part of a larger, secular curriculum, and in the way someone in Britain might study divinity. He had not come off a radical hilltop, and though he might always have been a believer, his degree of self-realisation was new. He was like a symbol of the enforced absence of religion in Turkey and of what a conspicuous absence it was.

  I had been a few times to the Islamic Cultural Centre on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Eyup had taken me once to hear a visiting Saudi diplomat speak and then, in his irreligious way and with his Turkish disdain for Arabs, laughed out loud when the man appeared in traditional Arab dress. After the lecture, I had begun a conversation with a student of religion, and it was him who first told us about Abdullah. We tried on many occasions to arrange a meeting with him, but it was only days before I was due to leave Istanbul, when the December rain and wind were at their fiercest and traffic clogged Istanbul’s major arteries, that we managed to arrange a time. We took a small, shared bus along the Bosphorus’ steely waters and a taxi over a giant, slab-like bridge, entering Asia with an ease
that never ceased to delight me.

  At the Islamic Cultural Centre, the rain drove us out of the open courtyards into covered walkways that led to the cafeteria. It was a bare white room, with one corner churning out cups of tea. We sat round a Formica table which was too low for me to write on. Eyup went to get us tea and I started to test the language abilities of the two students who had just walked in. Abdullah was heavy-set, with a round face, thick lips and an auburn Islamic beard. He had a friendly, docile manner and spoke English slowly but precisely. Oskan was clean-shaven with an angular face and close-set eyes. He spoke little English and next to Abdullah’s smiles and gentle voice, there seemed something hard about his manner. Eyup returned with a round of plain tea, the sugar cubes crumbling at the bottom of the glasses.

  ‘This is something very hard to explain,’ Abdullah began, in response to my question about why he had entered the theology faculty. I thought he meant that language would pose a problem, but this was not the case; he was thinking of the actual complication of his decision. ‘The simple and basic reason for it is that I want to learn about my religion. I’m studying Arabic language actually, not theology, but as a general education I have studied the Islamic sciences such as hadis [the sayings of the Prophet], and fiqh [jurisprudence].’ I was still under the impression that Eyup would have to translate from here on when Abdullah surprised me with his fluency.

  ‘You have to be a well-qualified and educated person,’ he said, picking his words carefully, ‘to represent your religion, culture and point of view in the world.’