Ottoman Odyssey

by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)

  ‘He will steal the votes,’ said the eldest of them, a man with a cynical, scowling face. ‘Of course he will. This is his chance to become president forever – why wouldn’t he?’ ‘He won’t get away with it,’ said another, younger man, with faux assurance. The first man cast him a pitying glance. While the conversation progressed in this vein, Bulgarian national television played quietly in the background – none of the men were watching, engrossed in the question of whether Erdoğan would win eternal presidency in a country none of them lived in, but felt utterly invested in.

  Unlike Alija Sahovic in Novi Pazar, or Birali Birali in Sofia, these Podkovian Turks did not consider Erdoğan some kind of modern, paternalistic sultan, but a power-hungry politician. They were in a minority. Erdoğan and his AKP government have always been aware of the political advantages of resurrecting influence in the Balkan region, especially for trade, but there has always been a more emotional impetus behind this: Erdoğan identifies as an Ottoman leader in troubled modern times, leading the faithful, and his self-belief has translated into a strange reality. Sometimes he signals his Ottoman credentials with heavy-handed symbolism, sitting in his newly built, i,ooo-roomed White Palace in Ankara with all the trappings of a modern sultan, and other times explicitly, such as when he lamented the precise loss of Ottoman territories at the fall of the empire in 1923.

  ‘In 1914, our land covered two and a half million square kilometres. Nine years later it fell to seven hundred and eighty thousand square kilometres.’

  ‘Our land’ is the key: Erdoğan and the fellow founders of the AKP both assume and actively promote a political continuum between the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey which does not exist. During the liberation of Mosul in 2016, Turkish state TV channels broadcast maps of a new, enlarged Turkey encompassing northern Iraq, an old Ottoman territory. If the Balkans were as militarily vulnerable, perhaps the map would have included those territories too, but given Turkey’s current sway in the region, such graphics are unnecessary.

  On 20 May 2018, I found myself in a roaring crowd of 10,000 Erdoğan supporters in an Olympic stadium in Sarajevo, nearly a year after my first visit to the city. While the Turkish president paced the stage, microphone booming, the Bosniak leader Bakir Izetbegović stood respectfully to one side, a host supplanted by his guest. As I looked around at the adoring Turkish diaspora, most of whom had travelled hundreds of miles to attend Erdoğan’s only rally on European soil, I realised that Alija Sahovic was almost certainly somewhere in there too, waving his flag with as much gusto as any Turkish voter, and not understanding a word.

  Spires in the East

  ‘The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over cities with heavy industry.

  It’s hard to breathe.’

  Yehuda Amichai, ‘Ecology of Jerusalem’

  ‘The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.’

  Amin Maalouf

  Jerusalem and the West Bank

  The Turkish towns near the Syrian border, on the edge of the Arab world, have an echo of the centuries of life that existed before modern Turkey ironed everything out into homogeneity. In their synagogues, mosques and churches of various denominations, congregations are tiny but still congregating. Before Syria’s civil war, Aleppo and Damascus would have been the logical points on my journey further south. Instead, I went to Palestine and Lebanon, both part of what was regarded as Greater Syria, an important region of Ottoman control from 1516 until the end of the First World War, when the territories were lost to the Allies. Fractious, racked by war and hopeless politics, these are still places where Muslims, Jews and Christians – not forgetting ancient peoples like the Druze and Samaritans – have lived together for centuries. Lebanon’s recognition of religious minorities is perhaps the nearest modern equivalent we have to the Ottoman millet groups, while Israel and the Occupied Territories of Palestine show us some of the most disturbing consequences of the creation of the nation state.

  Travelling through the Holy Land can be an unholy experience for an atheist. There is something perverse about the atmosphere of reverence still shown by millions of religious tourists every year to a place so brutalized by war and apartheid. In Hebrew, Jerusalem means ‘City of Peace’; its Arabic name, Al-Quds (the ‘Holy City’) is less obviously incongruous, but perhaps its most eloquent epithet is from the medieval Arab scholar Muqaddasi: ‘a golden goblet full of scorpions’. Throughout its history, conquering crusaders, sultans and 20th-century generals have marched through its gates; dominant religions have been periodically foisted on it. In 1517, Selim the Grim gained control of the city but it was his son Suleiman the Magnificent who ordered the rebuilding of the city walls in 1536 and ensured that all faiths had access to places of worship within these walls. In 1980, Israel absorbed Jerusalem and today the city is carved up between east and west. The latter is officially part of the state of Israel, and the east is the cusp of the West Bank, Palestinian land controlled by Jordan and Egypt prior to the Six-Day War of 1967, and now controlled by the Israeli military.

  Jerusalem is pockmarked by conflict and heavy with tension, but commercial and domestic life continues; on the winding streets of the Old City, between signposts marked in Arabic, Hebrew and English, hawkers sell everything from carved wooden figurines of Jesus Christ and miniature tinsel Christmas trees to carrot juice and freshly shelled walnuts. I went in November 2017, just before Trump’s recognition of the city as the capital of Israel drew thousands of Palestinians to the streets in protest. The air was laced with a mix of winter street food: roasted chestnuts, Turkish coffee and frying meat, overlaid with the occasional waft of cheap frankincense. Most passers-by are tourists, pilgrims or a mixture of the two, transported by the busload from Tel Aviv airport. Herded by guides, they have the energy of children on a school outing, adding to my impression of Jerusalem as a kind of religious Disneyland, and wear signs around their necks denoting their affiliation to evangelical churches across the world: Houston, Manila, Taipei, Belfast.

  Locals weave purposefully through the crowds – black-robed priests with long beards and aged nuns hobbling down the cobbled alleyways to hidden churches, ultra-Orthodox Jews making their way to the Wailing Wall, and Palestinian housewives buying vegetables. The scrum becomes particularly hectic on Friday afternoons, at the approach of Friday prayers and Shabbat. At a particular spot on the Via Dolorosa, said to be the path that Christ took on the way to his crucifixion, and now home to barber shops and souvenir stalls, pilgrims gather for reasons unknown to the casual observer. They stand with eyes closed, gently swaying as they sing holy verses, oblivious to the shouts of nearby shopkeepers advertising the price of cauliflowers. The chaos of Jerusalem’s Old Town evokes the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, but this cast of characters is like some vast Hollywood studio with extras mingling from several different sets. As a reminder that this is far from fiction, however, groups of soldiers from the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) stand silently at every junction, guns at the ready as they survey the crowd. Further up the Via Dolorosa is the seat of the Armenian Catholic Church, the joyfully named Church of Our Lady of the Spasm, but the focus of the route is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to be Christ’s resting place and in many ways a microcosm of Jerusalem’s divisions.

  In high season, the Holy Sepulchre is alive with the flash of cameras as religious tourists jostle for space. Their guides lead them bravely through the fray, flags held aloft as though for benign Crusading armies. Several local Orthodox and Catholic denominations own particular sections of the church, ascribing authentic status only to their own territories and maintaining a fierce rivalry that seems comically petty to an outsider, like a real-life version of Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Are you the Judean People’s Front?’ ‘Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea!’ Monks stick prissily to their sections, carefully cleaning the floor with
mops that dare not transgress into the neighbouring patch. In 1187, quarrels over ownership of the church were so serious that Sultan Saladin of Egypt entrusted the key to a Muslim family, in the same year he defeated the Crusaders; today, Adeeb Jawad Joudeh al-Husseini, a descendant of the same Ghodayya Hashemite family, unlocks the church at 4 a.m. every morning and locks it at 8.30 p.m. every night.

  One Sunday morning in early November, I sat at the back of the 9 a.m. service at Christ Church, the oldest Protestant church in Jerusalem, trying to work it out. The church was built in 1849, a decade into the Tanzimat reforms introduced by Sultan Mahmud II. This church was one of the many foreign missions that took advantage of the reforms to stake out a presence in the Holy Land. I was puzzled to find no iconography inside the church at all; even more curiously, all the script was in Hebrew, and a menorah (the Jewish seven-branched candelabra) stood on the altar. A priest from New Zealand was giving the sermon, in Anglican low-church style, to a packed congregation of mainly tourists.

  None of it added up until I talked to the Ukrainian evangelist manning the museum next door, who explained that the church was founded by London-born Messianic Jews – i.e. Jews who believe that Christ is the Messiah – and who were eventually folded into the Protestant Church because they were rejected by Orthodox Jews. I took a moment to appreciate the news that Sultan Mahmud II indirectly enabled these Londoners to eke out a stake in the religious real estate of the most holy city in the world while the market was down in the mid-19th century.

  Hundreds of tourists flock every Sunday to flagship churches like the Holy Sepulchre and Christ Church, and the services can seem oddly formal and performative. Visiting priests from across the world are given special billing, sermons are posted online and members of the congregation are urged to download the official church podcast (available on iPhone and Android) to enhance and preserve their religious experience.

  The services in smaller, local churches are far more relaxed – for example, the Greek Catholic church by Jaffa Gate was entirely dominated by tiny, noisy children running down the aisles. The church was a riot of colour, its walls covered in images of saints in pastel blue and yellow. The service was attended by a small but loyal local crowd; they sang hymns from memory in their mother tongue of Arabic, and the badly behaved children were never shushed. At one point, a particularly disruptive roving toddler was scooped up by a woman as he scuttled past her, and kept occupied while the priest got on with his animated sermon, a natural gesture I very much associate with Middle Eastern communities, including Turkey. I understood none of the Arabic and was wondering why the priest kept lifting his robes and wailing like a demented spectre when he uttered the English word ‘Halloween’, and I realized he was mocking the derivative of the Christian festival of All Hallows’ Eve that had taken place a few days earlier.

  There are around 165,000 Christians in Israel and around 53,000 in the occupied territories of Palestine – 50,000 in the West Bank and 3,000 in the Gaza strip. I went to two Muslim-majority but traditionally Christian towns in the West Bank – Bethlehem and Ramallah. The latter is now the de facto capital of Palestine, a collection of three villages still home to a roughly 30 per cent Christian minority, mainly Catholics, who often take European names. I was given a lift to the church of St George by a couple called Renée and Anton, who told me they were from the ‘Latin’ church; when I asked whether they meant the Roman Catholic Church they denied this vehemently, thinking I meant ‘Rum’ or Greek Orthodox (from the Byzantine Church of ‘Rome’), but in fact the Latins are Catholic. Ramallah is largely propped up by development money and is home to a significant community of Western expats; these expats and the Christian community create an excuse to allow residents more license than is usually found in Palestinian towns – alcohol can be found relatively easily, and a popular café in the centre of town is a discreet haunt for the city’s LGBT community.

  Entering the West Bank gave me a glimpse of life under occupation – enough to make me realize that it is difficult to talk meaningfully about coexistence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, in places so marked by separation, inequality and displacement. I crossed the Qalandia checkpoint near Ramallah and the Bayt Jala checkpoint near Bethlehem on municipal buses; at both, Palestinian commuters trying to cross into Jerusalem are corralled into crushing queues at rush hour, sometimes for hours at a time. As a foreigner, I was told to stay on the bus while locals got off to show their identity cards to armed IDF soldiers. Even more than in Jerusalem, I felt deeply uncomfortable at the passage of tourists (myself included) flocking to Bethlehem to take photographs of the birthplace of Christ, passing blithely through what is effectively an open-air prison.

  What I witnessed was a manifestation of much deeper divisions, of a state of apartheid that started with a decision made a century ago by the British government. I arrived in Jerusalem on 2 November 2017, exactly a hundred years since the Balfour Declaration, an event that destroyed Muslim-Jewish relations in Palestine. It took the form of a letter, sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, head of the Zionist movement in Britain at the time, pledging the government’s support for the creation of a Jewish state with the understanding that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.’ Two years later, however, Balfour wrote to his successor Lord Curzon explaining that ‘in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country . . . The Four Great Powers [the US, UK, France and Italy] are committed to Zionism.’

  Today, Jews make up 75 per cent of the state of Israel, while Muslim and Christian Arabs are 20 per cent and the remainder are non-Arab Christians. In 1917, in the last days of Ottoman control, Arabs made up 90 per cent of the population of Palestine, while Jews made up just under 10 per cent and owned just under 2 per cent of the land. When the Balfour Declaration was officially announced in Palestine – which was not until the end of 1919 – it did not go down well. The country was under British military administration and still recovering from the famine that had lasted over the past few years of war and reached its height in 1916, claiming 300,000–500,000 lives in Greater Syria. In 1915, this famine had been exacerbated by a plague of locusts which had annihilated the region, taking two hours to pass over Beirut alone. In December 1915, no flour remained in Jerusalem or Beirut, causing riots in ransacked shops. News of the Balfour Declaration caused panic, and protests soon broke out in Jerusalem, especially among Arabs, but, more interestingly, also among Jews who were ambivalent about Zionism, particularly the (majority) Sephardic Jews who were wary of European Zionism creating a new state which excluded Arab Jews, as they counted themselves (local Muslims often considered their Jewish neighbours as fellow natives or ‘sons of country’ [abnaa al-balad] and as ‘Arab Jews’ [Yahud awlad Arab]). By 1922, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration became an annual day of mourning and protests marked by black flags; even women attended.

  Jerusalem was at its most genuinely cosmopolitan in the late 19th and early 20th century, at the tail-end of the Ottoman Empire, as a consequence of the Tanzimat period of reforms (1839–1876). Public services were completely overhauled, state schools introduced and religious communities mixed as they had never done before. The Western missionaries such as the Messianic Jews who came to Jerusalem to take advantage of these reforms, set up organizations that brought the local Jewish and Arab communities together by shaking up the status quo – even Orthodox sects played in mixed football tournaments, copying the example set by the newly established St George’s Anglican College club. There is no such Orthodox team now, and indeed the Israeli football scene is mired in racism directed at Arab-Israeli players, most notable in the 2005 attacks against Abbas Swan, an Arab-Israeli midfielder who was one of the most successful players in Israeli history.

  Writing about the shared culture between Ottoman Jerusalemites in his book Lives in Common: Arabs
and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron, the Israeli scholar Menachem Klein paints a very different situation from the Jerusalem of today: ‘There was no mental boundary separating Muslim and Jew. The walls of language and culture were low ones, and Jews and Arabs who entered the physical or linguistic zone of the Other felt no sense of being alien.’44

  In the early 20th century, Jewish and Muslim families socialized together, attending the same bathhouses and cafés, inviting each other into their homes for meals on religious holidays, even marrying each other. Klein also mentions the performances of the Ottoman puppet show Karagoz waHajawat in Arab cafés frequented by Jews during the month of Ramadan in the early 20th century. Karagöz and Hacivat is still performed in Turkey during Ramadan, and throughout the year in Greece, as I discovered in Lesbos. Overlap of culture was as common with the Jews and Muslims of Palestine as it was with the Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Anatolia, including in the religious – or, more accurately perhaps, superstitious – spheres.

  ‘Both Jews and Muslims believed that rabbis could work wonders, and that demons and spirits residing around or in their common courtyards could hurt them. It was in this context that the members of both faiths, of all ages, shared their fears and their ways of coping with them. [. . .] When Muslims returned from their pilgrimages to Mecca, their Jewish neighbours congratulated them and the Muslims shared with them dates from the holy city.’45