The loom of time, p.9
The Loom of Time, page 9
—
I visited the leafy, tony suburb of Etiler, full of malls, cafés, and gyms, with winding residential streets packed with late-model cars and spectacular views of the Bosporus, reminding me of the suburb of Glyfada in Athens, where I used to live by the sea in the 1980s, another indication of the vast wealth created here in recent decades. Asli Aydintaşbaş, a local journalist with international degrees, welcomed me into her apartment. We sat outside on her balcony. Her fingers moving as she talked, she led me through the labyrinth of Turkish attitudes toward empire.
“The Turkey I grew up in had no imperial pride, except for the specific fact of the many Ottoman conquests. We were all at that time spiritual children of Atatürk, who had thought of the Ottoman past as backward and hindering our march to catch up with the West. The ultimate mission of Atatürk’s republic was to arrive at contemporary civilization, which was defined as European and American. After all, Kemalist doctrine taught us that the Ottoman Empire had collapsed under its own weight. Atatürk himself had spent his youth with the Young Turks trying to topple the bankrupt Ottoman system led by Abdul Hamid II,” the last sultan exercising full control over the empire, who was an embattled, complex, and fascinating figure: a symbol of both repression and ultimately failed attempts at reform and institution-building.
“That was then,” she said. “Under the Islamists, a wave of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire emerged. Rather than the Young Turks, it is Abdul Hamid who demands our sympathy in public discussions, the sultan who tried to save the empire. Atatürk’s modern republic is now seen as a mistake.[*4] His nation-state is viewed as reductionist, robbing us of our real geography” in the Balkans and the Middle East beyond Anatolia. “The nation-state, we are told, means selling ourselves short. According to this new imperial mindset, as the Islamists explain it, ‘Turks need to close the hundred-year parenthesis’ that was Atatürk’s Turkey.”
“As for Erdoǧan’s Turkey,” she went on, “it wants to be a standalone…non-aligned power on the periphery of Europe,” in a way like Tito’s Yugoslavia during the Cold War. “The conservative rulers of modern Turkey want to constantly remind the nation of its glorified past, whether in new television dramas or in theme parks…In this way, Turkey’s military adventures in Syria, Libya, Qatar, and Somalia are part of an ‘imperial destiny,’ and ‘certainly not a liability.’”
Encouraging Erdoǧan’s regional aggressiveness were the changes in the region itself. The political vacuums created in Syria, Iraq, and Libya had created temptations for Erdoǧan. For example, the Syrian civil war had thrown up independent Kurdish forces right on Turkey’s border, arguably aligned with guerrillas inside Turkey. Erdoǧan’s motive for action was not, therefore, illegitimate. Meanwhile, Russia, despite Vladimir Putin’s machinations, was still weaker than the old Soviet Union—even before the Ukraine war—so that Turkey now had less reason to be closely allied with the United States as it had been during the Cold War.
But this is where the Gibbonian storyline, in which empire is the default system of order, gets undermined, she suggested. While Tito, with his half-Croat, half-Slovene background, was a creature of Central Europe, who ruled Yugoslavia in the manner of a Habsburg emperor, and who during the Cold War deftly helped create the non-aligned movement as a hedge against the two superpowers, Turkey’s Islamist rulers had no such aptitude. Unlike Ottoman-era diplomats whom the Islamists professed to admire, they didn’t ingratiate themselves with their neighbors, or know how to play one adversary off against the other, while calming them at the same time, in the manner of both the Ottoman and Byzantine empires: rather, they made enemies all around. To wit, the Greeks and the Israelis, who had been quiet adversaries for decades, were at the time closely allied with the Egyptians, French, and others against Turkey over gas-drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean. True, Turkey moved closer to Russia, an historical enemy in the Crimean War and World War I in the Caucasus. Indeed, the Ottoman Empire fought fifteen major wars with the Russian Empire between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries.[33] But rather than two states that have assuaged their differences, what emerged was merely an alliance between two individuals, Erdoǧan and Putin, both of whom were in the process of trying to rebuild their respective empires. “It is a weird dance involving just two men,” Aydintaşbaş said, with no bureaucracies beneath them to help whenever there is a crisis, since the bureaucracies on both sides have deeper memories of the enmity between the two states. And, she emphasized, “Erdoǧan stands a real chance of losing a future election.”
Catching her breath, Aydintaşbaş observed that the Ottoman Empire stood for cosmopolitanism and the protection of minorities, since it was more decentralized and tolerant than its British and French imperial counterparts. “It may have been the sick man of Europe, but it wasn’t the sick man of Asia. Mehmed II ‘the Conqueror,’ who captured Constantinople from the Byzantines in 1453, was fabulously multilingual. He was close to the Greeks and Armenians. He had his portrait painted by the Venetian artist [Gentile] Bellini. But this narrow, provincial crew is not going to build or rebuild an empire like Mehmed’s. Instead, what you have now is lumpen-Ottomanism. Turgut Özal was much closer to being a true descendant of the Ottomans.” As for Erdoǧan, “he represents Ottomanism as a cover for authoritarianism,” building layers of militias and security apparatchiks around him.
Later she happened to mention the pedestrian thoroughfare, Istiklal Caddesi, near my hotel. “It used to have a real Left Bank aura,” she said, “with art galleries and many little handicraft bazaars. Now it is sterile.”
“Yes,” I said. “I found it disappointing, not at all like I remember it from the 1990s. I even recall going to a gallery opening there in 1998. What happened?”
She shrugged. “They,” meaning the regime, “shut down the whole arts scene there. Now it’s just bland cafés and kebab joints. This is what gradually happens with revolutions. They all end with sterility.”
I thought of the Russian Revolution, which began with a tumultuous and euphoric upheaval toppling the tsar, painstakingly captured by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Red Wheel series, and ended with the graveyard silence and absolute repression of the Bolsheviks. The Iranian Revolution, too, began with the mass euphoria of toppling the shah and ended with the deadening lumpen silence and undermining of Persian culture by the ayatollahs, as if the whole country had gone from Technicolor to black-and-white. Turkey under the Islamists was experiencing a diluted version of this phenomenon.
“What lies beyond Erdoǧan?” I asked.
“There is no soft landing for Erdoǧan. But there can be a soft landing for Turkey.” Turkey, she intimated, still had a European structure that would prevent the chaos of the 1970s, when it was far less developed.
“Might there be a coup sometime in the future?”
“It’s an unknown unknown,” she replied. The 2016 coup attempt was widely unpopular for two reasons. First, simply because it failed, nobody wanted to stick their head out by voicing support for it. Second, there was the fear that it might have only brought the Gülenists, another Sunni Islamic movement, to power—as they were thought to be behind the coup attempt.
As I prepared to leave, she looked out over the Bosporus and started talking about all the myriad restrictions imposed by Erdoǧan’s regime and previous Turkish governments on the small Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul, which in theory leads the Orthodox Christian world, but in practice represents a dying community in the city. The Greeks must send their children out of Turkey for proper religious training and hope that they come back, despite all the temptations of Europe and America, so passing on their legacy is problematic. Nor could they select a new patriarch from abroad, since all church officials had to be Turkish citizens. It was all part of the effort to weaken and eventually extinguish Greek life here. The Greek Patriarchate was the last true breath of Rome and Constantinople here, and therefore, at least officially, of Gibbon’s world. I suddenly yearned to meet the patriarch, but he was in Rome at the time of my visit, seeking assistance for his general situation from the Catholic pope.
* * *
—
Murat Ongun, the spokesman for the opposition mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoǧlu, met me in his private club, the Soho House, formerly the U. S. consulate in the city. He had just come from a smoke outside, and as we sat down with glasses of wine, he picked up where Asli Aydintaşbaş had left off.
Like his boss, the mayor, Ongun was a man of the Republican People’s Party, founded in 1923 and the oldest party in Turkey. The party was staunchly democratic and Kemalist. Thus, Ongun was a young man of the old Turkey.
“Erdoǧan’s government has been in power for two decades,” he said, so it has institutionally entrenched itself. “But what I call the common sense of the state, its underlying structure, prevents us from becoming like Russia.” He mentioned the Istanbul election as an example.
It was Erdoǧan who had said that whoever wins Istanbul wins Turkey. Erdoǧan himself had been a mayor of Istanbul and had used it as a power base to become prime minister. Well, İmamoǧlu of the Republican People’s Party defeated Erdoǧan’s candidate of the Islamic Justice and Development (AK) Party in the March 19, 2019, mayoral election. Erdoǧan then got the result annulled and a second election was held in June 2019, which İmamoǧlu again won by an even bigger majority, making him the mayor. “This will lead eventually to a change in power for all of Turkey,” Ongun said.
He went on:
“Atatürk is still widely popular. Erdoǧan has tried to have it both ways with Atatürk, undermining Atatürk’s legacy yet celebrating him at the same time. Kemalism is just too deeply rooted to be overturned and Erdoǧan knows it. Erdoǧan uses neo-Ottomanism for domestic consumption only. He has a caliph mentality.”[*5] Turkish military involvement in Libya, Syria, Qatar, even if unsuccessful, appeals to people’s pride.
Ongun told me he was an optimist about Turkey, and it had to do with the trajectory of Islam.
“We have 5.5 million refugees from the Syrian war here in Turkey, 1.5 million of them in Istanbul. They all want to go to Europe or the United States. It isn’t just that they want to escape from conflict. It’s that the secular West appeals to them. Because of technology and the ease of access to information, you have a new generation of Muslims integrated into the world. Religion is perishing from their lives, since they are able to seek answers online without going to local authority figures. Then there is the alienation from faith-based Islam precisely because of the politicization of it.”
While it was true that ISIS, for example, had a technological component with its videos of beheadings transmitted over the internet, and the spread of its message to Muslims in the West, this merely represented the exceptions; whereas the vast average of young Muslims were using technology to discover the wider world and its values. As for the alienation from faith-based Islam, that had already happened in Iran, whose population had turned cynical and secular on account of how religion had been hijacked by the ruling mullahs, thus tainting true devotion with politics. The mullahs were no longer a refuge from an oppressive state: they were the oppressive state.
But Iran was different from Turkey, Ongun tried to explain.
“At the end of the day we will go back to Anatolianism,” that is, to the geography of Atatürk, of the Turkic tribes who moved westward across the Anatolian land bridge from Central Asia, where they had for millennia lived a pagan existence. The Sunni Islam adopted by those Turkic tribes (both Seljuk and Ottoman) in Anatolia was different from the Shi‘ism of the Iranian plateau,” which had been radicalized by the obsession with defeat experienced in the early days of Islam, when the Shi‘ites had lost a monumental power struggle for the leadership of the Muslim faith.[*6] The Sunni Muslim faith of Anatolia, or Asia Minor, Ongun observed, is leavened by the open-minded mysticism of the Mevlevis, a Sufi order founded by the Persian mystic Jalaluddin Rumi in Konya in the thirteenth century. Indeed, Anatolia and the Iranian plateau are both heirs to an eclectic Turco-Persianate tradition, but the Islam that evolved in Anatolia had, by the modern era, turned into a more tolerant and easygoing version of what existed in Iran.
“Anatolia’s somewhat elusive tradition of tolerance will ultimately triumph over Erdoǧan’s bleak Islamism,” Ongun said, and in that way lead Turkey to an identity that blends Atatürk’s republicanism with the riches of the Ottoman imperial past.
* * *
—
I went to Teshvikye, another smart suburb, closer to the city center than Etiler, full of thin and stylish people and shops with captivating signage. Again, I was reminded of the better parts of Athens and also of Tel Aviv. In many ways the world—including the Near East—is becoming similar, as Claude Lévi-Strauss had detected back in 1955. Nuray Mert greeted me in her apartment full of books, old photographs, and artwork. She had a simple, lithe, and elegant appearance. Mert is a cancer survivor who lost her positions in both journalism and the university on account of her political views. Istanbul was full of established writers suddenly having trouble in mid or late career finding outlets for their work, because of regime oppression. A number of them told me that they were “horrified” by the “cancel culture” in the United States, because it vaguely reminded them of what was going on in Turkey, even though it was a bottom-up phenomenon in America, emanating from social media, rather than top-down as here.
“Though the nationalists and the Islamists are proud of their own imperial tradition,” Mert began almost in midsentence, “nevertheless, they think of imperialism in the hands of Westerners as an outright evil, and it is at the heart of many of their conspiracy theories. Their conspiracy theories about Jews merge with those about Western imperialism. Such theories are really about resentment. This is how the Islamists and nationalists console themselves and strip themselves of any responsibility for what has happened.”
Under Turgut Özal, she explained, “neo-Ottomanism was relatively harmless and nonthreatening. But it was always at heart an anti-democratic, irredentist force,” a force interested in other people’s territories. “And in the 1990s, after the Cold War ended, it was encouraged by the U.S., which appreciated [NATO member] Turkey’s outreach to the Turkic-speaking states of former Soviet Central Asia. Islamism and nationalism had two underlying tendencies in Turkey,” she went on, “the first was empire, and the second was authoritarianism, and the two work together. Even Kemalism,” which confined itself to building a republic in Anatolia only, “was imperfect. Remember, it was a revolution that had come after the destruction of a great war, and which built a one-party state.” Atatürk, after all, she said, may have been a Westernizer, but he was no democrat.
“At root, democracy is not about religion and it is not about empire. Democracy means secularism and individual freedom.” Democracy, in this definition, should be inseparable from classical liberalism. That is its guiding spirit. “Unfortunately, that has not been fashionable in Turkey since the 1990s.”
Mert’s short gray hair and thin features intensified her abstract and cerebral manner. She was like a formidable old-world intellectual. “The issue is really modernism,” she said, raising her head, “and how religion is being redefined by it.” Her explanation took time to establish. First, she agreed that the 1980 military coup here had led to Sunnification and had also let the religious genie out of the bottle. But the Turkish generals allowed that to happen not only because of the Shi‘ite revolution next door in Iran, but also because of the proximate threat of communism nearby. The Soviet Union was actively trying to undermine Turkey, and thus religion and nationalism combined well as a counterforce. Necmettin Erbakan, the longtime Islamist leader in the Turkish parliament before Tayyip Erdoǧan, was emblematic of this tendency. Though a religious militant, “Erbakan was also a patriotic man of his time,” Mert explained, an engineer and academic who worked well within the confines of Atatürk’s republic and of the democratic system that had fitfully emerged in the decades after Atatürk’s death in 1938.[*7] “Erbakan always had a national focus. He believed that the Turks deserved to rule the Islamic world,” which they had done for nearly a millennium following the Seljuks’ defeat of the Byzantines in 1071 at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. “Of course, it was a patronizing, neo-Ottoman view.”
But whereas Erbakan embodied the natural certainties of a more rural society, Erdoǧan spoke for the movement of religious Turks into the cities of Anatolia, where Islam had to become more ideological because of the need for it to survive in the impersonal, modernizing environment of urban life.
“Erdoǧan,” she said, “spoke for a new, lumpen-Islamist and nationalist generation”: an Islamic working class liberated from the fatalism of the village and consequently more angry and demanding. The Marxists used the term lumpen to denote an unshaped proletariat uninterested in revolutionary advancement, which therefore required direction from above. But as Asli Aydintaşbaş and Nuray Mert, as well as others, employed the term, it had a more pointed emphasis: a badly urbanized and angry class that constituted perfect fodder for revolutionaries. Mert explained that Erdoǧan was leading a drawn-out, neo-Ottoman “counter-revolution” against Atatürk’s republican revolution.
“And after Erdoǧan there might only be left a wasteland of destroyed institutions,” with perhaps even paramilitary forces that he has gradually raised up following two decades in power. “This was no longer a state of laws.”
She spoke of Trabzon, the Black Sea city in the east not far from the Georgian border where she had grown up. As a girl, she remembered there were only three or four restaurants in the entire city. It had been a traditional world where people ate only at home. “But today there are dozens of restaurants and the religious all go out to eat. No wine is served at these restaurants, though. The city has become ruralized as religious peasants have flocked into it, bringing their own traditions, but also being changed in the process. This is modernization.” It was not pretty or aesthetic. But it was progress: a world of newly urbanized peasants, who had left their fatalism back in the countryside, and had given the world nationalist and hardcore religious leaders who had come to power through elections, like Tayyip Erdoǧan and Narendra Modi in India.
