Turkish Awakening Read online

  The disproportionate police response to an unlicensed minicab and the risible presence of the undercover officer aside, I like to think of this episode more as a spectacular lesson in the guts of the Turkish Underdog. In most countries in the West, if you’re caught breaking the law, you come quietly, avoiding the stares of passers-by. In this case, our hero seemed to be positively fuelled by a gathering crowd, pacing the pavement like a majestic baritone on the Royal Opera House stage. The law was nothing to him – convinced of his own moral integrity, he refused to give in, until literally surrounded by police with batons. I admired him enormously, and I saw a lot more of his kind of spirit during the Gezi Park protests which swept Turkey in 2013. Riot police made liberal use of batons, tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon, but the crowds just kept returning, yelling for more gas.

  For those who want a quiet life there are, of course, non-criminal substitutes for the licensed taxi. The best is the dolmuş, a shared taxi in the form of a yellow minivan with patchy seats and a marbled plastic dashboard. It is a wonderfully bohemian mode of transport, allowing you to travel for a few lira all the way across town with constantly changing travel companions, and a driver whose mission it is to hurtle along, stopping only to hoover up and spit out passengers in swift, profit-making succession. It is hectic but fun, much cheaper than a taxi, better than a bus, and a great showcase of Turkish chumminess. I love the atmosphere of a dolmuş, where you pass your money forward to the driver through the hands of several strangers, receive your change similarly, shout out when you want to get out, and are cheerily sent on your way by six new friends. There is a kind of comfort and trust among people here which I really don’t see in Europe – it is absolutely typical of Turks that they are happy to throw themselves into a confined space with people they don’t know, and treat them like family.

  Dolmuş literally means ‘stuffed’, and that’s exactly what they are. Once, I was squashed next to the door of a very stuffed dolmuş when, characteristically, the driver stopped to pick up two more passengers – a woman and her child. There were literally no seats left so the mother stooped awkwardly by the door and lifted her kid onto my lap.

  ‘That’s it – sit on your sister’s lap. Good girl!’

  I loved the fact that this lady automatically assumed that I would be happy with this situation, and that the words ‘health and safety’ did not cross the mind of a single person present. It is such a typical scenario in this country, and there is no paranoia about potential paedophiles lurking around every corner. I find it difficult to imagine an equivalent situation in London – a mother parking her child on your lap in an overcrowded minibus, everyone else smiling over at the pair of you, not a seatbelt in sight.

  Turks love children. Nowhere else in the world have I seen not only women but men go soft at the sight of a small child, almost without exception. My favourite instance to date was the male security guard at Atatürk airport who was lifted from the depths of catatonic boredom to joyous raptures by an unruly toddler, placed in his care by a mother struggling with the X-ray machine. This uniformed young man chortled and gambolled with the child as the other guards gathered round him in an admiring group, subsequent passengers ignored as they passed through the detector.

  This child-friendly attitude undoubtedly has a lot to do with the great importance of family, and close-knit households, in this country, but there is a most fundamental, human connection among people here that I have noticed in various guises. For instance, Turks are so much more relaxed when it comes to protocol, although there is undoubtedly a lot of annoying bureaucracy and paperwork on an institutional level. However, I have found that when there is an opportunity to use personal discretion, employees generally go for it, particularly if there is some appealing human interest.

  When I arrived for my appointment to obtain a residence permit at the intimidating governmental compound in Istanbul, I realised to my dismay that I had forgotten to get a formal reference for my residential address and had not even filled in the part of the form stating my reasons for staying in the country – a disaster. Luckily, my canny boyfriend was there too, and when the surly-looking bureaucrat asked the official reason for my stay in the country, he was treated to the script of a Hollywood romance: how we two had met, how I stayed against my better judgement, how we couldn’t be parted, etc., etc. The official lifted dull eyes from the registration form, surveyed us with the ghost of a smile and uttered the immortal words: ‘Love, then,’ before stamping the seal of approval on my half-empty form and shouting out the next name in the queue. Clearly, his attention had wandered as he listened to the love story and computerised my form: to this day, my father’s name is listed as ‘London, UK’.

  However unapproachable official Turks may appear, you can be sure that a human heart beats somewhere beneath the uniformed exterior. They can make your life hell, and I have heard many horror stories from my expat friends who have tried to get permits or merely an appointment for a permit and failed for no discernible reason. Sometimes palms must be crossed with silver. Sometimes a ridiculous love story must be narrated. Turks are capricious and therefore human, preferable by far to an anonymous computer system or the chillingly anodyne officials in the US or Britain. The more sinister side of the coin is that, quite often, there is no official accountability for the actions of state employees. Police, in particular, are notorious for asking for bribes from traffic offenders and beating up people in detention with no fear of recrimination. This is more a fault of the system than anything else. When human beings know they are not accountable for their actions, they can act in horrible ways.

  If you sit by any road in Turkey and watch the traffic go by, you will notice that every so often a car, or more likely a dolmuş or lorry, will pass with brightly coloured block capitals painted across the top of its windscreen or back window. This will usually be the beginning of the standard Arabic prayer, shortened for practical purposes, or simply Allah korusun (‘God protect us’), and will act as a kind of talisman to protect the car and its passengers on the sometimes treacherous roads of this country. In Britain and the US, people use ‘Baby on board!’ signs or messages of that nature to warn off other drivers. Turks bypass the human element of traffic accidents and address themselves directly to the powers that be: praying always helps, and a permanently scripted prayer on your car serves as excellent insurance. The Turks use the image of a blue eye – the nazar – to ward off the evil eye. This universal image is painted on the car or swings in the form of a glass amulet from the dashboard in place of furry dice, as standard policy.

  Turks have a complicated relationship with religion, which I discuss more fully in later chapters, but the interesting element that I discovered at the beginning of my stay in Turkey is the extent of superstition, across the board. Even secular, highly educated Turks who have no time for organised religion and especially not for their devout Turkish neighbours use superstitious expressions unthinkingly, even when these expressions contain religious language. I include myself in this – in fact, while for the most part I saw expressions and gestures used by my mother and grandmother widely mirrored in Turkey, there were a few I grew up with that I think were old-fashioned even by Turkish standards.

  If you keep an ear open on any street corner in Turkey, within a couple of minutes you will have heard Inşallah (‘God willing’), Allah korusun and Maşallah (‘Thanks to God’). The last is equivalent to the universal ‘touch wood’ and is indeed often accompanied by this action. All these phrases flow through Turkish conversation as naturally as taking breath. If you happen to be eavesdropping on a particularly traditional group of Turks, you might hear Tövbe, which is a fearful reaction to someone expressing a potential calamity, no matter how improbable. For example, ‘If you leave I’ll pine away and die’ might be countered with a Tövbe – ‘May God guard against such a thing!’ It is equivalent to using a cancel button and sounds rather comical to a non-Middle Eastern ear but someone like my grandmother
would not have felt comfortable without saying it, just in case. In fact, she would have also bitten the end of her little finger as a double precaution – she once told me this was to remind her of the pain that would otherwise result from these reckless words. As a child, I accepted this as a very sensible-sounding practice and adopted it myself. I was always aware that it was not normal, however, and would hide it from my friends by murmuring the Tövbe under my breath and pretending to bite my fingernail.

  When I arrived in Turkey I realised that Tövbe was pretty superstitious even on home ground; when I first used it aloud, at last, in company, there was general amusement. I was told that it was a very provincial thing to say, and it was at that point that I began to work out the kind of life my grandmother must have had in her homeland. In London, she was resolutely true to her Turkish roots. She had a method of warding off the evil eye, a kind of extreme precautionary measure: if someone had said something particularly nice about one of the family, she would set light to the tips of a few dried olive leaves, which she kept in a little jar especially for the purpose, and wave them dramatically in a circular motion around the victim’s head to ward off the jealous spirits, muttering a prayer as she did so. The smoking leaves left a delicious smell which I would sniff greedily while trying to look pious.

  When I ask Turks about this practice they look as perplexed as a British person would, and I wonder whether this particular example of damage limitation is peculiar to the distant lands of Northern Cyprus or whether it is just outdated, as my wonderful grandmother was, several decades removed from her homeland. Was she an example of the expat’s singular adherence to customs and mores which, in the forsaken country, have morphed and developed quite considerably in the intervening time? As this kind of practice is only really performed in the privacy of the home, among family, it is difficult to tell. The more conventional method of protecting someone from the evil eye is to pour molten lead into cold water over their head, a service often performed by coffee-cup readers and other gifted practitioners of the supernatural.

  As with the Western ‘Thank God’ or ‘God forbid’, the religious element of these expressions is hardly ever acknowledged, at least consciously. Most people use them more or less unthinkingly, and they have become equivalent to ‘That’s a good thing’ or ‘That’s a bad thing’ or ‘I hope so’ (Inşallah). I’m sure religious people do invest more in their original meanings, especially for expressions like ‘God forbid!’ because fear is a powerful catalyst for belief. This goes for everyone, however, and I still hold that these phrases are basically manifestations of the kind of superstition you find all over the world.

  One absolutely unparalleled branch of mumbo jumbo, held in high esteem by many otherwise sane Turks, is astrology. I am still surprised by the number of closet irrationals among my friends and colleagues, who regularly check their horoscopes, anxiously anticipate lunar eclipses and even employ fortune tellers to check the stellar alignment potential of new romantic partners. Obviously an interest in astrology is not a specifically Turkish thing, but it is surprisingly popular here. Superstition in general is a deeply ingrained part of Turkish culture, and most Turks grow up with grandmothers reading their coffee dregs and interpreting ‘signs’. These grandmothers are in turn adhering to a feature of their youth, just as I still feel compelled to touch wood, having done so in my formative years.

  What fascinates me is the lack of respect that secular yet superstitious Turks have for their religious counterparts. Religion is a hugely problematic subject in Turkey, for many reasons, but since the founding of the republic it has been regarded in ‘progressive’ circles as the bane of modern life, when expressed publicly. This is due to the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reinvention of Turkey as a secular country in the 1920s, and the considerable efforts he made to stamp out the stuffy, superstitious elements of traditional Ottoman society and the close-minded conservatism which is still referred to as the ‘village mentality’ of Anatolia.

  After the First World War, Atatürk brought Turkey back from the brink of collapse. The country was shaken by defeat in the war, under a crumbling Ottoman excuse for a government. After the precarious victory in the war of independence which followed, Atatürk decided that Turkey needed a healthy dose of radical, modern secularism to present a progressive face to Western challengers. Many people equate Atatürk’s push to modernise with a specifically anti-Islamic agenda, but this is not true. He was anti-backwardness, be that the result of religious practice or the broader traditional mores which included superstition, antiquated hierarchies, unbending social etiquette and a general distrust of outsiders and their ways. His reforms were not targeted mainly against religion per se but against the stagnant conservatism that regarded things like scientific education and industrialisation with the utmost suspicion. It is easy to see why Atatürk felt that efforts to nurture a gradual, cultural change might prove too uncertain and lengthy to risk at such a formative time, and that radical steps were necessary; he masterminded a kind of Emergency Enlightenment, which was basically imposed on the Turkish population. While his intentions were admirable, it is also easy to see why such an abrupt departure was too artificial to remain ingrained in a Muslim nation forever. The strength with which Kemalists cling to Atatürk’s ideals is testament to the force of his vision, but it is also seriously outdated and over-rigid. Law 5816 exists to punish ‘crimes committed against Atatürk’, some eighty years after his death. This is not just a symbolic law: people have been imprisoned for insulting Atatürk or indeed the ideology of Kemalism. Professor Atilla Yayla, an academic from Ankara University, was suspended from his post, tried and sentenced to fifteen months in 2008 for suggesting that the early Turkish republic was less progressive than it is often portrayed in undergraduate textbooks. Overt or covert, criticism of Ataturk is seen as nothing less than blasphemy.

  From a certain point of view a religious analogy is completely inappropriate here, but actually it is striking how similar the Kemalists are to evangelicals, following the inspiration of a quasi-prophet – the only difference being that the gospel of Secularism is preached. Kemalists are as devoted to Atatürk and his doctrine as religious fanatics are to their idols, and his life story, teachings and speeches are taught extensively and emotionally from kindergarten up to university. When a man is a demigod and the country of his making an ideological utopia, laws which punish those who insult him are not so surprising. In addition to Law 5816, there is another law which has put scores of journalists and academics behind bars: Article 301, which punishes those who insult Turkishness. Two notable Turks who have been prosecuted under this law are Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist whose murder in 2007 is now being reinvestigated under suspicion that it was the product of a major criminal conspiracy, and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, who is no longer welcome in this country after he called upon Turkey to accept responsibility for an Armenian genocide.

  Kemalism and Turkish patriotism are not synonymous, but it is easier to understand the strength of Turks’ feelings towards Turkey when you can understand the strength of Atatürk’s legacy. Kemalism has many of the characteristics of a cult – albeit one forged with the best of intentions, for the protection and indeed survival of a nation on the brink of destruction. For a country still insecure about its status, still haunted by the crisis that galvanised the new republic into being from the wreckage of the (Islamic) Ottoman Empire, institutional secularism is seen by many Turks as the defining and protective quality of the nation, to be preserved at all cost. That is not to say that they deny their religion – almost all Turks regard themselves as Muslim, even if they do not practise. It is written on virtually any Turkish ID card you care to examine, because it is the standard entry which must be actively changed if you are of a different religion or do not want any religion recorded at all. Despite this assumption of Muslim identity, what might be called, in distasteful tones perhaps, ‘overt’ displays of Islam – burqas, religious schools, even the us
e of the Arabic greeting salaam – are deemed to insult the idea of ‘Turkishness’ which Atatürk wanted to make the primary element of a person’s identity, replacing religion. This definition of ‘Turkishness’ is cherished and jealously guarded by the considerable Kemalist demographic, which includes a significant proportion of academic and artistic circles, although this is slowly changing.

  Friends in England often ask me whether Turks are gradually getting more religious, or whether the government is imposing religion on them. Neither is true. The AKP is a religious political party and it reaches out to the considerable religious demographic of Turkey. Despite Turkey’s fame as a secular state, there has always been a traditionally conservative majority in the population. Until recently, these people have been sidelined by nationalist governments and military juntas, but the AKP not only respects religious Turks, it courts them. During the holy month of Ramadan, for example, large posters featuring a smiling Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wish passers-by a happy Ramadan in an elegant, calligraphic script. He promises his supporters more mosques and religious schools. Religious Turks feel personally cared for, and secular Turks feel threatened. The AKP are secure in the knowledge that they have the unquestioning support of a huge swathe of the population, and they are not interested in pacifying the rest.