TALKING TURKEY:
By Uli Schmetzer
Istanbul, November 2005

 http://www.ulischmetzer.tk/

The pep talks began on the way from the airport and
continued during the tours through the Old City over
the next few days. The tour guides never missed an
opportunity to praise the secular and moderate nature
of Islam in Turkey. One could have left the country
with the firm impression religion in Turkey was merely
a byproduct of daily life, the five times a day prayer
sessions limited to a few pious zealots, the
headscarves kept young women warm and - let’s call a
spade a spade - fundamentalism is a malaise alien to
Turkey.

The guides, mainly women, were efficient and utterly
devoted to their curriculum: To talk up the country’s
modern secular face.

As Turkey knocks at Europe’s door its government knows
it must allay fears Islamic fundamentalists will slip
through that door and run amok inside the European
Union. The stakes are high. Turkey’s bourgeoning and
westernized middle class views fusion with Europe as
the best defense against the steady advance of the
mullahs. Turkey’s concerned intellectuals see
membership in the EU as the best hope to wrest the
country out of its chronic poverty, its tribal
bickering, its shameful backwardness. Democrats feel
merging into Europe will curb the powers of a
putsch-happy military establishment and reign in human
rights abuses, including torture and the habitual
police beatings of detainees. And, of course, the
merchant class is far less altruistic: It expects
Europe to be the fountainhead of new wealth.

For all of them it is vital to convince the Europeans
Islam in Turkey bears a friendly face.

This will be a difficult task. Many Europeans are
paranoid about Islamic radicals and suicide bombers;
the legitimized expansion of a non-Christian religion
in the heart of Europe; the differences in culture and
ultimately, perhaps foremost though rarely voiced
publicly, the threat of a European labor market
swamped by cheap Moslem workers. In the prevailing
climate of job shortages, lay-offs and buy-outs the
nightmare of an invasion by millions of Turkish worker
haunts the great mass of Europeans - despite constant
denials by the integrationists who attribute this
threat to the nationalists.

The most vocal of my guides was Aisha. Her devotion to
Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey (leader of
the Young Turks) was iconoclastic. After all (so she
argued on every occasion when religion could be
expounded) Ataturk not only separated Mosque from
State but gave women the vote in the 1920s, liberated
them from wearing the veil and the scarf and outlawed
polygamy, a man’s legal right to four wives. Now a man
can only marry one wife, at a time.

“Why should I not thank Ataturk every day of my life
for what he did for me as a woman?” Aisha asked. She
has a six year old son. Her husband divorced her – to
marry a younger wife. It was his third divorce. By the
time his sexual ardor has diminished her husband will
probably have married four wives, the modern way. Old
habits die hard.

Aisha is a slim vivacious lady in her mid-thirties.
Dyed blonde strands run through her chestnut hair, a
symbol of her westernized ways. She pointed out - as a
good example of the continued secular nature of Islam
in Turkey - the government still banned headscarves on
girls going to school or women entering public
buildings. Her eyes blazed when someone suggested
according to all news reports fundamentalism in Turkey
was rising steadily at the expense of secularism. And
she huffed at someone else’s interjection the
government, beleaguered by religious zealots, was
tinkering with the idea to remove the ban on
headscarves under the pretext that in a truly
democratic society everyone has the right to wear what
they please, as long as it is neither offensive nor
against moral tastes.

“It can not happen because it would be a betrayal of
the Republican ideals of Ataturk,” she argued. No, she
admitted, she had not read Orhan Pamuk’s novel ‘Snow’
the story of young girls who commit suicide in a far
away city because they are not allowed to wear the
headscarf to school. Buffeted between the exigencies
of the fundamentalists and the secular orders the
girls take this dramatic way out of their dilemma. In
the novel the headmaster is shot by a fundamentalist
assassin for carrying out the government’s order to
ban from all education those girl students who insist
on wearing headscarves on school property.

In ‘Snow,’ Pamuk, Turkey’s most distinguished
novelist, raises the question whether the state is
justified in imposing a ban on a religious
prerogative. Before he shoots dead the headmaster the
assassin asks him: “ Does the word secular mean
godless? No? In that case how can you explain why the
state is banning so many girls from the classroom in
the name of secularism when all they are doing is
obeying the laws of their religion?” The assassin
continues: “How does all this fit in with what our
constitution says about educational and religious
freedom?” And finally he argues, just before he shoots
the headmaster dead: “Do we really want to push our
covered women to the margins of society by denying
them the right to an education? If we continue to
worship women who take off their headscarves and just
about everything else, too, don’t we run the risk of
degrading our women as we have seen so many women in
Europe degraded in the wake of the sexual revolution?”


Pamuk, a self-confessed westernized member of
Istanbul’s bourgeoisie, is a staunch advocate for
Turkish EU membership. One of the reasons, so he says,
is his fear if the door is closed it will create a
sense of national shame and will stimulate nationalism
and fundamentalism in Turkey. Pamuk says he could not
imagine a Europe without Turkey or a Turkey without
Europe. But then Pamuk is talking from the vantage
point of Istanbul, or Constantinople as it was once
called, a city that owes as much to Christianity as it
does to Islam. There was never any doubt the Golden
Horn and the Bosporus is as much a part of Europe as
it is of the Orient. In fact it was here, so many
travelers have written, that Europe ended and the East
began - or vice-versa.
Yet Istanbul is not Turkey. And when the European
community assesses Turkey’s application for membership
it does not look at a secular city where covered women
and bearded men remain a minority. What Europeans see
in the rest of Turkey - the progress of bearded and
head-wrapped religious fervor - caters to their worst
nightmares, nightmares fueled almost daily by the
drummed-up threats about imminent suicide attacks
issued by one of our faceless intelligence services.

Near Sirkeci station a young Italian woman looked at
the throng of pedestrians and shuddered: “How can
these people expect to be Europeans. Just look at
them. Do they look like Europeans?”

But what does a European look like? The young lady
herself, a citizen of Naples, had the green eyes of
the Levant, the high cheekbones of her Magreb
ancestors, the long limbs of the Saracens and the
thick lips left by a Semitic gene.
Yet her ignorance and arrogance, her racial
misidentification is shared by millions of Europeans
who see in ‘the other’ the outsider, the different
ones, the ones we must keep out. Unfortunately their
prejudice will determine Turkey’s fate.

No one here doubts the fundamentalists will benefit
from the backlash of a thumbs-down sign from Europe,
just as Europe will be loathed and penalized in future
for missing this golden opportunity to diffuse the
clash of civilizations now promoted by the neo-cons in
Washington. One hopes the Old Continent will not miss
this chance to take an important step towards what is
basically the core desire on both sides – peace.


 http://www.ulischmetzer.tk/