Sam Leith
Nigella’s perfect Christmas is positively postmodern
Last month, I asked: “Which would you rather be bitten by: a vampire or a zombie?” That seemed to excite some interest, so I will try a similar framing device again. Let me ask you the seasonal question: “Which would you rather bite: a turkey or a goose?”
This question differs, somewhat, from the previous one. My answer to the first would be “neither, if it’s all the same to you,” and my answer to the second would be: “both, if you’re offering.” I’m greedy. But we’ve reached the time of year when yet again, in colour supplement after colour supplement, telly special after telly special, we are invited to decide.
“Down with boring old turkey!” is the theme of one. “Make turkey sing!” is another. The conventions governing the media’s Christmas food coverage baffle me. It’s as if the food pages have been the subject of a takeover by the fashion pages: one in which “turkey” serves in the role usually occupied by “black.”
One one level, the reasoning is clearly this: we need to tell people, over dozens of pages and “definitively,” how to cook Christmas lunch. We did this last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, yet we can’t be sure that they haven’t forgotten. And the theme has to be turkey… or not-turkey, where the quiddity of the not-turkey is entirely defined by the not-ness of its relationship to turkey. If you see what I mean.
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Nicholas Birch
The Turkish people heaved a collective sigh of relief this week after their constitutional court narrowly voted against a call for the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party to be closed down for anti-secular activities. Politicians of all stripes found something to celebrate in the judges’ decision. Unnerved by months of political uncertainty, foreign investors now look set to return to one of the region’s most promising economies. European politicians who had warned that a ban could end Turkey’s EU accession bid applauded like misty-eyed soccer mums from the sidelines.
But the court’s ruling on the case brought by the country’s chief prosecutor—which imposed a fine on the AKP instead—was not a victory for democracy, as some have claimed. At best, it was an unwilling step forward by an establishment that has had no compunction in shutting down 24 parties in the past half century. At worst, it was a sign of the difficulties Turkey faces in ridding itself of its authoritarian demons.
Turkish secularists’ fears of rising religiosity under the AKP are not entirely unjustified. But the turmoil is only superficially about secularism and Islam (see Prospect, May 2008). It is more like the struggle for existence of a hermit crab, one that has outgrown its old shell but not yet found a new one.
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Thomas de Waal
In a list of global intellectuals dominated by names from Turkey and the Islamic world, one Turkish name stands out.
Orhan Pamuk evidently feels uncomfortable with the notion that he is a world intellectual and political oracle. His remarks about Turkey’s historical responsibilities towards Armenians and Kurds have made his life difficult and distracted attention from his novels. But his country is experiencing a profound existential crisis, one he has illuminated more profoundly than anyone.
When I interviewed Pamuk for the BBC World Service last year, he said: “I was harshly criticised by the previous generation of Turkish writers, my elders, who criticised me for being too apolitical, too bourgeois, too self-obsessed with rich upper-class culture to understand my country’s problems.
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Stephen Schwartz
Discuss this article here
Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish Muslim ideologue who claims to find inspiration in Islamic mysticism (Sufism), has had a busy summer. Following the hijacking by his many admirers of the Prospect/Foreign Policy global public intellectuals poll, on 24th June he was acquitted by the Turkish judiciary of charges of fundamentalism and terrorism. Then, some Turkish media reported that Gülen has been denied a “green card” for permanent immigrant status in the US and faces deportation.
Rumours had circulated for some months that Gülen, who resided for several years, while ill, in Pennsylvania, had already returned to Turkey following the election of the AK (Justice and Development) party, with which he is loosely connected. But the reports about Gülen’s immigration case were false. No such decision has been made in the US, and no resolution of his status is expected in the short term. The lesson of this latest item, for opponents of Gülen, is that wherever he goes, media manipulation and disinformation follow.
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Nicholas Birch
Battle lines are being drawn in Turkey. Indicted for anti-secular activities by the country’s chief prosecutor, the ruling AK party faces closure just eight months after it won a general election with 47 per cent of the vote. At the end of March the country’s constitutional court agreed to hear the prosecutor’s case, and the dispute could now roll on for months. It’s the latest and most bitter round of a feud that goes back decades. On one side, pious democrats. On the other, authoritarian secularists.
That’s the most commonly used dichotomy, anyway. But just how questionable it is was evident from the surreal row that triggered the prosecutor’s closure case: the government’s attempt to end the ban on women wearing headscarves in universities. Conservatives insisted that the ban breached the obligation for Muslim women to cover their heads. Opposition leader Deniz Baykal, dubbed a “staunch secularist” by the western press, argued for the ban on the grounds that a woman who leaves her head uncovered is not committing a cardinal sin in Islam. Few made the simple argument that what a woman wears on her head is none of the state’s business.
“This war is not between secularists and non-secularists, but Turkish Muslims and Muslim Turks,” says columnist Gokhan Ozgun. The real fear of secularists “is that their non-secular positivist Muslim state might turn into a non-secular orthodox Muslim state.”
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Christopher de Bellaigue
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Turkey’s election of 22nd July was meant to be about secularism, the creed that the republic’s founder, Kemal Atatürk, adopted in the 1920s, and which the ruling AK party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been accused of subverting. It was to defend secularism that Turkey’s generals in May made known their displeasure at plans to raise the pious, affable Abdullah Gül to the presidency, and it was to resolve the stand-off that Erdogan sought a new mandate—a mandate that he has now said he will use to put Gül in the presidential palace.
With its fine economic record, the AKP was never going to lose; to assure itself of a working majority, however, it needed to shed its divisive Islamist colouring and become a party for all Turks. In Turkey’s southeast, those mainly Kurdish provinces that have been the epicentre of a vicious rebellion since 1984, the AKP set itself a harder challenge: to become a party for all Kurds.
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Nibras Kazimi
Unity through football
“I will take the cup to Thawra City—I mean Sadr City; I will take it to Kadhimiya, to Adhamiya, to Dora; I will take it to Basra, to the north, to Mosul. Even if they kill me, I am a willing sacrifice for my people.” So said 24-year-old Younis Mahmoud, captain of Iraq’s national football team, to Iraq’s official television station Al-Iraqiya during a snap interview in Dubai, following Iraq’s victory in the Asian Cup in late July. Mahmoud is a Sunni Arab who was born in the oil-rich town of Dibis, northeast of Kirkuk. He grew up among other Sunni Arabs, Shia and Sunni Turkmen, Kurds and Christian Assyrians—a diversity reflected in the team he led to Iraq’s first major football victory.
After Iraq defeated South Korea in a semi-final penalty shoot-out—unleashing jubilation among Iraqis inside and outside the country and raising cautious hopes of bringing the cup to Baghdad—Iraqi singers began to record songs for the final, and the ditty that became the team’s anthem began with the words, “Have you ever seen a player on the fields play while pressing his hand to his wound?”
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Gerald Knaus
The late night posting on the website of the Turkish general staff on 27th April was a shock, even in a society used to surprises. In a short message, the military reminded the Turkish government and the world of its role as “defender of secularism,” and warned that it would act “when it becomes necessary.” Turkish columnists argued about whether this was a new style of intervention: the “e-coup.” It certainly had an impact, bringing to a halt the process of electing a president and triggering early elections on 22nd July.
Ever since the one-party regime established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s gave way to multiparty democracy in the late 1940s, Turkish politicians have operated in the shadow of possible military intervention. Turkey’s first coup, in 1960, ended with the execution of the country’s first elected prime minister. A second coup in 1970 saw mass imprisonments. When generals stepped in again in 1980, they detained 180,000 people, hanged 25 and drafted an authoritarian constitution that gave them the right to control most aspects of Turkish society. A “soft coup” in 1997 saw politicians, including the current prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sent to prison on trumped-up charges. By early 2007, however, many believed that these interventions belonged to the past: the Turkish economy was growing fast, the government was popular, and the country was in the middle of negotiations for membership of the EU.
Not everybody was shocked by the e-coup. A group of “authoritarian feminists” argued that Turkey’s generals were protecting the rights of women. Nur Serter, vice-president of the Atatürk Thought Association, told a flag-waving crowd in Istanbul that “we line up in front of the glorious Turkish army.”
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Maureen Freely
Since its birth in 1923, the republic of Turkey has been engaged in a war of words with the Armenian diaspora, with the latter insisting that what Anatolia’s Armenians suffered in 1915 was genocide. The Turkish state has put a lot of effort into denying that claim, both at home and abroad. Its allies have traditionally agreed not to “make an issue of it.” For 82 years, the Turkish intelligentsia did the same. But in February 2005, the novelist Orhan Pamuk broke the taboo. The hate campaign to which he was then subjected was widely reported, both in Turkey and abroad, as was his prosecution for insulting Turkishness. In the nationalist press in his own country, he was branded a traitor. In the west, he was cast as a lone voice, and that is how most people here continue to see him.
In fact, Pamuk is not alone. I know this because I grew up in Istanbul, and many members of my family still live there. In the late 1960s, I attended an American-owned lycée in Istanbul. Orhan Pamuk, who is my exact contemporary, and whose books I now translate, attended our brother school, which has since merged with my alma mater to become Robert College. Though we can thank these schools for giving us a world-class education, it carried contradictions that continue to mark us all. For example, Turkish nationals at the colleges were required to study certain subjects—history, geography, Turkish literature, and military science—in Turkish, and to study them as the ministry of education decreed. This involved memorisation and discouraged the intellectual inquiry that was so encouraged in the lessons taught by Americans. This meant that my classmates had almost to change personality several times a day.
By mid-afternoon, we would have left our beautiful, secluded campus to return to a city that was ever more virulently anti-American. By the late 1960s, universities had become war zones, with leftist students fighting daily pitched battles with the police. There were also repeated attacks against US personnel, especially those working on its 17 military bases.
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Gerald Knaus
Do certain religious attitudes promote economic development? Or is it the other way around: does development lead people to embrace interpretations of their faith that make it compatible with their enrichment? The question is an old dilemma of social theory and the debate will remain inconclusive.
In 2000, the Harvard historian David Landes published an essay on development entitled “Culture makes almost all the difference,” taking Max Weber as his reference point. Landes defends Weber’s thesis of the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism against its many critics. It is a fact, he argues, that in early-modern northern Europe, “religion encouraged the appearance in numbers of a personality type that had been exceptional and adventitious before, and that this type created a new economy that we know as industrial capitalism.” To illustrate the relevance of the argument today, Landes refers to contemporary history: “One could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany by taking account of culture. The same with South Korea versus Turkey.”
The argument is not new. Arthur Lewis, a leading 20th-century development economist, argued that some religious codes were more compatible with economic growth than others. Discussing Muslims in India, Lewis suggested that the way Islam was practiced was inimical to development, encouraging fatalism and suppressing innovation. In Turkey, secularists went further and said successful development requires the retreat of Islam.
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