The real poor, whose ramshackle houses I could sometimes spot lodged into the hill crevices, had arrived in Istanbul during the great global migration to cities that began in the 1950s, by the village-load. Entire towns from Anatolia would claim a patch of land—whether at the open city edges or jammed in between the mansions—and quickly assemble their concrete and tin shelters so that they couldn’t be evicted; they put facts on the ground. The slums of Istanbul were called gecekondu, which meant “built overnight,” and Istanbul politicians, walking that peculiar line between wily and humane, hurried to promise their new potential constituents electricity and water, knowing that such amenities would win them votes. Regardless of intention, they let them stay. I rarely saw homeless people in Istanbul, and slums never looked nearly as bad as they did in photos of Rio or Nairobi, and even this seemed to me proof of the Turks’ enduring humanity. I was the exact opposite of the Americans I’d met my first night in town, who complained about the food, the taxi drivers, the fact that no Turks spoke English. I loved everything, operating in a state of constant emotional genuflection before this secret society that had let me in.
Up the Bosphorus, in the northern villages, there were Ferrari dealerships and ice-cream-cone mansions stacked up steep hills. The Bosphorus looked like some celebrity vacation retreat, like Lake Como. It had the air of exclusivity and endless leisure. Women sat outside for hours at sidewalk tables, all exhausting shades of blond, their thin frames weighed down by Marc Jacobs or Gucci bags. Where did they get all this money? How did they make it? (I had only ever been as far east as Sarajevo.) I looked out the taxi window in Istanbul with a sudden sinking feeling I couldn’t put my finger on until years later. Like many of my reactions in those days, this one was embarrassing: it was as if it had never occurred to me that Turkey could be so rich. I would not have thought it could look like this: better than us. I had been invested in an idea of the East’s inferiority without even knowing it, and its comparative extraordinariness shook my own self-belief. This was perhaps, too, my first sense of America’s decline, and I felt it take me down with it, as if America’s shabbiness said something about myself or, worse, as if Turkey’s success said something about myself. Was this the same sense of failure Americans had felt when but a handful of men breached American borders and brought the towers down, their power somehow stronger than ours? Was this where American rage came from?
My own rage, a petulant kind of shame-rage, would emerge in Turkish class. My first days of lessons were a disaster of soul-shattering proportions. I had been good at languages in school in that way Americans are—to prepare for tests but never to actually speak them—and had barely glanced at a Turkish textbook before my plane landed, a light perusal of which would have informed me that Turkish was the Ironman of languages, one that shared almost no words with English, and worse, whose sentence structure was the reverse of ours. Unlike an American’s first experience of, say, Italian or Arabic, Turkish was not some liberation of the tongue. Turkish felt like a purposely designed obstacle course, all the g’s and k’s stuck in odd places, as if the founders of the Turkish Republic, who reformed Ottoman Turkish into a new language for a new nation, wanted foreigners to know their place. Well, I knew mine. I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t even hear them. My mouth felt slow and stupid; my tongue a flabby, inflexible thing. When I left my language class the first day, I felt a surprising kind of pain, like when you are teased on the playground. I had been instantly rendered the hapless American of stereotype and scorn.
*
AT THAT TIME, American journalists moved to Iraq or Afghanistan, or at least Beirut or Cairo, but Turkey was a country rarely written about in the newspapers, and few people back home, I could tell, thought I had chosen Istanbul for reasons beyond the fact that it was a beautiful tourist destination. My explanation that I wanted to learn about Islam was somewhat true. After seven hundred years as an Islamic empire, Turkey had become a secular republic and, according to the standard history, dispatched Islam from public life. Atatürk had found a way to contain it. For the last eighty years, therefore, the Turks had been wrestling with this secularizing experiment perhaps with lessons for all of us. Wasn’t Turkey the one Muslim country that, in those days, gave hope? Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” seemed more intellectual than martial in Turkey, and I saw the country like some idea lab dreamed up for my benefit.
It’s painful now to recall just how confused we all had been after September 11. The Onion headline two weeks later was “Holy Fucking Shit,” which, I remember, in the magazine office where I worked had offered us a palpable sense of relief, because no one else knew what to do or how to react to September 11, as if emotions came from the memories of other emotional experiences, not from an organic place. The week before September 11, I had been reading David Halberstam’s War in a Time of Peace, which was about the Clinton era—the period when we thought history was over. Halberstam quotes Clinton saying in 1992 to one of his Democrat colleagues: “‘I’ve been traveling around our country for a year and no one cares about foreign policy other than about six journalists.’” The afternoon of the tragedy, my editor bosses—most of them impressively well-read and conscious of the downtrodden—dispatched me to go interview Palestinians because the sight of those towers falling down had made them first think of Israel, which I suppose was then the conflict Americans suspected Arabs might be angry with them about. I was twenty-four and did what I was told. I could only think of asking the people I thought might know Palestinians: the Egyptians who worked at my corner deli. I felt so ashamed of this entire expedition, racking my brain for confirmation that Palestinians and Egyptians had an affinity to each other, something I actually don’t think I knew for sure at the time. The Egyptians said some Palestinians ran another deli down the street, and when I finally tracked them down to be interviewed, they were understandably bewildered. “Our fight is for Jerusalem, not New York,” they said.