In that magazine office, I was surrounded by Berkeley liberals—my politics by then also had swung dramatically to the left—but September 11 made us unsure of ourselves, both disturbed and captivated by the exhortations of revenge emanating from our television sets. There were a few voices at the time counseling caution. One of them was the black writer John Edgar Wideman, who wrote an article in Harper’s Magazine in opposition to the widely supported Afghan war, which he called phony “because it’s being pitched to the world as righteous retaliation, as self-defense after a wicked, unwarranted sucker punch when in fact the terrible September 11 attack as well as the present military incursion into Afghanistan are episodes in a long-standing vicious competition.” Wideman, as an “American of African descent,” could not applaud his “president for doing unto foreign others what he’s inflicted on me and mine.” As an American of African descent, he was one of the few Americans who could after September 11 see anything clearly.
Later the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who had spent years living among Muslims in Islamic cultures as different as Indonesia and Morocco, would observe of that period in America something unprecedented: the construction of a new reality. Of all the “reality instructors” at the time, the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis was the most prominent; he would eventually come to advise President George W. Bush on the invasion of Iraq. The central message of Lewis’s historical analysis was that a mysterious decay in the Muslim world had led to Muslim rage at their own impotence, and what had struck the United States in September was the beginning of a “war of the worlds” kind of showdown. Lewis’s historical analysis was designed to match the emotional pitch of the public and political rhetoric, and, in Geertz’s words, “to arouse the West, and most especially the United States, to armed response.”
I did not support the wars, but ignorance is vulnerable to the atmosphere it is exposed to, and without realizing it, I absorbed the same fear of Islam and Muslims, not in a bigoted way, but in the more insidious manner of the well-intentioned liberal mediator. Many of us unconsciously settled for these softer versions of oppression, the kinds that fit easily into the American vision of its place in the world: as guardian and enforcer. I had believed that Islam was something to be tamed, that religious Turks were not to be trusted to choose their own way in life, that in fact all Turks, since most were Muslim, were people who must be restrained—from what exactly I don’t know—and that “Islam” was a thing that I, an American abroad, should be thinking about solutions to, because that’s what Americans always do.
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I WAS IN THE RIGHT PLACE, because Turks had long been worried about Islam, and were especially worried the year that I arrived. An election was coming. The reigning prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, was a religious man whose wife wore a head scarf. Now one of the candidates for president in the election, Abdullah Gül, was also a religious man whose wife wore a head scarf. This was new, and, apparently, traumatizing. The president’s office had been created in the image of its founder, the secularist, modernist, rak?-drinking, womanizing, trailblazing, ballroom-dancing soldier-statesman Atatürk—a man who in the 1930s encouraged his adopted daughter, Sabiha G?k?en, to fly planes—and so the idea that that office would now be filled by a man who married his head-scarf-wearing wife when she was fifteen was for many akin to national-spiritual death. Political office, it seemed, was not just about politics but about Turkish identity. Erdo?an and Gül promised to preserve Turkey’s secularist character, and instead used the language of democracy, liberalism, and human rights to argue for their own inclusion in political life. But the secularists in the country didn’t trust them. Many of them flat-out hated them. The military, which the secularists (but not leftists like Caner) viewed as a necessary institution, and which had in the past overthrown the government four times in military coups, was threatening to intervene.
“Atatürk was a feminist? His daughter flew planes?” was a typical question I asked Caner. “They seem proud of that. It’s kind of cool.”
“Yes,” he would deadpan. “She flew planes over Kurdish villages and dropped bombs on them and killed people.”
He was referring to the Dersim Massacre of the 1930s, in which the Kurdish tribes of eastern Anatolia had revolted against the Turks, and rejected Atatürk’s demands that their Kurdish region be Turkified. Atatürk, and his daughter, apparently, responded by killing some thirty to fifty thousand of them, thus depopulating the region of Kurds. Caner would not have forgotten about this, because his family was from Dersim. Istanbul’s second airport, meanwhile, was named Sabiha G?k?en.
I would meet Caner often in those days at bars and cafés on ?stiklal Caddesi, the city’s main pedestrian artery, where one could find beer, lamb meatballs, bordellos, dance clubs, bookstores, movie theaters, and any number of pimps, thugs, and prostitutes. It was an irrepressibly energetic place, once the Grand Rue de Péra of Constantinople, the European district, now the domain of everyone and anyone, especially the young. I walked up and down it almost every day, trying to settle into some semblance of normal daily life in between Turkish classes and figuring out basic survival skills, like buying credits for my illegal cell phone. These were lazy, privileged days for a twenty-nine-year-old, and out of some guilt and genuine interest I engaged in my full-scale investigation of Turkey, trying desperately to understand everything in a few weeks.