It would be at least two years before I felt comfortable writing anything about it. Turkey’s history was virtually impenetrable at first to an outsider; a double helix of twists and turns sharing few of the same twists and turns, phases and stages, revolutions and themes of other countries. Turkey was both empire and republic, Islamic and secular, democratic and fascistic. The “state” (the military and judiciary) was different from the “government” (Parliament, the prime minister, the local municipalities), which was different from the “Deep State” (a mysterious network of ex-military, intelligence, and thugs rumored to control the country behind the scenes), and each had its own pathologies and trajectories. Its political factions included, over the years, Republicans, Democrats, anti-imperialists, leftists, Maoists, Stalinists, Islamists, nationalists, leftist nationalists, Islamic nationalists, and some group called the Gray Wolves that made scary hand signals in the shape of wolf ears. New political party names seemed to crop up every year: the Republican People’s Party and the Democrat Party, the Justice and Development Party and the Motherland Party, the National Salvation Party and the National Order Party and the National Development Party, the People’s Labor Party and the People’s Democracy Party, the Great Turkey Party and the New Turkey Party. The Communist Party still existed. The so-called Islamist political party embraced the West, and the secularist party did not. The Islamist party was capitalist, the secularist party was not. The country had been America’s and Israel’s staunchest ally, but the Turkish people liked neither very much. The head scarf was banned on university campuses and in government institutions, but you couldn’t drink alcohol within one hundred feet of a mosque. Women had gotten the vote in 1930, you could buy the morning-after pill at the pharmacy, abortions were legal until the tenth week, but only 24 percent of women worked, and most girls seemed to call their boyfriends eighty-two times a day.
Caner patiently served as a human encyclopedia, explaining which newspapers were “nationalist” and which “religious,” and which “liberal” and which “leftist”; what the difference was between a Marxist leftist and a Kemalist leftist; how gay Turks could evade military conscription by providing photos of themselves having sex—but only as a “bottom” because being a “top” didn’t necessarily mean you were gay. As with Sabiha G?k?en, the adopted daughter of Atatürk, the world’s first female fighter pilot, as well as the person who dropped bombs on thousands of Kurds who did not want to be Turkish, every time I learned some new factoid and parroted it back to Caner over coffee, he would return with the factoid’s dark underbelly, as if there were two entirely distinct but parallel histories here, the official one and the real one. What was good in one was almost always bad in the other. I assumed this dual nature was particular to the troubled nation I had chosen, which I regarded with an unconscious but automatic parental concern. But each day my confidence as a journalist, as a person, as a thinker, declined.
Despite my confusion, it was an exciting time. On one of my first Saturdays in the country, thousands, maybe millions, of secularists took to the streets in Istanbul and Ankara and Izmir, waving red flags and protesting the presidency of Abdullah Gül. The protest was a bit like Mardi Gras, or the Fourth of July, without alcohol or beads or men sticking their hands down your pants. “Turkey is secular, and will remain secular!” they shouted. On a dreary highway in a northern Istanbul neighborhood, I watched a woman waving her huge flag, which fluttered violently in front of two women passing in head scarves, who had to flinch to avoid it. “We don’t want an imam for president!” other women screamed. (Abdullah Gül was a businessman educated in London, but no matter.) A woman named Nur Serter, the vice president of the Atatürk Thought Association, told the crowd that the women were lining up “in front of the glorious Turkish army,” according to reports. Türkan Saylan, president of the Association for Support of Contemporary Living, complained during those days that the government was transforming the presidential palace into “the palace of a religious order.” Overwhelmingly, the angriest people were women, who believed an Islamic government might transform their lives. I was reading a book at the time by an academic whose mother went around wearing Atatürk pins and saying, “I have my Atatürk against their veils.” That week, a female think tank writer observed, “If all Turkey’s leaders come from the same Islamist background, they will—despite the progress they have made towards secularism—inevitably get pulled back to their roots.”
The dreaded roots of which they spoke were the Ottoman Empire. During the nineteenth century, it was the Turks, not the Arabs, who constituted the world’s imaginary Muslim menace. The Ottoman Empire was a vast multiethnic territory, one in which the intellectuals, the wealthy, and the artisans were largely Armenians, Greeks, Italians, and Jews. Its overlords, however, were the Turkish sultans, or the “Terrible Turks,” and the Western world hated them. One editorial in an 1896 edition of The New York Times, for example, declared that the Turk being “driven out ‘bag and baggage’” was, according to the newspaper, “the inner most desire of all of us.” Americans primarily thought of Turks as Muslims who killed Christians, and when World War I broke out, their sympathies lay with the Christian Armenians and Greeks, whom the Turks were in the process of slaughtering. The Ottomans, who had sided with the Germans, lost the war, and the victorious Western powers eagerly parceled out Ottoman lands to France and Britain in the disastrous way that Charles Crane observed. The Turks, those people who had been stewards of one of the greatest empires in the world for seven hundred years, were offered nothing but a stump of land in Anatolia, surrounded by enemies, with no access to waterways, and without Constantinople, seat of its caliphate, urban jewel of the East. It was one of many grand humiliations.
In response, a group of young Turks—soldiers and intellectuals who had long wanted to overthrow the dyspeptic, antimodern sultans, eliminate the caliphate, and draw up a proper constitution—nursed a catastrophic sense of grievance. To Turks in Istanbul, the Western occupiers, as well as the besieged Christian locals, were acting like conquerors who had won the crusades. They believed that Greeks were mocking the muezzin and calling street dogs Mohammed; that British soldiers swatted at fezzes and tore off veils; that the fires in Istanbul’s Muslim neighborhoods were acts of arson. Watching the dispossession of his people in disgust and fury, a Turkish soldier named Mustafa Kemal boarded a ship to Samsun, launched the war for independence, ousted the Western powers, and established the Republic of Turkey.