During my own bewildering initiation days, I spent too much money on a beautiful book about the Kemalist era called Modernism and Nation Building. In it, I read that Le Corbusier, the master of modernism, lamented the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire, even as his own work was celebrated by the young Turks who destroyed it. Le Corbusier had genuinely admired the simplicity of the Ottomans’ aesthetic, their “harmonious culture.” Indeed, I was surprised when I first visited Topkap? Palace, the longtime environs of the sultans, to discover a modest sense of majesty, none of the jewels, brocades, excess, and curlicues of most kings and castles. All of its art and design—its painted miniatures and calligraphy, geometric rooftops and octagonal tiles, soft-domed mosques and proud minarets—struck me as careful and dignified, a civilization of endless busy work and love.
The Kemalists disparaged all of it. They instead built giant concrete slabs of buildings that seemed to squat possessively on the land. The ideology of high modernism, according to Sibel Bozdo?an, “appealed particularly to ‘planners, engineers, architects, scientists and technicians’ who ‘wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct and worldview.’” Many nations embraced high modernism—India, Brazil, Iran—but to the Turks, this modernism did not come with dangerous philosophies from the outside because modernity belonged as much to Turkey as to anyone. A Kemalist slogan at the time was “Being Western in spite of the West”—in other words, being postcolonial but modernizing. Turkey could manage such contortions better than the others because Turkey had never been colonized. For the Turkish Republicans, Bozdo?an writes, “contemporary civilization” was “the universal trajectory of progress that every nation had to follow—a teleological destiny that could not and should not be resisted.”
This destiny meant a new lifestyle for the people as well. In cities such as Istanbul, the new Turkish citizen wore Western-style suits, and Western-cut dresses. Nuanced debates broke out in Parliament about whether to ban the pe?e, or cloth that covers a woman’s face; some local authorities simply wrenched off women’s ?ar?aflar, or sheets, right in the street, “leaving them in their underpants.” In 1931, a Turkish feminist named Nezihe Muhittin published a book called The Turkish Woman in which she wrote, “What was the woman of fifteen years ago but a ‘monster’ both in appearance and in personality?”
This violently transformative period was called the inkilap, or revolution. “What does the word ‘modern’ mean?” someone once asked Atatürk. “It means being a human being,” he replied.
Atatürk was one of the world’s first great modernizers, a word that to me, in 2007, had no historical meaning but a positive connotation that was as obvious as the word “happy.” In Istanbul, Atatürk’s photo was in every shop, every restaurant, sometimes looking like Dracula, other times like Kevin Kline. His statue rose in every square, and people stood still for a minute every November 10 at 9:05 a.m., at the time of his death—just stopped wherever they were and stared ahead like zombies, even if at a green light, even if in traffic, even if walking in the middle of the road. It all struck me as strange, obviously cultish, and depressingly old-fashioned. But after September 11, Bernard Lewis, the “reality creator” in America, the historian of Islam, celebrated Turkey as the model for the Middle East, the one Muslim country that had forged a modern, secularist state of relative stability out of the wreck of Islamic civilization. He proposed to George W. Bush that a contemporary iron-fisted Arab Atatürk could similarly create a secular, modern Iraq, with all new myths and infrastructure. This Turkey was the model for remaking the world in 1923; this Turkey was the model again in 2001.
The Kurds, who did not fit this model, who according to the new nationalist myths had always been Turkish, revolted. Thousands of people died in the war to subdue them, a task aided by Sabiha G?k?en, Atatürk’s daughter—who herself may have been an Armenian orphan—the world’s first female fighter pilot, a fact that much impressed the American newspaper that had once called for the demise of the Terrible Turks. “The advance in little more than a decade from the veil and harem to the air pilot’s helmet and the battlefield,” wrote The New York Times, “is a leap that makes even the Western imagination reel.”
Turkish women had indeed made astounding strides. That their rights had been bestowed upon them by a man, one man in particular, would haunt Turkish feminism and Turkish democracy forever, as would all Turks’ debt to their father-dictator, the man who had saved them from Western rapaciousness, Islamic torpor, even death itself. Atatürk’s ideological descendants—the Kemalists—ruled the country for the next decades, until, it seemed, the very year I arrived. These Turks would also be the ones I would most often meet during my first months in Istanbul.
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I MET THEM through random connections: friends of friends of friends, such as the Google colleague of my college roommate. Most of these people were very wealthy, transatlantic, English-speaking Turks with whom, our mutual acquaintances assumed, I would have the most in common. I would meet them at futuristic malls, eating burgers at French restaurants, where they spoke with almost perfect American accents. I experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance in these places, similar to when I went to American expat parties, of being among American people, speaking American English, laughing at American jokes, but not actually being in America, and thus feeling incomparably lost.
One woman invited me to a pool party in a site—which was a word for an upscale suburb with a gate—outside of Istanbul that to her was so prestigious she thought the cabdriver making three hundred dollars a month would know where it was. (He didn’t.) The houses stood five stories tall, with bougainvillea bushes spilling over the gates, Ferraris in the drive, and pools in the back, around which girls sat reading Us Weekly. At dinnertime, Abdullah Gül appeared on television, and the crowd debated his “hidden agenda”: Islamists talked a good game, they said, but harbored a secret mission to take over the world and install sharia law. I noticed, sitting in chairs in the corner, two enormous black-skinned dolls wearing aprons.
“Excuse me,” I said. “But what are those?”
“I don’t know,” the owner of the house said. “They are my parents’.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Do you know what they are?”
They looked like mammy dolls.
“No,” he said. Everyone shrugged. The woman who invited me looked as if she’d rather she hadn’t.
“Do you know where they are from?” I asked. Perhaps these wealthy people had traveled to some African country in which such dolls were a local craft.