Finally, a young man said, “Maybe from New Orleans,” referring to the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina only two years earlier. Everyone laughed.
To be fair, these Turks were callous in the way rich kids can be everywhere, but what I kept being told was that these people, who had spent time in New York or London, were more open-minded than their Islamic counterparts. I was often told that these so-called White Turks would be the ones most “like me.” (And in the sense that they shared the racism of many white Americans, I suppose this was true.) They went to the best high schools and came from Westernized families and were not religious Muslims. They always asked me why I was in Turkey when I could have stayed in New York. “I want to understand the relationship between religion and politics in Turkey,” I would say. They would respond that the Muslims “were ruining the country” or that they “wanted to turn the country into Iran.” One woman told me that the “veil simply is oppression, and I’m sick of quasi-enlightened intellectuals in the West suggesting that it’s a woman’s choice to wear the veil or not—it’s not a choice, they’re coerced.”
Many of them even developed a sign language for their agony, a political pantomime for the head scarf. In the midst of conversations they would drag their two hands around the sides of their face and under their chin. “Everything in Turkey is okay,” they seemed to be saying, “but now we have this.” And with that gesture I, especially me the Westerner, the foreigner, the uncovered free New York woman, was supposed to empathize with their despair.
Instead, I found these secular Westernized, so-called liberal people—my people—difficult to understand, so much so that I found I couldn’t relate to many of their feminist principles, ones to which I ordinarily would have been sympathetic. Their contempt for their culture had a deathly air to it. They boiled with a kind of anger and prejudice that reminded me of the American South. I was reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow at the time, in which he wrote:
No one who’s even slightly Westernized can breathe free in this country unless they have a secular army protecting them, and no one needs this protection more than intellectuals who think they’re better than everyone else and look down on other people—if it weren’t for the army, the fanatics would be turning their rusty knives on the lot of them and their painted women, chopping them all into little pieces.
Such was the central paradox of Turkish culture—liberalism in service of an authoritarian national project. Even feminism at times could be used in service of immorality, violence, and nationalism, as if women had been empowered only so Turkey would be powerful. The irony was that sometimes when secularists or Kemalists talked about “modernity,” they were talking about modernity as conceived by Atatürk seventy years earlier, during the formation of this Turkish Republican identity. To them, the rise of these religious politicians meant Turkey was going backward, back to the beginning, before Atatürk, before the “Turk.” It was not just feminism or antireligious fervor that compelled those women and men with flags to take to the streets, but their very identities as human beings. For these Turks, modernity was a religion in and of itself, and Atatürk their god. That was why girls had his signature tattooed on their arms. The Turks have been brainwashed! I thought. For a long time, I went on like this, believing two key fallacies: that this was my first brush with nationalist propaganda, and that the slavish devotion to “modernity” was something unique to the Turkish Republic, an abstract concept in which we Americans had never needed to engage.
*
IN MY FIRST WEEKS, I attended a conference on international press freedom at the Hilton hotel. The Hilton was in a zone of Istanbul seemingly designed precisely for conferences—spacious, monotonous, and full of travel agencies—halfway between Taksim Square, near where I lived, and Ni?anta??, an old, upper-class neighborhood where Spanish leather shoes cost five hundred dollars and Porsches regularly parked outside of cafés. The Hilton was by then one of Istanbul’s oldest modern hotels, with gates strangely resembling a highway toll plaza, and a huge lawn that surrounded the hotel’s modernist hulk of concrete, set far back from the road. The hotel had the shape of a giant 1960s television—a large screen on a small stand—and had the benevolent totalitarian aesthetic of the United Nations. As I drove in, I marveled at how much property it took up, as if it were one of the city’s many military installations, or some other precious piece of state property. When I entered, I felt the strange experience of being home again, a feeling I assumed came from the corporate uniformity of all international brands. Spending time at the Hilton seemed to make it the sort of place that would keep me from understanding the real Turkey, which I would learn someday was the Hilton’s point.
Journalists had come from all over the world to attend this conference on press freedom. I was new to Turkey, but even I knew that the Turkish journalists and thinkers on the panel largely supported the secularist point of view—there was the historian Andrew Mango, who had written a flattering biography of Atatürk; ?lber Ortayl?, a historian known for denying the Armenian genocide; and Bassam Tibi, who wrote an article called “Turkey’s Islamist Danger.” The last of them was a man named Ertu?rul ?zk?k, the editor of one of Turkey’s largest mainstream newspapers, Hürriyet, who spent most of the time insincerely wringing his hands over reader complaints that Hürriyet wasn’t pro-secularist enough, although Caner had told me that Hürriyet was one of the most secularist newspapers in town.
“What can we do?” he said. “We get so many letters saying our paper does not enforce laicism enough. We have all these antigovernment columnists, but readers still complain!”
“Don’t worry,” Andrew Mango said at one point. “You share your problems with Europe, more evolved societies, rather than the Middle East.”
“My generation had a strong republican education,” ?zk?k said. “We thought the problem with Islam was over!”
“If Turkey has not had a civil war, it’s because the military stopped it,” said Mango.