I had been most disturbed that day by the American journalist who moderated the panel. He had reported from Turkey throughout the nineties, including for The New York Times. When the threat of military intervention came up, to the audience of Western journalists at the international press freedom conference, he intoned: “When I first moved to Turkey, I struggled to make sense of it. A friend told me a story, and it’s a metaphor that I think will be helpful to all of you in understanding this place. My friend said, You have to think of Turkey as a bus. And the people riding the bus are the citizens. And the people driving the bus are the politicians. And any time the bus swerves a little this way or that way, the guardrails are there to keep it on course. The guardrails are the army.”
I was surprised. This was not how American journalists—New York Times journalists—see democracy, I thought; Americans don’t believe that a military, especially one threatening a coup, is a legitimate component of a democracy. I was only two weeks into the country, and thus knew nothing about foreign correspondents, male foreign correspondents, American male foreign correspondents, the history of The New York Times, the history of U.S.-Turkish relations, the history of the last hundred years. All I could see clearly at the time was a man spellbound by soldiers, and as I left the Hilton through its sad tollbooth, I assumed that this journalist was an exception to the rule.
*
ONE EVENING, after I had lived there for about six months, I took a ferry from European Istanbul to the Asian side to meet a Turkish woman for dinner. Those beetle-bug ferries were saturated in a 1970s aesthetic; all faded wood panels, sepia-toned lighting, and mustached men with nicotine-stained faces. Seagulls chased after us and Turks threw pieces of simit to their beaks. Men carried tea in tulip-shaped cups on trays, some sold strange, seemingly homemade, gadgets. Briefly, it felt as if everyone might know one another, or be related; after all, we’d all made the same decision to live in Istanbul. We were a breed, a club, a cult even. As we pulled farther away from the shore, the European side of the city expanded into a thousand new angles; something about the hills and curves and magnificence of the point of view meant that you always felt you were seeing the Old City for the first time. To this day, on those ferries, even in my darkest moments, I feel nothing but complete joy, as if immediately thrust into a state of meditation I cannot achieve on land, or on any other boat—an Istanbul-specific, ferry-bound peace.
Rana—that was her name—met me at the ferry terminal with a large smile and curly hair and an American accent. Her physical bearing was slightly tomboyish, not self-consciously feminine or rigid like that of many of the other Turkish women I saw, or thought I had seen at the time. Rana was open in many ways, and thankfully, since I had by then made few friends, she was open to me—perhaps if only because she had recently returned from New York herself, after a year doing a master of law, and missed it so much, she said, it felt as if her heart were broken. But she also loved Istanbul as much as I did—and she had a car. We embarked on a series of first dates: she took me to the boho coffee shop called ?imdi, where she’d met the love of her life, and to the independent record shop Lale Plak, where she had bought all her Nina Simone records; she showed me her favorite meyhane on the Asian side, where she taught me how to drink rak? the way the tough guys did. She drove me up the Bosphorus to the handsome Rumeli Hisar?, a fortress from which Mehmet the Conqueror had invaded Constantinople, and to a Polish village called Polonezk?y slightly outside the city, where we grilled meat outdoors and lay on hammocks. Rana seemed to delight in my childish excitements as much as I did: I was still in the habit of finding everything in Istanbul beautiful or adorable. She took me to her office, an elegant campus overlooking the Bosphorus, where she worked as a corporate lawyer, and pointed out the famous jazz club under the Galata Tower where she had always dreamed she would sing. She introduced me to her two closest friends, men, both of whom were children of leftists, and who, like many of Rana’s generation, had been raised after the 1980 coup to stay out of politics. Their generation was liberal-minded but apolitical, obeying the dictates of a new capitalist economy that demanded large salaries to survive.
Rana was cool and independent-minded and loving, and shared none of the prejudices of the White Turks I had met so far. But she, too, had emerged from an almost entirely secularist world: her mother came from a Kemalist, Westernized family, all of which I asked her about ceaselessly.
“The thing is, my mother tells me that when she grew up in a small town in Anatolia, in the fifties and sixties, girls rode bicycles in shorts and sleeveless shirts,” Rana said. “And now she says, you know, you can’t do that there. You can’t do that anymore.”
“But why? I mean, who says you can’t?”
“You don’t feel comfortable. You just wouldn’t,” she said. “You have to consider for a second that conservative religious people are different. Islam never experienced its renaissance, its enlightenment. And when it comes down to it religious people are not as liberal as we are, the way they live compared to the way we do.”
What Rana was saying was not just the view of Turkish secularists, but the view of Americans as well: these ideas manifested in our discussions about 9/11 in more coded ways. For some reason it wasn’t until I was in a foreign country, a Muslim country in which I passed religious people on the street every day, and where I often found myself agreeing with religious politicians, that I could sense something wasn’t right about the Western view of the world. For Turks, for liberal-minded women like Rana, this debate brought with it much higher stakes, of course: her fear of an Islamicizing country was little different from the fear of a pious woman in a secularist one. Forced dress and behavior was normal in Turkish history. Somehow, though, because in Turkey the force that wanted to restrain Islam was the military, I could see that Westerners, too, were a people who wanted to change people’s lives by force. What was the Enlightenment, what was liberalism?
Rana knew, too, better than I did, that something had gone wrong in Turkey’s history.
“You know, I will have these moments,” she said, looking distraught at the memory. “Where I will be driving, and I will see a covered woman, and of course I will stop and let her cross. And I wonder to myself whether that made her feel good that I did that, because women like me, uncovered women, aren’t usually so kind. Another time, it was raining and a covered woman offered me her umbrella. I thanked her over and over because I was trying so hard to make that connection, to show that I appreciated what she did. And suddenly I felt like this must be what it was like in 1950s America, and she is black and I am white.”