Some time later, we walked down Istiklal and passed a young woman in a fitted, sexy dress, and a tightly drawn head scarf. Rana scowled: “This is what I mean: If covering yourself to hide your sexuality is for Islam, then why is the dress so tight?” Somehow this mode of dress was acceptable to religious people, she explained, but if someone like Rana, a so-called secular woman, dressed in even a demonstrably unsexy way, a religious person might still condemn her for not wearing a head scarf.
Rana was angry about these complex Turkish social dynamics, but she didn’t support the head scarf ban. My careless readings about Turkey’s “head scarf issue”—my own reflex to control someone’s religion, body, self—had been about something else. My logic was drawn from a fear that Islam was something dangerous, threatening, not a religion but a way of life chosen to resist the modern world the rest of us enlightened folks accepted, a religion that seemed to necessarily lead to violence and oppression, unlike Christianity or Judaism, which, I supposed, did not. Even liberals, even educated people, even New Yorkers—sometimes especially them—had come to believe something was wrong with the religion itself, which in turn could only mean the religion required external restraint, like the “guardrails” guiding a bus full of corrupt politicians. Where I had gotten the idea that Islam should be restrained seemed not difficult to pinpoint: I was influenced by the post–September 11 discourse of the time. But where did I get this impulse to restrain anyone from anything in the first place? I wondered, as if Rana’s analogy to 1950s America had not just been made.
*
AT THE TIME, one of the White Turks’ greatest fears had been of something called mahalle bask?s?, or “neighborhood pressure.” A prominent academic named ?erif Mardin, famous for a groundbreaking book on Islamic movements, had given an interview to a newspaper in which he mentioned the term, setting off a public panic. Secularists seized on Mardin’s mahalle bask?s?, described in the media as the steady pressure by religious people on secular people to be more Islamic, as scientific proof of their amorphous fears. In other words, even if Erdo?an did not force you to wear the head scarf, your neighbors will shame you into feeling like you have to. Many Turks interpreted the term, and his comments, to mean that Islam was a disease you could catch, that neighbors influenced one another to be more Islamic, and that people, often girls, felt pressure to conform to these beliefs. It was as if Islam had a unique conformist force to it, its own Jedi magic. Mardin had said:
There is something called “neighborhood pressure” in Turkey. The “neighborhood pressure” is a phenomenon and an atmosphere very difficult for social scientists to describe. I believe this atmosphere exists in Turkey, independent of the AK Party. Therefore, if conditions are suitable for the development of such an atmosphere, the AK Party will also have to obey this atmosphere.
Mardin emphasized later that he did not mean that the AK Party was creating neighborhood pressure, but rather that the party would be likelier to submit to it. The secularists, not surprisingly, deduced that an Islamic party ruling the country would mean more Islam for everyone.
I went to visit Mardin, who lived in the kind of Turkish neighborhood where there would rarely be any pressure to be Islamic. It was another site, or gated community, in the wealthy northern hills above the seaside village of Bebek, where women might jog in half-shirts, and New York–style luxury apartment towers overshadowed mosque minarets. Mardin was old and wore a brace around his midsection. He had the modest wisdom of many aging academics.
“When I said that about neighborhood pressure, I had been responding to a man who was against the Orientalist elements in neighborhood life, against the people with loose trousers lounging in coffeehouses with their nargile,” he said. “This man was speaking of the neighborhood as a place where ‘backward’ tendencies” were becoming more normal in reaction to modernity.
But when Mardin responded that there was such a thing as neighborhood pressure, he meant that it was “a state of mind, so to speak, of the people who, without being aware of it, promote a kind of life that is according to them an ‘Islamic’ kind of life. It’s very difficult to apprehend because it’s very evanescent. There is something that is both very cloudlike and at the same time real about it.”
“So you are saying it is more than a religion?”
“Modern political science has always taken up religion as ‘religion,’ as a separate topos,” he said. “But neither in the West nor in Islam is this the case. When you try to differentiate Islam from social life, that is a Western way of looking at it. Very recently Islam, society, and science were all things that were integrated in a way which we cannot really apprehend today. The weight of these former relations—that were very warm, very close, where people bonded around Islam—that bond was destroyed. Politics in its wider sense is also a way of making up for this bond which has been destroyed.” What we were seeing now was a “translation of what is missing from society, into politics.” Erdo?an, the AK Party, could be this translator.
The writer Pankaj Mishra once said that Islam was a civilization in a way Americans didn’t understand, a way of life. Suddenly, I tried to imagine what those years of Kemalism, of modernization and nation-building, of secularization were like. It is difficult to find memoirs of postrevolutionary Turkey in English—memoirs that describe the sensation of being unable to read street signs, of seeing women unveiled, of losing one’s identity and one’s, as Mardin put it, atmosphere and way of social relations. A Mind at Peace, the 1949 novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanp?nar, is a rare glimpse of what it meant to experience both external and internal devastation: Istanbul ravaged by war and poverty; entire populations transferred out of the once cosmopolitan city; the loss of superpower status; the new Turkish Republican pressure to banish the rotting Ottoman past from their minds and to subordinate Islam.
“They’re all orphans of a civilization collapse,” one of his characters says. “What good does it do to destroy previous forms that have provided them with the strength to persevere? Great revolutions have long experimented with this, and they’ve served no purpose besides leaving the masses naked and exposed … What do you think we’ll gain through such a refutation besides the loss of our very selves?”