Foreign observers at that time also expressed alarm over Atatürk’s radical alterations. Exiled in Istanbul after fleeing Hitler, the German scholar Erich Auerbach lamented in letters to Walter Benjamin that Turkey had much in common with his own native land:
Atatürk has had to force through everything he has done in a struggle against the European democracies on the one hand, and on the other against the old Muslim, pan-Islamist sultan economy, and the result is a fanatically, anti-traditional nationalism: a renunciation of all existing Islamic cultural tradition, a fastening onto a fantasy “ur-Turkey,” technical modernization in the European sense in order to strike the hated and envied Europe with its own weapons. Hence the predisposition for European exiles as teachers, from whom one can learn without being afraid that they will spread foreign propaganda. The result: Nationalism in the superlative with the simultaneous destruction of the historic national character. This configuration, which in other countries such as Germany, Italy, and indeed also in Russia is not yet a certainty for everyone, steps forth here in complete nakedness.
Orhan Pamuk’s idea of hüzün, or melancholy, had its roots in this period, too. “Ours was the guilt, loss, and jealousy felt at the sudden destruction of the last traces of a great culture and a great civilization that we were unfit or unprepared to inherit,” he once wrote, “in our frenzy to turn Istanbul into a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city.”
But what Mardin was saying was more profound to me: that Islam had been the foundation of their human relations. Mardin, in fact, described this atmosphere with the Turkish word hava, which can mean “atmosphere” or “weather,” but more commonly means “air,” and in that beautiful Turkish phrasing I could see for the first time that Islam had been even more than a civilization. It had been the air they breathed.
We in the West still seemed to believe the old story of how a man transformed an Islamic empire into a secular republic: Atatürk came along, changed some rules, the people followed. Old Turkish textbooks didn’t portray the suppression of Islam as anything other than a liberation. But I began to question for the first time what it was like to suddenly lose your language, your mode of dress, your idea of the world. My assumption had been that any social revolution that resulted in a country becoming more “modern,” in the American sense, must have been a good thing. In Turkey, not only had this revolution been damaging, but it hadn’t worked. It was strange, I was as critical of the United States as I thought one could be. But at that point, I still had no idea that with even those political views came an unassailable, perhaps unconscious faith in my country’s inherent goodness, as well as in my country’s Western way of living, and perhaps in my own inherent, God-given, Christian-American goodness as well.
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ATATüRK’S ERA of nation-building quickly mutated into a period of turbulence and fracture. The decades after Atatürk’s revolution were like skipping records, beginning with an election and ending with a military coup, the country always having to start over and imagine itself again. Turks often explained military coups as a trauma, an erasure, leaving the society disjointed and incoherent. But as I had seen, even in 2007, Western journalists were still touting the military as the country’s “guardrails,” the guardian that kept Turkey on track to democracy. Westerners once believed this, during the Cold War, because of the fear of communism. Now, it was the fear of Islamism, and specifically the fear of Erdo?an.
In the 1960s, the country’s vast population of poor, pious Muslims, long isolated in remote towns in the east, began flooding the cities, and Islamic brotherhoods urged their followers to find compromise with modernity. Reports from that period describe almost a small invasion of peasants, families from the Black Sea and Adana and Erzurum who squatted in the old beautiful buildings and erected shacks on spots of land. The new atmosphere gave birth to a new breed of politician, as many religious Turks devised ways to be both devout and, in Atatürk’s phrase, “a human being.” Out of that confident generation came Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, the man who was the leader of Turkey when I arrived and who is still as I write this sentence more popular than an Adele song.
Erdo?an grew up in Kas?mpa?a, a blue-collar Istanbul neighborhood near the heart of the city. Like some cross between South Boston and old Italian Brooklyn, Kas?mpa?a was a tribal, dangerous place, full of lower-class cowboy-immigrants from the Black Sea who may or may not have belonged to some mafia but definitely could beat you up. The men from Kas?mpa?a—they were also called kabaday?, or tough guys—strutted up and down their hillside slope of the city with a particular macho swagger. “Walk behind the prime minister someday,” a Kas?mpa?a resident told me. “You’ll see what it means to be Kas?mpa?al?.”
It was possible that this particular vanity, or pride, was very new. In the last fifty years—almost Tayyip Erdo?an’s lifespan—the world of the average Turkish man had been dramatically transformed. He found decent work. He sent his children to college and bought his wife fancier clothes. He still didn’t have some of the rights of his fellow citizens; if you were openly religious, or had a religious vocation, then you were explicitly banned from high-ranking officer positions within the military, for instance. (I once met an imam, who was also a muezzin, who was also the owner of a hostel by a pretty lake in the middle of the country, but what he really, really wanted to be was a commando. Such a thing was not possible in Turkey.) Nor was it possible for women who wore head scarves to serve in many state-run institutions, including Parliament. But more and more people in Turkey were middle-class and pious, and these Turks no longer felt snubbed by the Westernized elite, or by the West. They were spiritually redeemed and politically enfranchised by the rise of Kas?mpa?a’s native son, who would morph from a simit seller on the street to the most powerful and independent leader in the Middle East. Indeed, when I visited Kas?mpa?a some years later, I discovered Erdo?an cell phone ringtones, Erdo?an shrines, six degrees of Erdo?an separation, and Erdo?an one-upmanship:
“Erdo?an and I were best friends. Best friends.”
“My mother was midwife to Erdo?an’s kids.”
“I am two years older than Tayyip!”