Modern Turkey, modern identity (By Oliver Leaman professor of philosophy and Judaic studies at the University of Kentucky, US

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/de...ay&link=107098

Modern Turkey, modern identity
by
OLIVER LEAMAN*
Anyone visiting Turkey is immediately confronted with the question of
where it is. If you fly there on British Airways from London Heathrow
the question arises when deciding which terminal to go to.

Do you go to the BA terminal for Europe? Is Turkey in Europe? This
existential debate is keenly felt in Turkey itself as a result of its
protracted negotiations with the European Union over membership,
negotiations which are beginning to appear as murky as the Bosporus
itself. Turkey is starting to look suspiciously Asian to many
Europeans. It is not just that the population is predominantly Muslim,
nor that there are so many of them, nor that they are so young when
compared with the European norm, although these are all factors that
would change the nature of the EU as each additional entry of major
countries has changed it in the past. There is also the issue much
discussed in Turkey itself of where the country is, what it is and
where it should be going.

These issues look political or social and have nothing really to do
with philosophy. But that is not actually how they are often
represented. When the present pope as a cardinal dismissed the
prospect of Turkey joining the EU because it was, as he put it, not
European, he caused great offense in Turkey, particularly among those
opposed to membership. On his December 2006 visit he backtracked on
this and on much else, having stirred up so much ire with his speech
identifying Islam with both violence and a lack of commitment to
rational enquiry. He struck a nerve, though, not because of his
particular comments but because he put his finger on a live issue in
Turkey also, the nature of Turkey as a country. Right now Turkey is
economically dynamic and full of self-confidence, and all over
Ä°stanbul there are posters saying that whatever the EU does, Turkey
will be strong. But won’t rejection to the EU push Turkey away from
its long term path to modernization and into the arms of Islamic
obscurantism associated more with the Arab world?

Turkey right now is a secular country ruled by a religious party. A
great deal of power is concentrated in those who see the secular
nature of the country as vital to its identity as a modern country.
The republican government that took over the country after the end of
the caliphate set itself in a determinedly secular direction,
discouraging Islam in every way possible. Even today women are not
allowed to wear headscarves in government offices or universities,
leading to the paradoxical situation that in Europe and the United
States headscarves are ubiquitous while in Turkey, with its huge
Muslim majority, they are restricted. It may have been the case in the
past that Islam was predominantly the religion of the uneducated and
rural populations, and so could be seen as an obstacle to economic and
social progress. But today it is cool to be religious, in Turkey as in
many other parts of the world, and modern people with modern ideas and
aspirations often wish to declare in public their commitment to a
particular interpretation of their religion by wearing certain
clothes, among other activities. The identity issue arises yet again;
if Turkey is a secular country, as it is constitutionally, how can it
allow religion to play a significant role in public life? The
defenders of secularism argue that in a country which is predominantly
and now enthusiastically Muslim, a dam has to be constructed to
control the aspirations of the people, since otherwise they would
submerge everything else if allowed to escape. Secularists tend to see
the religious as rather like addicts who need to be kept away from
whatever it is that would otherwise dominate their lives unless they
are strictly controlled. The religious see the secularists as
preventing them from expressing their beliefs in public as fully as
they would like, restricting what is in fact the majority from playing
a more explicit role in deciding where the country should go, and how.
It is the identity issue yet again. What sort of country is Turkey
supposed to be?

Turkey, the saying goes, is between East and West, and Ä°stanbul itself
is indeed between Europe and Asia. This dichotomy is constantly
repeated in Turkey itself. It is certainly true that in many Turkish
cities there survive examples of a multicultural and multiethnic past
that find very impressive physical form as churches, mosques,
synagogues and mixtures of European and Middle Eastern architecture.
It is also true that the Ottoman Empire at its best was able to
include within its boundaries a highly diverse and relatively
contented population. But there is little East meeting West in Turkey
today. Turkey is now predominantly Muslim and other religions are tiny
and lack any real presence in the country that is more than
architectural and based on past glories. Within the large Sunni
majority there exist significant ethnic differences, and also apart
from the Sunnis there is an important and large Shiite group, the
Alevis, but the social and commercial intermingling of Turks, Arabs
and Europeans within one country that was so much part of the Ottoman
Empire does not exist any more except in a rather contrived way. In
fact there is far more East meeting West in countries like Germany and
Britain with their substantial Muslim and Asian communities than in
contemporary Turkey. The difference is that these newer and growing
communities have yet to construct all the buildings and institutions
that represent their presence in these countries. Turkey has the
buildings in abundance, but no longer any significant population to
inhabit anything except the mosques.

Is the East meeting West slogan then nothing but a slogan, an
orientalist fantasy which no longer has any reality? Certainly if you
look at the faces of the textile workers getting off their buses to go
to work in the early hours you see no indication of the paradoxical
nature of Turkey as a nation, nor in the enthusiastic Galatasaray
supporters as they come to the stadium hours before the game to work
up to an appropriate level of enthusiasm. Most people want to make a
living, or support their team, and wider metaphysical issues such as
the identity of the nation are not everyday and vital issues. They
occur more in the imagination of those peripherally affected by
Turkey, for whom the concept of Turkey as a whole is an entirely
aesthetic idea.

To give an example of this, the choreographer Pina Bausch, we are
told, fell in love with Turkey four years ago, and the result is a
modern dance work based on the theme of Istanbul and called “Nefes,�
being performed in Brooklyn as I write this in December 2006. The
themes of the composition are various but include many references to
the hamam, belly dancing, Turkish folk dancing, the sea and Turkish
delight, all stereotypical orientalist themes designed to emphasize
the exotic, the strange, the ultimate otherness of what is described.
The only realistic theme consists of a man and woman trying to move
through the city but find themselves utterly dominated by vast numbers
of cars, buses and motorcycles chaotically careering across the stage.
One of the most wonderful effects of the pope’s visit to Turkey was
that it led the police to close down whole areas of Ä°stanbul while he
was in town, bringing the city back to some semblance of peace and
quiet. One night all the bridges across the Golden Horn were closed,
and I along with thousands of others walked across the bridges at
night, where all that could be heard was the sound of feet on
sidewalks and all the mosques and monuments of the city were lit up
and shone sedately down on us. The occasional police siren and engine
of the harbor police only served to emphasize the extraordinary
silence. It was possible then to step into the road to admire the
buildings without fear of being knocked down, and to relax in the open
without the tension of fast traffic and rushing commuters. Many people
commented that the pope should come more often (although not those
stuck in long traffic jams and unable to reach their destination).

Is this East meeting West? No, it is the ordinary life of cities where
there are terrorism concerns that close down the city for a short time
and make it revert to an earlier and slower form of existence. The
melancholy tone of İstanbul, so nicely captured in Orhan Pamuk’s book
of the same name, has little to do with East meeting West and more to
do with an old imperial capital, it could be Vienna, it could be
London, suddenly having to cope without its empire and feeling a
mixture of regret and nervous anticipation at what is now in prospect.

East meeting West has little to do with Turkey’s identity problem.
Crossing the bridge from the European to the Asian side of the
Bosporus does not reveal many differences. It is not as though on one
side there are sleek cars and wide streets and on the other dusty
bazaars and camels. That is why searching for the identity of a
country is so problematic, as indeed is trying to pin down the
identity of anything. We think there must be some essence, some core
ingredients that everything shares and makes it the thing that it is,
but when we actually try to find it we are unsuccessful. Some would
say that a problem that Turkey has with the EU is that the latter is
an organization difficult to join unless a country already has a
strong sense of its own identity, since joining involves a merging of
that identity in the union, and consequently something of a
diminishment of it. You can only readily give something up if you know
what you have in the first place, and the protracted debate in Turkey
over identity reveals that it is unclear what would be ceded on
joining, since it is unclear to many Turks precisely what their
country represents in the first place.

So dwelling on the issue of identity can be disadvantageous, and
suggests that a country, likes a person, may be unsure what it is or
who he or she is, where it is going and what makes it the thing that
it is. On the other hand, such confusions illustrate what is usually a
very interesting period in history, and in the personal development of
the individual. It represents a stage where competing interests and
ideas are calling for acceptance or rejection, and how a country seeks
to define itself and say what it is about it that it feels is
important or otherwise. This process is not without problems, as we
have seen, and if the process is too protracted then there is the
danger of a collapse into indecisiveness and uncertainty. How Turkey
will respond to these pressures and influences remains to be seen, but
it does seem likely that there will be a response, and whatever it is
will establish the direction of the nation for some time. It is
important that the debate moves on from the vacuous “East meets West�
truism and really engages with contemporary issues of concern. That is
after all how identity in both an individual and a country becomes
established, when the platitudes and accepted truths of the past
suddenly come to be seen as hollow, and a new direction results.
Turkey seems to be set on a debate about its new direction, and how
new it actually turns out to be will be an intriguing question.