The famous mosques and historical palaces lining the Bosphorus elicit little more than polite interest from the boat's passengers. But as a luxurious waterfront villa comes into view, crowds swarm to the side of the boat. Cameras appear suddenly from the enveloping folds of black chadors.
Forget Topkapi Palace, this is where the Turkish soap opera Noor was filmed.
With its glamorous cast and extreme plotlines, Noor has become a phenomenon across the Middle East, sparking a tourism boom to Turkey that drew 105,000 visitors from Arab countries in May alone this year – an increase of about 33% on last year. First airing on the Saudi MBC satellite channel in early 2008, its final episode was seen by nearly 80 million viewers from Palestine to Morocco.
Noor, starring Turkish actors Songül Öden and Kivanç Tatlitug (pictured), tells the story of a girl from the country who marries into a wealthy Istanbul family – a modern day Cinderella story of sorts, albeit one that includes a lot of foreplay, an illegitimate child and some prison time for Noor herself.
Continue reading: Turkish soap opera Noor brings tourist boom to Istanbul
Showing posts with label Turkey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Turkey. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Saturday, 27 February 2010
A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
With Zülfü Livaneli's Atatürk biopic 'Veda' (Farewell), along with another offering on the same subject, due out in the next few months, we look back at the history of Atatürk biopics in Turkish cinema - or, more accurately, at the lack of them
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
A scene from 'Veda' by Zülfü Livaneli.
Despite the passing of nearly a century since one of the first films detailing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s role in the War of Independence, we have yet to see a truly impressive, groundbreaking feature film on Atatürk.
This week, “Veda” (Farewell), an Atatürk biopic by revered writer, composer, singer and filmmaker Zülfü Livaneli is being released. And in March, we will get to see another biopic, “Dersimiz Atatürk” (Today’s Lesson, Atatürk), written by Turgut Özakman, who penned the biggest-selling novel/biopic on Atatürk, “Şu Çılgın Türkler” (These Crazy Turks).
Both films promise to be essentially chronological tales of Atatürk’s life from childhood to death, a story memorized by heart by everyone born in Turkey. “Veda” is narrated by Atatürk’s childhood friend Salih Bozok, a devoted follower to his vision. The second film is told by an old storyteller to children – meaning we will get to watch another film about the founder of the Turkish Republic in narration, much like Can Dündar’s controversial 2008 documentary, “Mustafa.”
From Olivier to DeMille
As long as there has been cinema in Turkey, there have been rumors about Atatürk films, with a definitive feature biopic perpetually in the works since the 1950s. The reasons why these films were never made boil down to three basic facts: Atatürk’s image as a deity in the collective conscience of the Turkish people; apprehension about deviating from the state accounts of Atatürk’s biography; and the significance of such a film for the current political agenda.
According to Metin Erksan, one of Turkish cinema’s greatest filmmakers, Hollywood’s interest in an Atatürk biopic goes back to the late 1940s. American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was cast to play Atatürk after World War II; when he visited Turkey in 1951, he was welcomed as a national hero, but the film project never came to fruition.
Later, Sir Laurence Olivier showed interest in the same script. But his interest also wore off as no government, civil or private institution from Turkey chose to cooperate in the project. Soon, another big name, the legendary American director and producer Cecil B. DeMille, showed interest in adapting Atatürk’s life, the Independence War and the Kemalist revolutions to the silver screen.
DeMille, who was known for his penchant for extravaganza with big epic dramas such as “The Ten Commandments” and “Cleopatra,” approached state representatives from both Turkey and the United Kingdom. Though U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a green light to the project, Turkey once more remained silent.
After DeMille died, his production partner, Adil Özkaptan, talked with Turkish President Cemal Gürsel. Both Özkaptan and Yul Brynner, the latest actor cast as a potential Atatürk, also met with Gürsel, but were once again unable to produce an Atatürk biopic.
License to film Atatürk
Tarquin Olivier, the son of the British cinema giant, tried for more than a decade to bring Atatürk to the screen – even linking Antonio Banderas to the role at one point. The plan was shelved, however, and Banderas had to content himself with playing Ché in “Evita” and Zorro in “The Mask of Zorro” and its sequel.
The latest in a line of international Atatürk projects was initiated not long ago by Fuad Kavur, a British citizen who is also the cousin of the late Turkish director Ömer Kavur. The script is apparently ready and there are rumors that Kavur has been approaching producers with the idea of casting Daniel “James Bond” Craig in the lead role.
Despite the abortive foreign attempts, there are a few examples of Atatürk biopics in the history of Turkish cinema – some of them merely adaptations of school books, others expensive productions that are little more than glorified adaptations of the same school books.
The most noted of these offerings are director Feyzi Tuna’s “Metamorfoz” (Metamorphosis), commissioned by President Kenan Evren following the 1980 coup; the early 1990s television series “Kurtuluş” (Independence), directed by Ziya Öztan and written by Özakman; and “Cumhuriyet” (The Republic) by the same duo in the late 1990s.
Semih Tezcan began attempting an Atatürk biopic in 1980s; his three-decade-long quest to make the movie, however, resulted instead in the book, “Atatürk Filmi Projesi Nasıl Baltalandı?” (How Did the Atatürk Biopic Project Get Axed?).
Was ‘Mustafa’ a cautionary tale?
The most recent example of an Atatürk movie was a documentary film that proved more controversial than it deserved to be. Dündar’s “Mustafa” shed a whole new light on Turkey’s greatest hero, depicting the deified leader as a human being for perhaps the first time.
As implied by the first-name title, “Mustafa” was a very intimate recounting of Atatürk’s life in a never-before-seen light. Following painstaking research in the public archives from Atatürk’s personal journals, Dündar brought a whole new dimension to an exalted leader who finally came down from his pedestal.
Here was a man who flirted, missed his mother, had his heart broken, clashed with his friends, made mistakes, danced, drank and eventually led a lonely life in the face of a new century he could understand perfectly well but had no one with whom to share it.
From the first day of its release, “Mustafa” became the top subject of newspaper stories and TV programs. Did Atatürk talk about an autonomous land for the Kurds? Could he be called a dictator? What were the motives behind showing him smoking? And, oddly enough, how could he be lonely with a whole nation in awe of him?
Two years after “Mustafa” and the endless debates around it, two new feature films on Atatürk are ready to hit the screens.
The debates surrounding Dündar’s efforts seem to have sounded a cautionary note because, from the looks of the trailers, both films promise to be history lessons rather than character dramas. Here’s hoping the trailers are misleading.
Source: Hurriyet: A brief history (or lack thereof) of Atatürk in the movies
Sunday, 14 February 2010
The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
The extent to which the great Ottoman Empire influenced the rest of Europe can still be seen from the buildings it has left behind, explains architecture and design expert Jonathan Glancey.
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Driving west from Istanbul, it looks as if the city will never end.
Out through the commanding Roman walls of the town - bulldozed in parts to let six-lane carriageways of traffic race through - the skyline turns into a seamless blur of fourth-rate quick-build apartment blocks.
Cheap hotels bristle with dripping air-conditioning units, anonymous business headquarters are set behind jammed car parks, carpet warehouses proffer colourful displays behind enormous plate glass windows.
And the giant cranes - I couldn't begin to count them all - raise reinforced concrete skeletons of ever more apartment blocks on floodplains and hillsides, on what were once fields and forests, as far as the eye can possibly see.
Istanbul is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west
Will the built-up area ever stop? Will it go all the way to the Balkans, Greece and Italy?
Perhaps it will, especially if Turkey becomes a member of the European Union, and also because Istanbul, with a population of who knows exactly how many millions of people, is one of the world's fastest growing cities, expanding north, south, east and west.
But what I could not help thinking, as I made my way to Lake Buyukcekmece on the far side of the city's Ataturk Airport, is that the Ottoman Empire that drove Istanbul for the best part of half a millennium, once headed this way too.
Reconnecting Istanbul
If Suleiman the Magnificent, the 16th Century Ottoman emperor, had had his way, the road west would have led directly to Rome - the city that had been the hub of the empire that had created Istanbul, or Constantinople, in the first place.
Inside the Rustem Pasha Mosque (completed by Sinan in 1563)
How far did Ottoman style influence Europe's great architects?
Calling himself "Caesar of all the lands of Rome", Suleiman dreamed of reconnecting Istanbul with Rome.
He would do it by conquest, travelling on the road that passes over Lake Buyukcekmece on a bridge designed and built by his architect, Sinan.
In fact, his armies did set foot and hoof in Italy - but they never made it as far as Rome.
In recent years the superb bridge, too narrow for modern traffic has been bypassed.
A lonely tourist attraction, it takes off from a sorry-looking public park, complete with a cartoon-style statue of Sinan sporting an ambitious turban, and lands at the foot of another concrete panorama, blocking the view west.
This was the bridge Suleiman saw rising as he set off on his last military adventure, to conquer Hungary. He was killed in the campaign so never saw it completed.
Nor had he managed to forge a direct link between what had been the ancient Roman Empire and his New Rome, Ottoman Istanbul.
From his death in 1566, the empire sank into a long, if exquisite, decline.
Yet one legacy Suleiman left is that of his architect, Sinan.
Influential art
Sinan lived to be 100, realising hundreds of designs for mosques and madrassas, bridges and aqueducts.
One of Palladio's churches: St Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Does Palladio's St Giorgio Maggiore borrow from the works of Sinan?
This contemporary of Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio, two of the most influential Italian architects, is little known in the West, yet not only did Sinan shape some of the world's finest buildings - who could argue with the choice of his Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul or Selimiye Mosque in Edirne? - but his work was also to influence that of the most ambitious architects of the Italian Renaissance, as theirs was to affect his.
What I came to understand on my latest trip to Istanbul - with the penny, or Turkish Lira, dropping as I walked across Sinan's Buyukcekmece bridge - is just how real this connection was.
Istanbul was joined to the West culturally if not politically or in terms of religious belief, and if not by political treatises, then by architecture.
Michelangelo's dome, soaring above the roof of St Peter's, Rome, was surely influenced by those of Sinan's daring mosques in Istanbul.
Scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul
Equally, it seems possible that Sinan would have seen drawings by the Italians.
Palladio's champion and patron, Marcantonio Barbaro, was for six years the Venetian ambassador to Istanbul.
Surely he made some sort of connection between Sinan and Palladio?
Whenever I go to Venice and look afresh at Palladio's sublime churches of St Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore - the Redeemer - I am sure I am seeing or scenting something in their design from east of the Mediterranean - from Istanbul?
Somewhere in undocumented Ottoman archives, scholars might yet stumble on correspondence between the greatest architects of Italy and Istanbul, confirming a connection between the Italian and Suleiman's Renaissance, between the old and new Romes.
FIND OUT MORE
Radio 3 Sunday Feature: Sinan the Magnificent
Presented by Jonathan Glancey, Architecture Correspondent for the Guardian
2000GMT, 14 February
Available for 7 days on the iplayer
The desperate sprawl of modern Istanbul makes today's city somehow further from Rome, the West or the European Union, than Sinan and Suleiman's city was 500 years ago.
As I stood on the haunting bridge across Lake Buyukcekmece it seemed somehow sad that the road across it leads not to some new glory or to a shaking of modern Turkish hands in western Europe, but to the blank-faced and all too solid walls of yet another, architecture-free concrete housing estate.
Source: BBC News: The Ottoman architect who linked East and West
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
William Dalrymple applauds an exemplary study of the 16th-century Levant Company and England's dealings with the mighty Ottoman empire
For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.
1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press
By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.
Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.
There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."
James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.
Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".
Mather excels at portraying the everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".
Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".
It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.
One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.
Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.
William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)
Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
For 200 years, from the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia and Constantinople was the Mediterranean's greatest port. The sultan and his viziers ruled a great patchwork of peoples, languages and religions, an empire comparable in size and importance to that of Rome. Decisions made in Ottoman Constantinople affected millions across the globe, from Ireland through Poland to Sumatra. There was no other city in Europe that in size or grandeur could begin to compare.
1. Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World
2. by James Mather
3. 320pp,
4. Yale University Press
By contrast, 16th- and 17th-century England was a small and relatively impoverished mono-religious and mono-lingual state, perched precariously on the cold northern edge of Christendom. Compared with the might of the Ottomans, it was neither a major political nor military power. Although Britain's navy was sufficient to defend it from its immediate neighbours, Ottoman technological superiority at sea led to the capture of large numbers of British vessels and by the 1620s the Turkish navy had extended its reach into the waters of the British Isles.
Yet despite this, much of the contact between Britain and the Ottoman empire was both peaceable and profitable. After the founding of the English Levant Company in 1581, through a charter of Queen Elizabeth I, Britain was closely engaged with the Turks as the Ottoman empire expanded westwards through central Europe and Britain's trade network expanded eastwards to meet it. The company sold wool and tin (to be used in Ottoman armaments and munitions production) and in return bought huge quantities of Ottoman silks, Indian spices and indigo and, oddly enough, currants.
There was, in consequence, a great deal of movement between the two worlds. Elizabethan London had a burgeoning Muslim community that encompassed a large party of Turkish ex-prisoners, some Moorish craftsmen, a number of wealthy Turkish merchants and a "Moorish solicitor". At the same time, large numbers of Englishmen – from traders and diplomats to renegades and galley slaves – lived in Ottoman lands. When Charles II sent Captain Hamilton to ransom some Englishmen who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they refused to return: the men had converted to Islam and were now "partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks... they are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women," wrote Hamilton. "Such ladies are," he added, "generally very beautiful."
James Mather's wonderful book is the first full-length study since 1935 of the Levant Company, the organisation that oversaw both England's trade and diplomacy with the Ottoman world, and which supervised and set the tone for the odd yet remarkably successful relationship between the two. As Mather shows, by the end of the 17th century trade with Turkey accounted for one quarter of all England's overseas commercial activity. It was the first non-Christian environment in which Englishmen established a major and distinct national presence and was an important and largely forgotten precursor to the centuries of empire ahead.
Yet as Mather is at pains to emphasise, there was an important distinction between these early contacts and the later colonial relationships that grew out of them. The attitude of the Jacobean travellers was utterly different from the arrogance of their Victorian successors. In the Ottoman Middle East, it was they and not their alien associates who had to conform; indeed, at this period, most Turks had never heard of England and as one imprisoned Englishmen put it, in Ottoman Jerusalem "the Turks flatly denied... they had ever heard of either of [his] Queen or country".
Mather excels at portraying the everyday life of the Englishmen who joined the Levant Company. He traces their recruitment, apprenticeship and training and the adventure of their maiden voyage out: "The Seae beating sometimes into my very Cabin; & I tossd & tumbled sometime my bed upon mee, & sometimes I upon my bed... all wet & dabbled, & in a confusion of Torments." Another factor compared life on ship to "imprisonment... with a chance of drowning besides".
Many seem to have lived like modern expats, keeping to their own compounds, importing their own cider, butter, beer and bacon, playing "bowles" and "krickett", indulging in amateur dramatics and drinking too much. The Aleppo factors even imported their own pack of English hounds. Others mixed in, recording the detail of Ottoman life in a series of fascinating dispatches, though few Englishmen seem to have had as much intimacy with Ottoman life as Francesco Lupazzoli, the priapic Venetian consul in Smyrna, who lived until he was 114, fathering no less than 126 children, 105 of them illegitimate, from his five wives and innumerable Smyrniot mistresses. The English factors, in contrast, had to vow to avoid all indulgence in "fornication and matrimony" as well as "cards, dice, tables, taverns and playhouses".
It is a fascinating and little studied subject and Mather's work is a major contribution to the historiography of Britain's relationship both with the Mediterranean and the world of Islam, which at that point was much more tolerant than religiously repressive Reformation Europe. It is also a vital corrective to the influential but wrong-headed readings of the flagbearers of intellectual Islamophobia such as VS Naipaul and Bernard Lewis, both of whom have manufactured entirely negative images of one of the most varied empires of history and the complicated European relationship with the Ottoman world.
One of the most interesting questions Mather raises is why the Levant Company never went the way of its younger contemporary, the East India Company, and turned into an empire-building, land-seizing, imperial-military power. After all, in the early years, the two companies overlapped to a considerable extent in terms of both investors and personnel: in the 1630s, 28 of the 47 directors of the East India Company court were also Levant Company members. It was not, he believes, for lack of opportunity so much as because of the conservative way in which the Levant Company was managed. It always erred on the side of caution and tried to avoid the devastating expenses incurred by its India counterpart in the course of its military adventures.
Ironically, though, it was the East India Company that eventually helped bring down the company that had inspired its birth. After the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt, the East India Company moved into the country and the Levant Company sank into financial impotence. Yet at its height in the 1630s, it was "the most flourishing and beneficial company to the commonwealth of any in England" and the agent through which Britain engaged with and interacted with the Islamic world. Given this, the importance of this excellent and balanced study cannot be underestimated.
William Dalrymple's most recent book is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury)
Source: The Guardian: Pashas: Traders and Travellers in the Islamic World by James Mather
Saturday, 30 January 2010
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city's Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey's last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Since no one knows exactly when coffee was first introduced, it’s not possible to celebrate an anniversary. But coffee lovers around the world don’t need a special day; for them, every day is coffee day.
The first records of coffee drinking come from the Yemen area, where the beans grew wild, although some say coffee initially came from Ethiopia. It was seen as a precious commodity to be protected before people realized they could sell the beans and get a good return on them.
Coffee drinking has had its ups and downs. It was viewed with suspicion as a powerful, addictive drug and attempts were made to stop people from drinking it. Religious mystics who belonged to one of the many Sufi lodges that sprang up are thought to have used coffee as a stimulant for their often strenuous religious services.
There were mixed feelings about coffee drinking from the beginning because of its effect on people. This is even less surprising since coffee was not drunk in the diluted fashion now favored by the Western world. It came hot and thick and if you weren’t careful, you would end up with some of the grounds in your mouth. Actually, the same holds true for Turkish coffee today. One researcher on coffee and coffeehouses cites a document dated to 1511 that he believes shows the first time that coffee was banned, an incident that happened in Mecca.
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city’s Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. One source has suggested that was the case because there were Mamlukes, who were part of the rulers of Egypt’s army, found in Erzurum quite early on. Ottoman Sultan Selim I took Egypt in 1517 when there were already hundreds of coffeehouses in Cairo. In doing so, the coffeehouse became a center for men who, for one reason or another, weren’t working or didn’t want to go home directly after work.
Little coffeehouses sprang up all over the city and then spread out to towns and villages. By 1595, a foreign observer noted that there were some 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul, attracting men with time to spare. No food was served, although no one would object to a customer bringing food in. The coffeehouse became a center where information was exchanged about the local area and beyond. Those who couldn’t read could find help and advice there.
The coffeehouse also provided a place for different social groups to gather; some even boasted musicians, theatrical performances, storytellers or wandering minstrels. The mix that allowed for socializing also made coffeehouses venues for political talk and they were considered potential hotbeds for revolt. Attempts were made to stamp them out, without much success – with one exception. In 1623, Sultan Murat IV came to power and personally forbade the sale of coffee. Though edicts issued by religious authorities were regularly flouted, the coffee ban was one prohibition that was obeyed, at least as long as the sultan lived, because he had the force to back it up. The coffeehouses reopened in 1640, upon his death.
Architecturally, the Ottoman coffeehouse would usually be a one-story building with a very high ceiling and tables and chairs or benches covered with cushions around a large open space. It was not unusual to find a fountain in the middle of the main area, and there might be rooms off to the sides. In winter, heat would be provided by braziers, or metal fire boxes, while in summer, the favored coffeehouses were those that opened on a veranda or patio, preferably shaded by tall, old plane trees. If there was a view, so much the better.
Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey’s last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse. If another minstrel happened to be around, they might start a duet or – more likely – an improvised duel, with one starting off the stanza of a song and the music to go with it and the second having to respond. More formal competitions might be even organized to attract an audience.
Eventually coffee was accepted as a drink that did not violate the Muslim prohibition against alcoholic beverages. It became part of socializing, even for women, although they were never to be found in coffeehouses until modern times. Even today, a Turkish woman might feel uncomfortable entering such an establishment. Women in Ottoman times would drink coffee in harem settings or at a hamam (Turkish bath); a number of paintings showing such gatherings can still be seen today. The ceremonies were perhaps not as elaborate as those conducted as part of serving tea in Japan, but special cups and pots were used. Learning about them was part of a well-brought-up girl’s education and when a young man’s parents came to call on her family to ask her hand in marriage, she had to show off her ability to make coffee.
Once a man found a coffeehouse that he felt compatible with, he would usually continue to frequent that place. Because of this, it was possible to leave messages for people at coffeehouses, knowing that sooner or later, the intended recipient would get it. Coffeehouse ownership would traditionally pass from father to son, with the boys in the family waiting on tables and cleaning up. The spread of television and the broadcasting of football matches have kept the coffeehouse popular on special occasions. Men with time on their hands still frequent coffeehouses to play dominoes or other games with their friends, or simply to sit there with their horse-racing forms or crossword puzzles.
Coffee drinking in Turkey was eventually supplanted by tea drinking. In spite of experiments with coffee-growing, the country’s geography is not suitable for it, and so coffee has to be imported. It never lost its popularity, but simply became so expensive that it was beyond the reach of many households. In fact, its importation was banned in the 1970s because the foreign currency required to purchase it was far too scarce to be used for something as nonessential as coffee. People who had foreign friends visiting would ask them to bring coffee and even five-star hotels were reduced to finding circuitous routes for their supplies. Nescafe thus became the coffee of choice and coffeehouses became more like teahouses. Now that coffee is once again available, customers will be offered a choice of tea or coffee, but tea is mentioned first.
Most recently, Turks have fallen under the spell of “modern” international coffeehouse chains that appeal in spite of their higher prices, but are visited only occasionally for that same reason. Moreover, the traditional Turkish coffeehouse has all but disappeared from many neighborhoods in big cities and those that do exist are often too far out of the way to be conveniently visited.
That doesn’t mean the traditional Turkish coffeehouse isn’t respected as part of the country’s culture. It just isn’t there anymore to be used as a community social center and it doesn’t seem as if it will ever come back.
Source: Hurriyet: The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Since no one knows exactly when coffee was first introduced, it’s not possible to celebrate an anniversary. But coffee lovers around the world don’t need a special day; for them, every day is coffee day.
The first records of coffee drinking come from the Yemen area, where the beans grew wild, although some say coffee initially came from Ethiopia. It was seen as a precious commodity to be protected before people realized they could sell the beans and get a good return on them.
Coffee drinking has had its ups and downs. It was viewed with suspicion as a powerful, addictive drug and attempts were made to stop people from drinking it. Religious mystics who belonged to one of the many Sufi lodges that sprang up are thought to have used coffee as a stimulant for their often strenuous religious services.
There were mixed feelings about coffee drinking from the beginning because of its effect on people. This is even less surprising since coffee was not drunk in the diluted fashion now favored by the Western world. It came hot and thick and if you weren’t careful, you would end up with some of the grounds in your mouth. Actually, the same holds true for Turkish coffee today. One researcher on coffee and coffeehouses cites a document dated to 1511 that he believes shows the first time that coffee was banned, an incident that happened in Mecca.
Istanbul got its first taste of coffee in 1554, when Syrian traders Hakim and Sems opened a coffeehouse in the city’s Tahtakale district, although individual residents must have previously savored the hot brew during trips to other places in the Middle East. One source has suggested that was the case because there were Mamlukes, who were part of the rulers of Egypt’s army, found in Erzurum quite early on. Ottoman Sultan Selim I took Egypt in 1517 when there were already hundreds of coffeehouses in Cairo. In doing so, the coffeehouse became a center for men who, for one reason or another, weren’t working or didn’t want to go home directly after work.
Little coffeehouses sprang up all over the city and then spread out to towns and villages. By 1595, a foreign observer noted that there were some 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul, attracting men with time to spare. No food was served, although no one would object to a customer bringing food in. The coffeehouse became a center where information was exchanged about the local area and beyond. Those who couldn’t read could find help and advice there.
The coffeehouse also provided a place for different social groups to gather; some even boasted musicians, theatrical performances, storytellers or wandering minstrels. The mix that allowed for socializing also made coffeehouses venues for political talk and they were considered potential hotbeds for revolt. Attempts were made to stamp them out, without much success – with one exception. In 1623, Sultan Murat IV came to power and personally forbade the sale of coffee. Though edicts issued by religious authorities were regularly flouted, the coffee ban was one prohibition that was obeyed, at least as long as the sultan lived, because he had the force to back it up. The coffeehouses reopened in 1640, upon his death.
Architecturally, the Ottoman coffeehouse would usually be a one-story building with a very high ceiling and tables and chairs or benches covered with cushions around a large open space. It was not unusual to find a fountain in the middle of the main area, and there might be rooms off to the sides. In winter, heat would be provided by braziers, or metal fire boxes, while in summer, the favored coffeehouses were those that opened on a veranda or patio, preferably shaded by tall, old plane trees. If there was a view, so much the better.
Among the different types of coffeehouses, one popular kind would have a minstrel or minstrels who would sing, known as an aşık. Turkey’s last great minstrel, Aşık Veysel, garnered a following when he started singing in a coffeehouse. If another minstrel happened to be around, they might start a duet or – more likely – an improvised duel, with one starting off the stanza of a song and the music to go with it and the second having to respond. More formal competitions might be even organized to attract an audience.
Eventually coffee was accepted as a drink that did not violate the Muslim prohibition against alcoholic beverages. It became part of socializing, even for women, although they were never to be found in coffeehouses until modern times. Even today, a Turkish woman might feel uncomfortable entering such an establishment. Women in Ottoman times would drink coffee in harem settings or at a hamam (Turkish bath); a number of paintings showing such gatherings can still be seen today. The ceremonies were perhaps not as elaborate as those conducted as part of serving tea in Japan, but special cups and pots were used. Learning about them was part of a well-brought-up girl’s education and when a young man’s parents came to call on her family to ask her hand in marriage, she had to show off her ability to make coffee.
Once a man found a coffeehouse that he felt compatible with, he would usually continue to frequent that place. Because of this, it was possible to leave messages for people at coffeehouses, knowing that sooner or later, the intended recipient would get it. Coffeehouse ownership would traditionally pass from father to son, with the boys in the family waiting on tables and cleaning up. The spread of television and the broadcasting of football matches have kept the coffeehouse popular on special occasions. Men with time on their hands still frequent coffeehouses to play dominoes or other games with their friends, or simply to sit there with their horse-racing forms or crossword puzzles.
Coffee drinking in Turkey was eventually supplanted by tea drinking. In spite of experiments with coffee-growing, the country’s geography is not suitable for it, and so coffee has to be imported. It never lost its popularity, but simply became so expensive that it was beyond the reach of many households. In fact, its importation was banned in the 1970s because the foreign currency required to purchase it was far too scarce to be used for something as nonessential as coffee. People who had foreign friends visiting would ask them to bring coffee and even five-star hotels were reduced to finding circuitous routes for their supplies. Nescafe thus became the coffee of choice and coffeehouses became more like teahouses. Now that coffee is once again available, customers will be offered a choice of tea or coffee, but tea is mentioned first.
Most recently, Turks have fallen under the spell of “modern” international coffeehouse chains that appeal in spite of their higher prices, but are visited only occasionally for that same reason. Moreover, the traditional Turkish coffeehouse has all but disappeared from many neighborhoods in big cities and those that do exist are often too far out of the way to be conveniently visited.
That doesn’t mean the traditional Turkish coffeehouse isn’t respected as part of the country’s culture. It just isn’t there anymore to be used as a community social center and it doesn’t seem as if it will ever come back.
Source: Hurriyet: The rise and fall of the Turkish coffeehouse
Saturday, 9 January 2010
Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Few collections of folk tales and folk poetry from medieval Anatolia have been translated into English. Thanks to Professor Talat Halman, a new book has recently been published that provides examples of both. According to Halman, the material came from books, anthologies, and special publications, as well as story-telling sessions in rural areas
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.
The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.
Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.
The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.
One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.
In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.
Folk tales in modern times
Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.
Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.
Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.
The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry
In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.
Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Illustration from Professor Talat S. Halman's “Popular Turkish Love Lyrics & Folk Legends.”
Turkish folklore has not been collected and studied for as long as othethe folk tales of other countries. Some studies have done nothing other than recount the stories, who told them, where they were collected and when.
The Vedas of India, or sacred texts, have been considered the origin of many folk tales, and some parts of them date back as far as 1500 B.C. Stories from Egypt come from approximately the same time, so one cannot be very sure of origins. The Greek fable-teller Aesop told some fabulous stories in the fifth century B.C., and there is reason to believe he did not make some up; rather, he may have retold stories he heard growing up. Scholars have even traced the origin of some of his fables back to Sumer and Akkad. Similar folk stories can be found in material from Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. This makes it unlikely, if not impossible, that these tales originated from a single source.
Another theory proposed in modern times was that the tales resulted of humans’ explanations of nature. They attributed life to everything in nature including stones, the earth and more. This is commonly found in cultures all over the world and suggests a common origin – even where one would think there could be no resemblance. Stories involving legal cases occurring in both early Athens and in modern times among natives of a Southeast Asian island, considered a javelin as the murderer rather than the person throwing it.
The javelin in both cases is given an animated nature, something we would never think of today in modern jurisprudence.
One could place the second theory even further back to the customs and practices of early humans worshipping animals and beliefs that they were descended from animals. Taboos or prohibitions may have occurred from the same source.
In the end, scholars decided that it was hopeless to attribute a common point of origin for folk tales as it is impossible to determine sources for any instances mentioned, and people are mostly stereotyped and can be found in a lot of places.
Folk tales in modern times
Although the Brothers Grimm wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and were not the first to collect folk tales in the modern era, they are usually pointed out as the forerunners of modern fairy tale collecting. Their fairytale work was followed by collecting folk music. During their lifetime, they gathered several hundred tales and adhered to the original stories as closely as possible. These were not stories they made up, so any attempts at psychological analysis of the Brothers Grimm is useless unless one wonders why they collected more of one type of story rather than another. It was only later when methods and standards for collecting and publishing fairy tales were decided.
Folk tales have been collected from almost everywhere around the globe, including Turkey. They were usually transmitted orally, and it remained to the older people to tell the younger ones. When modern communications were introduced and many people migrated in search of a better life, those traditional stories began to be lost. One of the earliest collectors of Turkish folk tales was Ignacz Kunos, a Hungarian scholar who traveled through Anatolia and collected stories from the people living there. Forty-four Turkish fairy and folk tales he collected were published in 1896 and are at present available free of charge online. P.N. Boratav who is better known for having collected Turkish folk music in Anatolia is also credited with having gathered folk tales as well.
Collecting folk tales in Turkey was supported by the feelings of nationalism arising after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923. Their study was even available in universities. Since then, a fair number of studies have been produced and collections, such as the one at Texas Technical University in Lubbock, Texas, have been made. A department of folklore was established at Indiana University under the chairmanship of Ilhan Basgoz. It includes ethnomusicology or the study of folk music.
The latest in Turkish folk tales/folk poetry
In November, a new book, written by the prolific author and translator Professor Talat S. Halman, joined the few books of Turkish folk tales available in English. The publisher, Syracuse University, said that it was the first time an illustrated book of Turkish lyric poetry and folk tales had been published in the United States.
Continue reading Hurriyet: Folklore and love combined – a different look at medieval Anatolia
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though few dervish lodges remain in Istanbul as meeting places for Sufi orders, a visit to any of their locations throughout the city can reveal much about the background of the various orders
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though the 1925 ban against Sufi orders meant the closing of all their properties, recent efforts have seen the restoration of many orders’ tekkes, or dervish lodges, throughout Istanbul.
For centuries, the architecture of the sects’ lodges was often dictated by the practices of the sects themselves. The more elaborate the tekke, the wealthier the people who subscribed to that sect – even though many of these mystic sects called for the renunciation of worldly goods in order to become one with God or the ultimate Truth. The main lodge was usually built where the founder of the mystic sect was buried or vice versa.
Tekke architecture
Generally speaking, tekkes were made of wood and sometimes stone, depending on the amount of money and materials available. Even when quite large, they were not especially imposing buildings, yet all had a large room that formed the central portion of the lodge where the members would gather for various ceremonies. This large hall might be round, octagonal or even multi-sided to represent any of the numbers the group held holy.
There would be standing room or possibly sitting space to observe the participants. When a sect combined music with its ritual ceremonies, there would be space for the musicians. Leading off the main room would be a series of other rooms devoted to various practices, including a kitchen and a refractory, a library and rooms for the leader of the sect or the person in charge of that particular lodge and his family. In addition, there were often also rooms for those studying to become full members of the lodge, or for sect members who were traveling in the area.
Few of the tekke buildings were as elaborate as the one devoted to Rumi in Konya. Because of the veneration for Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi sect, the original mosque and school greatly expanded over the centuries to incorporate nearby buildings and cemeteries. A better example of a normal Mevlevi tekke is the one found in Istanbul’s Tünel neighborhood.
The building was closed with the banning of Sufi orders in 1925, but from time to time, permission was given for the upkeep of the building. The center in Konya became a museum, as did the one in Tünel. Eventually the Mevlevis were allowed to perform their whirling ritual as a theatrical performance in the Tünel tekke.
Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Though the 1925 ban against Sufi orders meant the closing of all their properties, recent efforts have seen the restoration of many orders’ tekkes, or dervish lodges, throughout Istanbul.
For centuries, the architecture of the sects’ lodges was often dictated by the practices of the sects themselves. The more elaborate the tekke, the wealthier the people who subscribed to that sect – even though many of these mystic sects called for the renunciation of worldly goods in order to become one with God or the ultimate Truth. The main lodge was usually built where the founder of the mystic sect was buried or vice versa.
Tekke architecture
Generally speaking, tekkes were made of wood and sometimes stone, depending on the amount of money and materials available. Even when quite large, they were not especially imposing buildings, yet all had a large room that formed the central portion of the lodge where the members would gather for various ceremonies. This large hall might be round, octagonal or even multi-sided to represent any of the numbers the group held holy.
There would be standing room or possibly sitting space to observe the participants. When a sect combined music with its ritual ceremonies, there would be space for the musicians. Leading off the main room would be a series of other rooms devoted to various practices, including a kitchen and a refractory, a library and rooms for the leader of the sect or the person in charge of that particular lodge and his family. In addition, there were often also rooms for those studying to become full members of the lodge, or for sect members who were traveling in the area.
Few of the tekke buildings were as elaborate as the one devoted to Rumi in Konya. Because of the veneration for Rumi, the founder of the Mevlevi sect, the original mosque and school greatly expanded over the centuries to incorporate nearby buildings and cemeteries. A better example of a normal Mevlevi tekke is the one found in Istanbul’s Tünel neighborhood.
The building was closed with the banning of Sufi orders in 1925, but from time to time, permission was given for the upkeep of the building. The center in Konya became a museum, as did the one in Tünel. Eventually the Mevlevis were allowed to perform their whirling ritual as a theatrical performance in the Tünel tekke.
Continue readin: Hurriyet: Local Istanbul municipality restores tekkes
Sunday, 8 November 2009
The Rise and Rise of Turkey
It is generally accepted that America’s destruction of Iraq overturned the balance of power in the Gulf, opening the way for the Islamic Republic of Iran to emerge as a major regional power, able to challenge the dominance of Sunni Arab states and pose as a rival to both Israel and the United States.
Its influence has spread to Iraq itself — now under Shiite leadership — and beyond to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and even perhaps to Zaidi rebels in northern Yemen fighting the central government in Sana‘a, a development that has aroused understandable anxiety in Saudi Arabia.
However, the Iraq war has had another important consequence that is also attracting serious notice. America’s failure in Iraq — and its equal failure to tame Israel’s excesses — has encouraged Turkey to emerge from its pro-American straitjacket and assert itself as a powerful independent actor at the heart of a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The Turks like to say that whereas Iran and Israel are revisionist powers, arousing anxiety and even fear by their expansionism and their challenge to existing power structures, Turkey is a stabilizing power, intent on spreading peace and security far and wide.
Turkey is extending its influence by diplomacy rather than force. It is also forging economic ties with its neighbors, and has offered to mediate in several persistent regional conflicts. It has, however, not hesitated to use force to quell the guerrillas of the PKK, a rebel movement fighting for Kurdish independence.
But even here, Turkey is now using a softer approach. The rebels have been offered an amnesty and Turkey’s influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has this past week paid a visit — the first of its kind — to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. There is even talk of Turkey opening a consulate in Erbil.
In recent years, Turkey’s diplomacy has scored many successes, winning great popularity in the Arab world and strengthening Turkey’s hand in its bid to join the European Union. Some people would go so far as to argue that there is no future for Turkey without the E.U., and no future for the E.U. without Turkey.
Turkey’s dynamic multi-directional foreign policy started to take shape when the Justice and Development party, or AKP, came to power in 2002 under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, now president of the Turkish Republic. These men are rightly considered to be conservative and moderately Islamic — their wives wear headscarves — but they are careful to stress that they have no ambition to create an Islamic state. Turkey’s population may be largely Muslim, but the state itself is secular, democratic, capitalist and close to both the West and the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, Turkey sees itself as a bridge, vital to both.
Ahmet Davutoglu is credited with providing the theoretical framework for Turkey’s new foreign policy. He was Mr. Erdogan’s principal adviser before being promoted foreign minister.
Two visits in October illustrate Turkey’s activisim. Prime Minister Erdogan, accompanied by nine ministers and an Airbus full of businessmen, visited Baghdad, where he held a session with the Iraq government and signed no fewer than 48 memoranda in the fields of commerce, energy, water, security, the environment and so forth.
At much the same time, Foreign Minister Davutoglu was in Aleppo, where he signed agreements with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, of which perhaps the most important was the removal of visas, allowing for a free flow of people across their common border.
Turkey also broke new ground in October by signing two protocols with Armenia, providing for the restoration of diplomatic relations and the opening of the border between them. Not surprisingly, Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan has strongly objected to this development, since it is locked in conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated pocket of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces.
Indeed, Turkey’s protocols with Armenia are unlikely to be fully implemented until Armenia withdraws from at least some of the districts surrounding Karabakh — but, at the very least, a historic start has been made toward Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
From the Arab point of view, the most dramatic development has undoubtedly been the cooling of Turkey’s relations with Israel. The relationship has been damaged by the outrage felt by many Turks at Israel’s cruel oppression of the Palestinians, which reached its peak with the Gaza War.
Even before the assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Erdogan — a strong supporter of the Palestine cause — did not hesitate to describe some of Israel’s brutal actions as “state terrorism.” A total breach between the two countries is unlikely, but relations are unlikely to recover their earlier warmth so long as Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, remain in power.
Underpinning Turkey’s diplomacy is its central role as an energy hub linking oil and gas producers in Russia and Central Asia with energy-hungry markets in Europe.
One way and another, a resurgent Turkey is rewriting the rules of the power game in the Middle East in a positive and non-confrontational manner. This is one of the few bright spots in a turbulent and highly inflammable Middle East.
Patrick Seale is the author of “The Struggle for Syria,” “Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East” and “Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.” Agence Global
Reproduced from the NY Times: The Rise and Rise of Turkey
Its influence has spread to Iraq itself — now under Shiite leadership — and beyond to Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and even perhaps to Zaidi rebels in northern Yemen fighting the central government in Sana‘a, a development that has aroused understandable anxiety in Saudi Arabia.
However, the Iraq war has had another important consequence that is also attracting serious notice. America’s failure in Iraq — and its equal failure to tame Israel’s excesses — has encouraged Turkey to emerge from its pro-American straitjacket and assert itself as a powerful independent actor at the heart of a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The Turks like to say that whereas Iran and Israel are revisionist powers, arousing anxiety and even fear by their expansionism and their challenge to existing power structures, Turkey is a stabilizing power, intent on spreading peace and security far and wide.
Turkey is extending its influence by diplomacy rather than force. It is also forging economic ties with its neighbors, and has offered to mediate in several persistent regional conflicts. It has, however, not hesitated to use force to quell the guerrillas of the PKK, a rebel movement fighting for Kurdish independence.
But even here, Turkey is now using a softer approach. The rebels have been offered an amnesty and Turkey’s influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has this past week paid a visit — the first of its kind — to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. There is even talk of Turkey opening a consulate in Erbil.
In recent years, Turkey’s diplomacy has scored many successes, winning great popularity in the Arab world and strengthening Turkey’s hand in its bid to join the European Union. Some people would go so far as to argue that there is no future for Turkey without the E.U., and no future for the E.U. without Turkey.
Turkey’s dynamic multi-directional foreign policy started to take shape when the Justice and Development party, or AKP, came to power in 2002 under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, now president of the Turkish Republic. These men are rightly considered to be conservative and moderately Islamic — their wives wear headscarves — but they are careful to stress that they have no ambition to create an Islamic state. Turkey’s population may be largely Muslim, but the state itself is secular, democratic, capitalist and close to both the West and the Arab and Muslim world. Indeed, Turkey sees itself as a bridge, vital to both.
Ahmet Davutoglu is credited with providing the theoretical framework for Turkey’s new foreign policy. He was Mr. Erdogan’s principal adviser before being promoted foreign minister.
Two visits in October illustrate Turkey’s activisim. Prime Minister Erdogan, accompanied by nine ministers and an Airbus full of businessmen, visited Baghdad, where he held a session with the Iraq government and signed no fewer than 48 memoranda in the fields of commerce, energy, water, security, the environment and so forth.
At much the same time, Foreign Minister Davutoglu was in Aleppo, where he signed agreements with Syria’s foreign minister, Walid al-Muallim, of which perhaps the most important was the removal of visas, allowing for a free flow of people across their common border.
Turkey also broke new ground in October by signing two protocols with Armenia, providing for the restoration of diplomatic relations and the opening of the border between them. Not surprisingly, Turkey’s ally Azerbaijan has strongly objected to this development, since it is locked in conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated pocket of Azerbaijan occupied by Armenian forces.
Indeed, Turkey’s protocols with Armenia are unlikely to be fully implemented until Armenia withdraws from at least some of the districts surrounding Karabakh — but, at the very least, a historic start has been made toward Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
From the Arab point of view, the most dramatic development has undoubtedly been the cooling of Turkey’s relations with Israel. The relationship has been damaged by the outrage felt by many Turks at Israel’s cruel oppression of the Palestinians, which reached its peak with the Gaza War.
Even before the assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Erdogan — a strong supporter of the Palestine cause — did not hesitate to describe some of Israel’s brutal actions as “state terrorism.” A total breach between the two countries is unlikely, but relations are unlikely to recover their earlier warmth so long as Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, remain in power.
Underpinning Turkey’s diplomacy is its central role as an energy hub linking oil and gas producers in Russia and Central Asia with energy-hungry markets in Europe.
One way and another, a resurgent Turkey is rewriting the rules of the power game in the Middle East in a positive and non-confrontational manner. This is one of the few bright spots in a turbulent and highly inflammable Middle East.
Patrick Seale is the author of “The Struggle for Syria,” “Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East” and “Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.” Agence Global
Reproduced from the NY Times: The Rise and Rise of Turkey
Thursday, 24 September 2009
'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul
By Roger Hardy
Middle East analyst
Ertugrul Osman - the would-be sultan known in Turkey as the "last Ottoman" - has died in Istanbul at the age of 97.
Osman would have been sultan of the Ottoman Empire had Turkey's modern republic not been created in the 1920s.
As the last surviving grandson of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, he would have been known as his Imperial Highness Prince Shehzade Ertugrul Osman Effendi.
Born in Istanbul in 1912, Osman spent most of his years living modestly in New York.
Source: BBC News, 'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul
Middle East analyst
Ertugrul Osman - the would-be sultan known in Turkey as the "last Ottoman" - has died in Istanbul at the age of 97.
Osman would have been sultan of the Ottoman Empire had Turkey's modern republic not been created in the 1920s.
As the last surviving grandson of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II, he would have been known as his Imperial Highness Prince Shehzade Ertugrul Osman Effendi.
Born in Istanbul in 1912, Osman spent most of his years living modestly in New York.
Source: BBC News, 'Last Ottoman' dies in Istanbul
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
The world through the eyes of Pîrî Reis and Kâtip Çelebi
A collection of Ottoman-era maps from the great Ottoman Turkish cartographers of the 16th and 17th centuries -- Admiral Pîrî Reis and scholar Kâtip Çelebi -- is currently on display at İstanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace Art Gallery.
The show is a tribute to Kâtip Çelebi, the well-known 17th century historian, geographer and bibliographer, on the 400th anniversary of his birth, which is being marked across Turkey throughout the year as part of the 2009 Year of Kâtip Çelebi announced by the Turkish commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
“The Ottomans' Worldview: from Pîrî Reis to Kâtip Çelebi” includes detailed maps from the two prominent men who made some of the most important contributions to Ottoman geography and cartography together with works from other geographers from the same era.
The exhibition, organized by the İstanbul-based Bahçeşehir University Civilization Studies Center (MEDAM), aims to show the perspective of the Ottoman Empire from 1650 to 1660, MEDAM President Bekir Karlıağa explained in a recent interview with Today's Zaman. “Maps reveal the knowledge and technology of the period, and we thought showcasing them rather than adding our own interpretations or comments would be better,” he said, adding that this way the exhibit's viewers can come to their own conclusions.
The world maps of Pîrî Reis and his book “Kitab-ı Bahriye,” which he presented to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1526, are the most important 16th century Ottoman naval and cartographic works, Professor Karlıağa explained. “Even though they are prepared in a traditional style, the works of Pîrî Reis are portolan charts based on his personal experiences, observations and earlier maps from the East and West. Although they lack longitude and latitude lines, they are as precise as scientific maps for practical naval purposes since they have a projection center and are adjusted for variation,” Karlıağa said.
Kâtip Çelebi's work marked the beginning of the transition from traditional geographical methods to a more scientific study, Karlıağa said. Kâtip Çelebi's best known work is the “Kashf al-zunu-n ‘an asa-mi- al-kutub wa-al-funu-n” (The Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and the Sciences), a bibliographic encyclopedia written in Arabic, listing around 14,500 books in alphabetical order. This work served as a basis for the "Bibliothèque Orientale" by Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville.
Karlıağa added that it is fitting that 2009 has been declared the year of Kâtip Çelebi. “He was one of the most important Turkish-Muslim scholars of the 17th century, and this was because he was a multi-talented man. He studied many different branches of thought, including history, geography, music, arts, philosophy, law, mysticism and Islamic theology,” he noted.
The show also features maps from other geographers of the 16th and 17th centuries as well as maps of Ottoman territories from various European geographers of the time.
The show's İstanbul run at the Dolmabahçe Palace Art Gallery wraps up tomorrow, but it is slated to travel other locations in Turkey and abroad, including Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, Antalya, Adana, and Kayseri as well as California, New York, Paris, Aix en-Provence, Tashkent and Damascus this year. Conferences on the work of Kâtip Çelebi will be held to accompany the show.
The exhibition is part of MEDAM's series of cultural events to mark the year of Kâtip Çelebi. The cartographer's complete works will be translated into modern Turkish, and his famous world atlas, “Cihannüma,” will be translated into English. An international conference on Kâtip Çelebi, with 30 scholars from around the world expected to participate, is scheduled for June 19-20 at the Ankara State Painting and Sculpture Museum.
16 June 2009, Tuesday
RUMEYSA KIGER İSTANBUL
The show is a tribute to Kâtip Çelebi, the well-known 17th century historian, geographer and bibliographer, on the 400th anniversary of his birth, which is being marked across Turkey throughout the year as part of the 2009 Year of Kâtip Çelebi announced by the Turkish commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
“The Ottomans' Worldview: from Pîrî Reis to Kâtip Çelebi” includes detailed maps from the two prominent men who made some of the most important contributions to Ottoman geography and cartography together with works from other geographers from the same era.
The exhibition, organized by the İstanbul-based Bahçeşehir University Civilization Studies Center (MEDAM), aims to show the perspective of the Ottoman Empire from 1650 to 1660, MEDAM President Bekir Karlıağa explained in a recent interview with Today's Zaman. “Maps reveal the knowledge and technology of the period, and we thought showcasing them rather than adding our own interpretations or comments would be better,” he said, adding that this way the exhibit's viewers can come to their own conclusions.
The world maps of Pîrî Reis and his book “Kitab-ı Bahriye,” which he presented to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1526, are the most important 16th century Ottoman naval and cartographic works, Professor Karlıağa explained. “Even though they are prepared in a traditional style, the works of Pîrî Reis are portolan charts based on his personal experiences, observations and earlier maps from the East and West. Although they lack longitude and latitude lines, they are as precise as scientific maps for practical naval purposes since they have a projection center and are adjusted for variation,” Karlıağa said.
Kâtip Çelebi's work marked the beginning of the transition from traditional geographical methods to a more scientific study, Karlıağa said. Kâtip Çelebi's best known work is the “Kashf al-zunu-n ‘an asa-mi- al-kutub wa-al-funu-n” (The Removal of Doubt from the Names of Books and the Sciences), a bibliographic encyclopedia written in Arabic, listing around 14,500 books in alphabetical order. This work served as a basis for the "Bibliothèque Orientale" by Barthélemy d'Herbelot de Molainville.
Karlıağa added that it is fitting that 2009 has been declared the year of Kâtip Çelebi. “He was one of the most important Turkish-Muslim scholars of the 17th century, and this was because he was a multi-talented man. He studied many different branches of thought, including history, geography, music, arts, philosophy, law, mysticism and Islamic theology,” he noted.
The show also features maps from other geographers of the 16th and 17th centuries as well as maps of Ottoman territories from various European geographers of the time.
The show's İstanbul run at the Dolmabahçe Palace Art Gallery wraps up tomorrow, but it is slated to travel other locations in Turkey and abroad, including Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, Antalya, Adana, and Kayseri as well as California, New York, Paris, Aix en-Provence, Tashkent and Damascus this year. Conferences on the work of Kâtip Çelebi will be held to accompany the show.
The exhibition is part of MEDAM's series of cultural events to mark the year of Kâtip Çelebi. The cartographer's complete works will be translated into modern Turkish, and his famous world atlas, “Cihannüma,” will be translated into English. An international conference on Kâtip Çelebi, with 30 scholars from around the world expected to participate, is scheduled for June 19-20 at the Ankara State Painting and Sculpture Museum.
16 June 2009, Tuesday
RUMEYSA KIGER İSTANBUL
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Turkey fined for failing to protect woman
ISTANBUL // In a debut that was inglorious but could yet turn out to be a watershed for women’s rights in this country, Turkey this week became the first member state of the Council of Europe to have been convicted by the Council’s court for failing to protect a woman from violent abuse by her former husband.
In the verdict, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ordered Turkey to pay a total of €36,500 (Dh187,748) in damages and expenses to Nahide Opuz, 37, from the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey’s south-east. The court ruled unanimously that Turkey’s judiciary and police had failed to protect Mrs Opuz from repeated assaults and threats by her former husband, Huseyin Opuz, despite numerous pleas for help by Mrs Opuz and despite the fact that Opuz killed her mother to prevent the two women from fleeing.
“I want to see an end to violence against women and I want the state, the judiciary and the police to take it seriously,” Mrs Opuz said through her lawyer, Mesut Bestas. Mrs Opuz still feels threatened by her former husband and does not want to speak to the media herself, Mr Bestas said in a telephone interview. She wants to lead a “free life, far away from worries”, the lawyer quoted her as saying. Mr Bestas said his client had not received police protection.
Click here to find out more!
According to a statement by the Strasbourg court, the couple got married in 1995. They had three children. Soon after the wedding, Mrs Opuz said she and her mother were beaten and threatened by her husband. Opuz was repeatedly remanded in custody, but always released. Charges against him were dropped when the two women withdrew their complaints, apparently under pressure from Opuz, the court said.
Although Mrs Opuz and her mother told the authorities their lives were in danger and although Opuz was repeatedly questioned over the years, he was never held in custody for a long period. In Oct 2001 he stabbed his wife seven times with a knife and in March 2002 he shot and killed his mother-in-law as the two women were preparing to run away. He told police “his honour had been at stake”, the court said. He was later convicted of murder, but he was again released pending an appeal. Mrs Opuz filed for divorce after the killing.
Seven years after Mrs Opuz first applied to Strasbourg, the court ruled that Turkey’s judiciary and police had ignored the fact that “further violence, indeed a lethal attack, had not only been possible but even foreseeable”. Rejecting Turkey’s argument that Mrs Opuz had withdrawn her complaints several times, the court said that given the husband’s history of violence, authorities should have made sure “that the prosecution continue in the public interest”.
In one of the most damning passages of the verdict, the court accused Turkish authorities of “passive” behaviour. Judicial decisions “had been ineffective and even disclosed a certain degree of tolerance” towards the violence against the two women, the court said. As a member of the Council of Europe, an organisation of 47-member countries founded in 1949 to develop and uphold democratic and human rights principles, Turkey is obliged to abide by the rulings from Strasbourg.
The verdict and the public humiliation for Turkey, a country that sees itself as a modern republic with equal rights for men and women but is plagued by high rates of domestic violence, made front-page news throughout the country. According to a government-sponsored study released this year, four out of 10 women in Turkey say they are victims of physical domestic violence.
The decision of the seven-judge panel in Strasbourg was like a “slap in the face” for Turkey, the Yeni Safak newspaper said. Canan Arin, a lawyer specialising in cases of domestic violence, said she was happy about the verdict, but felt ashamed at the same time. “I am ashamed because the Turkish republic is a country that does not attach great value to human life, to the life of women,” she told the NTV news channel.
Pinar Ilkkaracan, a founding member of the Association for Human Rights for Women – New Solutions, a pressure group, told NTV the verdict had the potential to change the way Turkish authorities deal with cases of domestic violence. “Women who experience such a [violent] behaviour and are confronted with indifference when they turn to the authorities now have a weapon in their hands.”
Remziye Tanrikulu, a women’s rights lawyer in Mrs Opuz’s hometown of Diyarbakir, also said the Strasbourg verdict was a “very important decision”. Speaking in a telephone interview, Mrs Tanrikulu said Turkey had improved its laws against domestic violence, but there were problems with the application of these laws. “After this decision, there is pressure from Strasbourg,” she said. The justice ministry in Ankara started an inquiry to establish what went wrong in the case of Mrs Opuz, newspapers reported yesterday.
But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, criticised the verdict. The decision was “shameful”, Mr Erdogan told NTV in a live interview yesterday. He said it was wrong for the court to condemn the whole of Turkey for a single case and that Turkey’s law enforcement agency was trying to fight domestic violence. “We have laws,” he said, adding that no country could guarantee the safety of its citizens “100 per cent”.
As the debate continued, Turkish media yesterday reported another suspected case of deadly domestic violence. Fadile Karatoprak, 23, from the capital Ankara, was found strangled in her house, the reports said. Mrs Karatoprak had divorced her husband shortly before her death. Her three-year-old son was reported to have told police that “my mum was killed by my dad”.
In the verdict, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, ordered Turkey to pay a total of €36,500 (Dh187,748) in damages and expenses to Nahide Opuz, 37, from the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey’s south-east. The court ruled unanimously that Turkey’s judiciary and police had failed to protect Mrs Opuz from repeated assaults and threats by her former husband, Huseyin Opuz, despite numerous pleas for help by Mrs Opuz and despite the fact that Opuz killed her mother to prevent the two women from fleeing.
“I want to see an end to violence against women and I want the state, the judiciary and the police to take it seriously,” Mrs Opuz said through her lawyer, Mesut Bestas. Mrs Opuz still feels threatened by her former husband and does not want to speak to the media herself, Mr Bestas said in a telephone interview. She wants to lead a “free life, far away from worries”, the lawyer quoted her as saying. Mr Bestas said his client had not received police protection.
Click here to find out more!
According to a statement by the Strasbourg court, the couple got married in 1995. They had three children. Soon after the wedding, Mrs Opuz said she and her mother were beaten and threatened by her husband. Opuz was repeatedly remanded in custody, but always released. Charges against him were dropped when the two women withdrew their complaints, apparently under pressure from Opuz, the court said.
Although Mrs Opuz and her mother told the authorities their lives were in danger and although Opuz was repeatedly questioned over the years, he was never held in custody for a long period. In Oct 2001 he stabbed his wife seven times with a knife and in March 2002 he shot and killed his mother-in-law as the two women were preparing to run away. He told police “his honour had been at stake”, the court said. He was later convicted of murder, but he was again released pending an appeal. Mrs Opuz filed for divorce after the killing.
Seven years after Mrs Opuz first applied to Strasbourg, the court ruled that Turkey’s judiciary and police had ignored the fact that “further violence, indeed a lethal attack, had not only been possible but even foreseeable”. Rejecting Turkey’s argument that Mrs Opuz had withdrawn her complaints several times, the court said that given the husband’s history of violence, authorities should have made sure “that the prosecution continue in the public interest”.
In one of the most damning passages of the verdict, the court accused Turkish authorities of “passive” behaviour. Judicial decisions “had been ineffective and even disclosed a certain degree of tolerance” towards the violence against the two women, the court said. As a member of the Council of Europe, an organisation of 47-member countries founded in 1949 to develop and uphold democratic and human rights principles, Turkey is obliged to abide by the rulings from Strasbourg.
The verdict and the public humiliation for Turkey, a country that sees itself as a modern republic with equal rights for men and women but is plagued by high rates of domestic violence, made front-page news throughout the country. According to a government-sponsored study released this year, four out of 10 women in Turkey say they are victims of physical domestic violence.
The decision of the seven-judge panel in Strasbourg was like a “slap in the face” for Turkey, the Yeni Safak newspaper said. Canan Arin, a lawyer specialising in cases of domestic violence, said she was happy about the verdict, but felt ashamed at the same time. “I am ashamed because the Turkish republic is a country that does not attach great value to human life, to the life of women,” she told the NTV news channel.
Pinar Ilkkaracan, a founding member of the Association for Human Rights for Women – New Solutions, a pressure group, told NTV the verdict had the potential to change the way Turkish authorities deal with cases of domestic violence. “Women who experience such a [violent] behaviour and are confronted with indifference when they turn to the authorities now have a weapon in their hands.”
Remziye Tanrikulu, a women’s rights lawyer in Mrs Opuz’s hometown of Diyarbakir, also said the Strasbourg verdict was a “very important decision”. Speaking in a telephone interview, Mrs Tanrikulu said Turkey had improved its laws against domestic violence, but there were problems with the application of these laws. “After this decision, there is pressure from Strasbourg,” she said. The justice ministry in Ankara started an inquiry to establish what went wrong in the case of Mrs Opuz, newspapers reported yesterday.
But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, criticised the verdict. The decision was “shameful”, Mr Erdogan told NTV in a live interview yesterday. He said it was wrong for the court to condemn the whole of Turkey for a single case and that Turkey’s law enforcement agency was trying to fight domestic violence. “We have laws,” he said, adding that no country could guarantee the safety of its citizens “100 per cent”.
As the debate continued, Turkish media yesterday reported another suspected case of deadly domestic violence. Fadile Karatoprak, 23, from the capital Ankara, was found strangled in her house, the reports said. Mrs Karatoprak had divorced her husband shortly before her death. Her three-year-old son was reported to have told police that “my mum was killed by my dad”.
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
The Ottoman Revival
By Yigal Schleifer
Turkish nationalism goes back to the future.
One clear day in February, when Ali Babacan visited Yemen, his hosts brought him to a centuries-old, mud-brick building outside Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. There, about a dozen tribal leaders were waiting for the Turkish foreign minister with curved daggers drawn. If Babacan was at first startled, he soon realized that he was being greeted in a way once reserved for newly arrived Ottoman governors—complete with drums and a traditional dance that had probably not been performed for a Turkish official in almost a century.
Not so long ago, top Turkish officials didn’t bother to visit Yemen, or for that matter most other countries in the Middle East. In the nearly 90 years since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, its leaders have tended to equate the East with backwardness, and the West with modernity—and so focused their gaze primarily on Europe. Meanwhile, Arab countries, once ruled by sultans from Istanbul, looked upon Turkey with a mixture of suspicion and defensive resentment.
Today that’s changing. Not only is Turkey sending emissaries throughout the region, but a new vogue for all things Turkish has emerged in neighboring countries. The Turkish soap opera Noor, picked up by the Saudi-owned MBC satellite network and dubbed in Arabic, became a runaway hit, reaching some 85 million viewers across the Middle East. Many of the growing number of tourists from Arab countries visiting Istanbul are making pilgrimages to locations featured in the show. In February, Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab newspaper based in London, took note of changing attitudes in a widely circulated column, “The Return of the Ottoman Empire?”
This new mood started at home. Since it first came to power seven years ago, Turkey’s government, led by the liberal-Islamic Justice and Development Party, has taken a different approach to its role in the region. The mastermind of this turnaround—“neo-Ottomanism,” as some in Turkey and the Middle East are calling it—has been Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister’s chief foreign-policy advisor. In his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, he argued that in running away from its historical ties in the region, Turkey was also running away from political and economic opportunity. His strategy has paid off, literally, for Turkey. Trade with the country’s eight nearest neighbors—including Syria, Iran, and Iraq—nearly doubled between 2005 and 2008, going from $7.3 billion to $14.3 billion. And, from being on the verge of war with Syria a decade ago, Ankara is now among Damascus’s closest allies in the region.
The Ottoman past is also in the air in Turkey. At a recent government rally, one enthusiastic supporter unfurled a banner proclaiming the prime minister “the last sultan.” Moviegoers have been flocking to see a new spate of Ottoman-themed films, from The Last Ottoman, an action flick set during World War I, to Ottoman Republic, a comedy imagining daily life in modern Turkey if the sultans were still in charge.
Istanbul’s newest cultural attraction is the municipal-run Panorama 1453 History Museum, a granite-clad building just outside the city’s ancient walls that tells the story of the Ottomans’ conquest of Byzantine Constantinople. In the gift shop, visitors can buy everything from cuff links emblazoned with the sultans’ seal to a 1,000-piece puzzle showing Mehmet the Conqueror entering Constantinople on horseback.
On a recent visit, I met a group of head-scarved women who were taking in the sights and sounds of the museum’s main exhibit: a circular diorama depicting Mehmet the Conqueror’s victorious final assault on Constantinople’s walls. “This is beautiful, most beautiful,” said one 28-year-old schoolteacher with a big smile, as the sound of thunderous cannon fire played in the background. “We must know our history.”
Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. Yet for much of the last century, it has meant rejecting the country’s Ottoman history. Today it means claiming it.
Turkish nationalism goes back to the future.
One clear day in February, when Ali Babacan visited Yemen, his hosts brought him to a centuries-old, mud-brick building outside Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. There, about a dozen tribal leaders were waiting for the Turkish foreign minister with curved daggers drawn. If Babacan was at first startled, he soon realized that he was being greeted in a way once reserved for newly arrived Ottoman governors—complete with drums and a traditional dance that had probably not been performed for a Turkish official in almost a century.
Not so long ago, top Turkish officials didn’t bother to visit Yemen, or for that matter most other countries in the Middle East. In the nearly 90 years since the founding of the modern Turkish Republic, its leaders have tended to equate the East with backwardness, and the West with modernity—and so focused their gaze primarily on Europe. Meanwhile, Arab countries, once ruled by sultans from Istanbul, looked upon Turkey with a mixture of suspicion and defensive resentment.
Today that’s changing. Not only is Turkey sending emissaries throughout the region, but a new vogue for all things Turkish has emerged in neighboring countries. The Turkish soap opera Noor, picked up by the Saudi-owned MBC satellite network and dubbed in Arabic, became a runaway hit, reaching some 85 million viewers across the Middle East. Many of the growing number of tourists from Arab countries visiting Istanbul are making pilgrimages to locations featured in the show. In February, Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab newspaper based in London, took note of changing attitudes in a widely circulated column, “The Return of the Ottoman Empire?”
This new mood started at home. Since it first came to power seven years ago, Turkey’s government, led by the liberal-Islamic Justice and Development Party, has taken a different approach to its role in the region. The mastermind of this turnaround—“neo-Ottomanism,” as some in Turkey and the Middle East are calling it—has been Ahmet Davutoglu, the Turkish prime minister’s chief foreign-policy advisor. In his 2001 book, Strategic Depth, he argued that in running away from its historical ties in the region, Turkey was also running away from political and economic opportunity. His strategy has paid off, literally, for Turkey. Trade with the country’s eight nearest neighbors—including Syria, Iran, and Iraq—nearly doubled between 2005 and 2008, going from $7.3 billion to $14.3 billion. And, from being on the verge of war with Syria a decade ago, Ankara is now among Damascus’s closest allies in the region.
The Ottoman past is also in the air in Turkey. At a recent government rally, one enthusiastic supporter unfurled a banner proclaiming the prime minister “the last sultan.” Moviegoers have been flocking to see a new spate of Ottoman-themed films, from The Last Ottoman, an action flick set during World War I, to Ottoman Republic, a comedy imagining daily life in modern Turkey if the sultans were still in charge.
Istanbul’s newest cultural attraction is the municipal-run Panorama 1453 History Museum, a granite-clad building just outside the city’s ancient walls that tells the story of the Ottomans’ conquest of Byzantine Constantinople. In the gift shop, visitors can buy everything from cuff links emblazoned with the sultans’ seal to a 1,000-piece puzzle showing Mehmet the Conqueror entering Constantinople on horseback.
On a recent visit, I met a group of head-scarved women who were taking in the sights and sounds of the museum’s main exhibit: a circular diorama depicting Mehmet the Conqueror’s victorious final assault on Constantinople’s walls. “This is beautiful, most beautiful,” said one 28-year-old schoolteacher with a big smile, as the sound of thunderous cannon fire played in the background. “We must know our history.”
Nationalism is nothing new in Turkey. Yet for much of the last century, it has meant rejecting the country’s Ottoman history. Today it means claiming it.
Saturday, 2 May 2009
The Return of the Ottoman Empire?
By Mshari Al-Zaydi
A Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page Editor, where he also contributes a weekly column. Has worked for the local Saudi press occupying several posts at Al -Madina newspaper amongst others. He has been a guest on numerous news and current affairs programs as an expert on Islamic extremism.
The only way one can explain the heated return of “Ottoman” Turkey to the Middle East quagmire is as the setting up of a suitable position for the Turkish Fez in the new Middle East division.
This is what some Turkish intellects have argued according to Serkan Taflioglu, a researcher of Middle East affairs at ASAM, the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies in Ankara. “Heated Turkish political movements dealing with Middle East issues, which have increased over the past few months, are based on the Turkish belief that the future of developments in the Middle East will depend, to a large extent, on the kind of relationship that exists between Iran and the US over the next couple of years,” said Taflioglu. Moreover, he indicated that Turkey’s deep involvement is motivated by Ankara’s desire to assume its natural role in the region in accordance with its power and interests. But as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan speaks about the children in Gaza who are being slaughtered, we know that feelings alone are not the driving force behind political activity.
Turkey is now turning towards its Ottoman past after neglecting it for so long; not in order to restore its former glories as some naïve and nostalgic supporters of Islamic parties might believe, but rather to establish an effective presence for the Turkish state that suits its historical, political and economic significance in the region.
Iran ventured into Arab affairs at an early stage, ever since the Khomeini revolution. This revolutionary fervor died down for a while due to the outbreak of war between the Khomeini state and the Baath state of Iraq. That was followed by the Rafsanjani and Khatami eras, before blatant Iranian penetration of Arab issues such as Palestine and Lebanon began to take place during the reign of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s role in the region increased and the Arabs could not keep up with Iran’s craftiness and Tehran’s skillful political maneuvering.
Turkey noticed how Iran’s early involvement in Iraq had achieved gains for it on the ground and how that had created a central political power that was so firmly linked to Iran. In other words, Iran’s bold venture into Iraqi affairs forced the US and the Arabs to acknowledge its role in the region. Iran continued to follow this approach in Lebanon and Palestine and today we are seeing the results: Hezbollah’s indirect rule over Lebanon by virtue of Iranian backing and a similar situation in the Palestinian territories. Furthermore, we know nothing about other Iranian schemes in the Gulf region, Yemen or North Africa.
The game proved to be a real advantage to Iran, so it decided to liquefy its old political investments in Lebanon and Palestine as the world watched the inauguration of the new US administration, which says that it is different to the former Bush administration and that it is willing to listen to everyone without imposing America’s visions upon others.
Like Iran, Turkey has an imperialistic past in our region. The only empire that contended with Ottoman Turkey over power in the region was Safavid Iran. Ferocious battles took place in the ruthless confrontation between the Ottomans and the Safavids, and Iraq itself was one of their battlefields. Baghdad fell under the rule of the Safavid Persian Shah and then would be conquered by the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Much of the vehement sectarianism that we witness today is a product of that ancient and fierce imperialistic conflict between Iran and Turkey, or the Safavids and the Ottomans, or the Sunnis and the Shia. In the end however, it was a confrontation in which the Arabs did not play a fundamental role; they were marginal to the situation.
The Arab masses have demonstrated support for Erdogan and it is most likely that they are the same people who live on Muslim Brotherhood dogmas or those who have been impressed by them. This support increases whenever the public remembers that Erdogan reminded Israel that he is a descendant of the Ottomans. When we hear this, our minds run wild and we conjure up the image of Mehmet II the Conqueror returning to the gates of Tel Aviv and the return of the Ottoman Sultan. We imagine that Erdogan has awoken Turkey from its deep sleep and hoisted the flag of the Ottomans once again. All these dreams, which our fellow citizens in our Arab countries use to heal their wounds, do not necessarily represent the objectives of Turkey, the NATO member state, which is pushing to be part of the European Union. These dreams do not necessarily represent the secular state that is ruled by regulations of a strict secular constitution and guarded by generals who see themselves as the guardians of the Ataturk structure.
The intensity of support for Erdogan, the new Ottoman Sultan, reached its peak after the incident that took place at the Davos Economic Forum when he addressed the Israeli President Shimon Peres and walked out of the session in a dignified manner, returning to Istanbul as a conqueror. Such support of course is supposed to have some kind of effect on the “weak” Arabs so that they may take a stand just like Erdogan.
The truth is that Erdogan did not adopt an actual stance that could count as a political measure. He took a stand that would be popular with the masses. To take a real stand would result in achieving concrete political, military and security gains on the ground; embodied in agreements through acts of negotiation. This is what is happening at present in Cairo between Hamas and Israel through Egyptian mediation, which could also pave the way for inter-Palestinian reconciliation under the sponsorship of Egypt. However, it is difficult to imagine reconciliation whilst Hamas relies heavily upon the Syrian-Iranian camp.
Speaking of Syria, the interview that President Bashar al Assad gave to Al Manar television was an important interview that followed the Kuwait Summit where there was a reconciliatory atmosphere initiated by Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz during the summit itself. But the King’s initiative was not well-received; in the interview, President al Assad stressed the importance of Syrian-Turkish ties as well as the importance of Syrian-Iranian ties.
Are we facing a semi-objective coalition in the region at the expense of all Arab countries (except Syria) that consists of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Israel, all struggling to control war and peace? Iran is aggravating the issue so as to further strengthen its position and force the USA, the international community and the Arabs in the region not to make it give up the power that it has gained.
Turkey, which woke up recently, wants to partake in the power struggle, according to Serkan Taflioglu who said that Turkey is busy trying to understand the new agreement in the region whereas Israel, as usual, wants to maintain its power in the region. As for Syria, it believes that the smart thing to do would be to abandon the Arab ship and seek shelter in Iran or Turkey to protect it from the region’s flooding waters.
Turkey believes that it is more capable than Iran to deal with the issues of Palestine and Lebanon firstly because it is also a predominantly Sunni country and secondly because of its nostalgia for the Ottoman state. Such longing is continually backed by the Muslim Brotherhood and some fundamentalist parties. However, this longing does not exist amongst nationalist movements or the Levant Arabs, or perhaps the Salafists of the Arab Peninsula who do not have fond memories of the Turkish Ottoman oppression.
The Muslim Brotherhood says that the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey is one of the reasons that it exists (Saad Hawi, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood figure, in his book entitled ‘Hedi Tajribati wa Hedi Shahadati’, p37).
Because of long-standing nostalgia, the ailment of political legitimacy that they believe has been absent since the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, the antagonism with Arab countries, and Iran’s attack on Arab countries that oppose the radical Iranian bloc, we now see the Brotherhood exaggerating its praise of Erdogan after it failed to publicize Khamanei and Ahmadinejad in the Arab world because of the sensitive issue of sectarianism, which is a fundamental part of the ailing culture in the region.
Nevertheless, we must admit that Turkey is different to Iran; it is not a fundamentalist state. This is why the Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sought to remind everyone of Turkey’s secularism with the demand that Hamas becomes a pure political movement if it wants Turkey’s support. These all are messages to the West in order to maintain its trust.
“Turkey is a NATO ally and will not cut ties with Israel,” which would be reckless according to Babacan. But Erdogan is taking such action so as to activate Turkey’s new role. Israel will not be harmed by this. Peres had a friendly chat with Erdogan soon after the “Davos incident” during which the two men reiterated the friendly relations between Turkey and Israel.
Nobody would disagree with Erdogan’s comments on the children of Gaza because what happened in the Gaza Strip was an awful crime. But it seems that his comments had also provoked those suffering from the anger of the Turks such as the Turkish Kurds who need Erdogan to show more humanity towards them. Emine Ayna, Co-Chairperson of the Democratic Society Party was quoted saying, “Erdogan also knows how to kill, and the only nation that can say to Peres that he knows well how to kill children and women is the Kurdish nation because it is being killed by bombs,” according to the Lebanese As-Safir Newspaper.
The question remains however; where do the Arab countries fit in to this political bazaar that is now being set up?
A Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page Editor, where he also contributes a weekly column. Has worked for the local Saudi press occupying several posts at Al -Madina newspaper amongst others. He has been a guest on numerous news and current affairs programs as an expert on Islamic extremism.
The only way one can explain the heated return of “Ottoman” Turkey to the Middle East quagmire is as the setting up of a suitable position for the Turkish Fez in the new Middle East division.
This is what some Turkish intellects have argued according to Serkan Taflioglu, a researcher of Middle East affairs at ASAM, the Center for Eurasian Strategic Studies in Ankara. “Heated Turkish political movements dealing with Middle East issues, which have increased over the past few months, are based on the Turkish belief that the future of developments in the Middle East will depend, to a large extent, on the kind of relationship that exists between Iran and the US over the next couple of years,” said Taflioglu. Moreover, he indicated that Turkey’s deep involvement is motivated by Ankara’s desire to assume its natural role in the region in accordance with its power and interests. But as Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan speaks about the children in Gaza who are being slaughtered, we know that feelings alone are not the driving force behind political activity.
Turkey is now turning towards its Ottoman past after neglecting it for so long; not in order to restore its former glories as some naïve and nostalgic supporters of Islamic parties might believe, but rather to establish an effective presence for the Turkish state that suits its historical, political and economic significance in the region.
Iran ventured into Arab affairs at an early stage, ever since the Khomeini revolution. This revolutionary fervor died down for a while due to the outbreak of war between the Khomeini state and the Baath state of Iraq. That was followed by the Rafsanjani and Khatami eras, before blatant Iranian penetration of Arab issues such as Palestine and Lebanon began to take place during the reign of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran’s role in the region increased and the Arabs could not keep up with Iran’s craftiness and Tehran’s skillful political maneuvering.
Turkey noticed how Iran’s early involvement in Iraq had achieved gains for it on the ground and how that had created a central political power that was so firmly linked to Iran. In other words, Iran’s bold venture into Iraqi affairs forced the US and the Arabs to acknowledge its role in the region. Iran continued to follow this approach in Lebanon and Palestine and today we are seeing the results: Hezbollah’s indirect rule over Lebanon by virtue of Iranian backing and a similar situation in the Palestinian territories. Furthermore, we know nothing about other Iranian schemes in the Gulf region, Yemen or North Africa.
The game proved to be a real advantage to Iran, so it decided to liquefy its old political investments in Lebanon and Palestine as the world watched the inauguration of the new US administration, which says that it is different to the former Bush administration and that it is willing to listen to everyone without imposing America’s visions upon others.
Like Iran, Turkey has an imperialistic past in our region. The only empire that contended with Ottoman Turkey over power in the region was Safavid Iran. Ferocious battles took place in the ruthless confrontation between the Ottomans and the Safavids, and Iraq itself was one of their battlefields. Baghdad fell under the rule of the Safavid Persian Shah and then would be conquered by the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Much of the vehement sectarianism that we witness today is a product of that ancient and fierce imperialistic conflict between Iran and Turkey, or the Safavids and the Ottomans, or the Sunnis and the Shia. In the end however, it was a confrontation in which the Arabs did not play a fundamental role; they were marginal to the situation.
The Arab masses have demonstrated support for Erdogan and it is most likely that they are the same people who live on Muslim Brotherhood dogmas or those who have been impressed by them. This support increases whenever the public remembers that Erdogan reminded Israel that he is a descendant of the Ottomans. When we hear this, our minds run wild and we conjure up the image of Mehmet II the Conqueror returning to the gates of Tel Aviv and the return of the Ottoman Sultan. We imagine that Erdogan has awoken Turkey from its deep sleep and hoisted the flag of the Ottomans once again. All these dreams, which our fellow citizens in our Arab countries use to heal their wounds, do not necessarily represent the objectives of Turkey, the NATO member state, which is pushing to be part of the European Union. These dreams do not necessarily represent the secular state that is ruled by regulations of a strict secular constitution and guarded by generals who see themselves as the guardians of the Ataturk structure.
The intensity of support for Erdogan, the new Ottoman Sultan, reached its peak after the incident that took place at the Davos Economic Forum when he addressed the Israeli President Shimon Peres and walked out of the session in a dignified manner, returning to Istanbul as a conqueror. Such support of course is supposed to have some kind of effect on the “weak” Arabs so that they may take a stand just like Erdogan.
The truth is that Erdogan did not adopt an actual stance that could count as a political measure. He took a stand that would be popular with the masses. To take a real stand would result in achieving concrete political, military and security gains on the ground; embodied in agreements through acts of negotiation. This is what is happening at present in Cairo between Hamas and Israel through Egyptian mediation, which could also pave the way for inter-Palestinian reconciliation under the sponsorship of Egypt. However, it is difficult to imagine reconciliation whilst Hamas relies heavily upon the Syrian-Iranian camp.
Speaking of Syria, the interview that President Bashar al Assad gave to Al Manar television was an important interview that followed the Kuwait Summit where there was a reconciliatory atmosphere initiated by Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz during the summit itself. But the King’s initiative was not well-received; in the interview, President al Assad stressed the importance of Syrian-Turkish ties as well as the importance of Syrian-Iranian ties.
Are we facing a semi-objective coalition in the region at the expense of all Arab countries (except Syria) that consists of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Israel, all struggling to control war and peace? Iran is aggravating the issue so as to further strengthen its position and force the USA, the international community and the Arabs in the region not to make it give up the power that it has gained.
Turkey, which woke up recently, wants to partake in the power struggle, according to Serkan Taflioglu who said that Turkey is busy trying to understand the new agreement in the region whereas Israel, as usual, wants to maintain its power in the region. As for Syria, it believes that the smart thing to do would be to abandon the Arab ship and seek shelter in Iran or Turkey to protect it from the region’s flooding waters.
Turkey believes that it is more capable than Iran to deal with the issues of Palestine and Lebanon firstly because it is also a predominantly Sunni country and secondly because of its nostalgia for the Ottoman state. Such longing is continually backed by the Muslim Brotherhood and some fundamentalist parties. However, this longing does not exist amongst nationalist movements or the Levant Arabs, or perhaps the Salafists of the Arab Peninsula who do not have fond memories of the Turkish Ottoman oppression.
The Muslim Brotherhood says that the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey is one of the reasons that it exists (Saad Hawi, a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood figure, in his book entitled ‘Hedi Tajribati wa Hedi Shahadati’, p37).
Because of long-standing nostalgia, the ailment of political legitimacy that they believe has been absent since the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, the antagonism with Arab countries, and Iran’s attack on Arab countries that oppose the radical Iranian bloc, we now see the Brotherhood exaggerating its praise of Erdogan after it failed to publicize Khamanei and Ahmadinejad in the Arab world because of the sensitive issue of sectarianism, which is a fundamental part of the ailing culture in the region.
Nevertheless, we must admit that Turkey is different to Iran; it is not a fundamentalist state. This is why the Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan sought to remind everyone of Turkey’s secularism with the demand that Hamas becomes a pure political movement if it wants Turkey’s support. These all are messages to the West in order to maintain its trust.
“Turkey is a NATO ally and will not cut ties with Israel,” which would be reckless according to Babacan. But Erdogan is taking such action so as to activate Turkey’s new role. Israel will not be harmed by this. Peres had a friendly chat with Erdogan soon after the “Davos incident” during which the two men reiterated the friendly relations between Turkey and Israel.
Nobody would disagree with Erdogan’s comments on the children of Gaza because what happened in the Gaza Strip was an awful crime. But it seems that his comments had also provoked those suffering from the anger of the Turks such as the Turkish Kurds who need Erdogan to show more humanity towards them. Emine Ayna, Co-Chairperson of the Democratic Society Party was quoted saying, “Erdogan also knows how to kill, and the only nation that can say to Peres that he knows well how to kill children and women is the Kurdish nation because it is being killed by bombs,” according to the Lebanese As-Safir Newspaper.
The question remains however; where do the Arab countries fit in to this political bazaar that is now being set up?
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Leaping across the fire to embrace Nevruz
ISTANBUL - Few days of the year have more historical significance than the current turning point on Earth’s orbit: spring equinox. For many people in Turkey and its near abroad, the day is celebrated as a new year holiday and is recognized as the official birth of spring.
Leaping across the fire to embrace Nevruz Turks call it Nevruz, which this year will fall on Monday, March 23, but it is also known as Newruz to the Kurds and many people across the Middle East. It is an ancient holiday based on astronomical calculations. Ancient night-sky observers were experts because it was essential to calculate when plants would appear, when a crop should be sewn and when the ceremonies customarily held on special dates such as the spring equinox should be carried out.
Very little is known about the origins of the celebrations. The first time they appear in historical records is in regard to celebrations in ancient Persia. Even then the roots cannot be determined with any certainty because of earlier civilizations that arose in China and India. It is also known that Incas in ancient Peru celebrated the spring equinox.
Western historians believe that the festival originated with the Zoroastrians who followed a religion and philosophy. The dates for the appearance of this monotheistic religion vary widely from after 330 BC to 6000 BC. However there was a belief among the Persians that this day was the first day of the New Year, hence NawRuz (naw, new; ruz, year) and the belief continues.
One cannot underestimate that significance of this because this seems to be a time of celebration that spread to many other countries in the vicinity of Persia. Nowruz is celebrated in Greater Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia and by Iranians worldwide. It is a public holiday in Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan. Iran also celebrates it as their New Year’s Day.
Additionally the Nowruz is also celebrated by Kurds in Iraq and Turkey and among some of the Alevi groups.
The Turks believe Nevruz originated at the time when their ancestors finally escaped from the mountains of Central Asia. Ergenekon is a legendary place located in the inaccessible valleys of the Altay Mountains where the Turkic peoples were first gathered. [Today it has a far different connotation as it has been applied to an alleged conspiracy of prominent people in Turkey to destabilize the country.] The Kurds consider Nevruz their day of liberation from oppression as expressed in a legend about the evil king Dehaq being overcome by the Blacksmith Kawa who subsequently led the people through Ergenekon Mountain to freedom.
Practices and beliefs
One of the main concepts of Nevruz is the importance of light. It is a victory of a god of light over the powers of darkness, a basic tenet in Zoroastrianism. We see a similar belief in Greek mythology when a god or goddess descends into Hades for three days. Persephone comes to mind, the Greek girl who marries the god of darkness and can leave to return to the surface of the Earth but she mustn’t eat anything. Finally she can’t bear it and eats six pomegranate seeds. From then on she can only stay on the surface for six months and the rest are spent underground.
Zoroaster is supposed to have preached in the royal court of Bactria. He preached that there were two forces in the world, good and evil, and that they were in combat with each other. There was no life at that time but eventually there was and when the cycle of life began it was termed the new day or Nevruz. It is the ceremonial rituals and traditions surrounding this cosmology that form the roots of Nevruz.
How the celebrations were held in the first days is unknown with the exception of lighting bonfires. Leaping across them would be part of a purification ritual in which everyone would be rid of their illnesses or bad luck. They would also demonstrate their bravery and agility at the same time. In addition to that, eggs formed an important part of the rituals with eggs being dyed yellow, green and red. These are the three colors associated with today’s Kurds.
Today lighting bonfires is usually done outside of urban areas to prevent any serious fires breaking out. The festivities might continue over several days starting from the time of the equinox but usually between the 20th and 24th of March. In Iran this occurs over 12 days and in Azerbaijan over four weeks. Since it was related to purification, people would bathe and then put on new clothes; over time bathing as part of the tradition was eliminated but the donning of new clothes continues as it represents freshness and the new.
The cleansing ritual became a serious spring-cleaning as well with almost every household in Persia participating. Then on Nevruz Day, people would put on their new clothes and visit elder members of their families and friends.
Coming to Islam, these celebrations have nothing to do with the Muslim religion but rather are connected with folk traditions. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any thoughts on the issue. Since at the equinox day and night are of equal length, Islamic belief is that was the way the Earth was created and so celebrating the equinox is to celebrate the creation of the Earth. Similarly when Allah started the stars turning, that is considered the New Year and celebrated as such.
Another belief is Nevruz was the day when the Prophet Moses was leading his people out of Egypt
Leaping across the fire to embrace Nevruz Turks call it Nevruz, which this year will fall on Monday, March 23, but it is also known as Newruz to the Kurds and many people across the Middle East. It is an ancient holiday based on astronomical calculations. Ancient night-sky observers were experts because it was essential to calculate when plants would appear, when a crop should be sewn and when the ceremonies customarily held on special dates such as the spring equinox should be carried out.
Very little is known about the origins of the celebrations. The first time they appear in historical records is in regard to celebrations in ancient Persia. Even then the roots cannot be determined with any certainty because of earlier civilizations that arose in China and India. It is also known that Incas in ancient Peru celebrated the spring equinox.
Western historians believe that the festival originated with the Zoroastrians who followed a religion and philosophy. The dates for the appearance of this monotheistic religion vary widely from after 330 BC to 6000 BC. However there was a belief among the Persians that this day was the first day of the New Year, hence NawRuz (naw, new; ruz, year) and the belief continues.
One cannot underestimate that significance of this because this seems to be a time of celebration that spread to many other countries in the vicinity of Persia. Nowruz is celebrated in Greater Iran, Caucasus, Central Asia and by Iranians worldwide. It is a public holiday in Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kashmir and Kyrgyzstan. Iran also celebrates it as their New Year’s Day.
Additionally the Nowruz is also celebrated by Kurds in Iraq and Turkey and among some of the Alevi groups.
The Turks believe Nevruz originated at the time when their ancestors finally escaped from the mountains of Central Asia. Ergenekon is a legendary place located in the inaccessible valleys of the Altay Mountains where the Turkic peoples were first gathered. [Today it has a far different connotation as it has been applied to an alleged conspiracy of prominent people in Turkey to destabilize the country.] The Kurds consider Nevruz their day of liberation from oppression as expressed in a legend about the evil king Dehaq being overcome by the Blacksmith Kawa who subsequently led the people through Ergenekon Mountain to freedom.
Practices and beliefs
One of the main concepts of Nevruz is the importance of light. It is a victory of a god of light over the powers of darkness, a basic tenet in Zoroastrianism. We see a similar belief in Greek mythology when a god or goddess descends into Hades for three days. Persephone comes to mind, the Greek girl who marries the god of darkness and can leave to return to the surface of the Earth but she mustn’t eat anything. Finally she can’t bear it and eats six pomegranate seeds. From then on she can only stay on the surface for six months and the rest are spent underground.
Zoroaster is supposed to have preached in the royal court of Bactria. He preached that there were two forces in the world, good and evil, and that they were in combat with each other. There was no life at that time but eventually there was and when the cycle of life began it was termed the new day or Nevruz. It is the ceremonial rituals and traditions surrounding this cosmology that form the roots of Nevruz.
How the celebrations were held in the first days is unknown with the exception of lighting bonfires. Leaping across them would be part of a purification ritual in which everyone would be rid of their illnesses or bad luck. They would also demonstrate their bravery and agility at the same time. In addition to that, eggs formed an important part of the rituals with eggs being dyed yellow, green and red. These are the three colors associated with today’s Kurds.
Today lighting bonfires is usually done outside of urban areas to prevent any serious fires breaking out. The festivities might continue over several days starting from the time of the equinox but usually between the 20th and 24th of March. In Iran this occurs over 12 days and in Azerbaijan over four weeks. Since it was related to purification, people would bathe and then put on new clothes; over time bathing as part of the tradition was eliminated but the donning of new clothes continues as it represents freshness and the new.
The cleansing ritual became a serious spring-cleaning as well with almost every household in Persia participating. Then on Nevruz Day, people would put on their new clothes and visit elder members of their families and friends.
Coming to Islam, these celebrations have nothing to do with the Muslim religion but rather are connected with folk traditions. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any thoughts on the issue. Since at the equinox day and night are of equal length, Islamic belief is that was the way the Earth was created and so celebrating the equinox is to celebrate the creation of the Earth. Similarly when Allah started the stars turning, that is considered the New Year and celebrated as such.
Another belief is Nevruz was the day when the Prophet Moses was leading his people out of Egypt
Sunday, 15 March 2009
The Turkish publishing sector: Not an industry yet, but getting there
Books are one of the many things in life that we tend to take for granted. They are always simply there, at the library or bookstore, when we need them. Of course, with the advent of Internet shopping, the effect has become even more exaggerated. And yet behind all this lies the world of publishing, and in Turkey this is a world that is just coming into its own.
Though it is not yet large enough to be called an industry in itself, the Turkish publishing sector has witnessed a number of major transformations over the last two decades, according to author and publisher Cem Akaş, from G Yayın Grubu (G Publishing Group). "Its structure and branches still do not function in an efficient and effective way, but things are nonetheless very different from, say, 1995. For one thing, Turkish publishers have gotten much better at keeping up with recent titles that get published in the United States, the UK, France and, to some degree, Germany and Italy. They have also become better at selling their writers abroad. This is thanks to the increased 'visibility' of Turkey, the increased activity of literary agents and, of course, Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize," he explains.
The number of writers going down the road of self-publishing has also increased considerably, Akaş notes. One form of publishing, what Akaş calls "institutional publishing," publishing by corporate conglomerates, particularly private banks, is now "past its heyday." He says, "It is still there, but it is not flourishing anymore."
"The Internet has been warmly embraced by a huge number of budding writers -- a lot is going on there," he continues, concluding, "The general trend is continuing with respect to the constant increase in new publishers, the constant increase in small publishing companies that go under and the constant decrease (as percent of population) in readership."
Emine Eroğlu, the head of the Timaş Publishing House, one of the major publishers in the country, agrees that publishing has reached the level of institutionalization, even if it cannot yet be called an industry. "The fact that it has not completed the process is a disadvantage. Pirate prints are a serious threat for the market. The biggest advantage of European or American publishers, for example, is that they are publishing to the world and selling their books everywhere," Eroğlu says, adding that they are trying to survive off the domestic market alone and that this blocks their growth.
The world publishing industry is like an enormous football game, with the main players being such countries as the US, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain, Nermin Mollaoğlu, from the Kalem Literary Agency, explains. "Sometimes a backup member from India or China plays, but that fashion fades away very quickly," she adds. However, she says Turkey's advantage is that it generally follows a very wide range of high-quality writers from both East and West without being much affected by fluctuations in "fashion."
Bestsellers in Turkey
When it comes to sales figures and bestsellers in Turkey, Mollaoğlu says there is a vacuum in the sector. "I don't trust any of the bestseller lists in Turkey. Internationally, bookstores prepare them according to the books they have sold most in a given week. If you ask most of the bookstores in Turkey how many books they sold today, they could not answer," she complains.
According to Akaş, one of the signs that publishing hasn't reached industry status in Turkey is the lack of dependable numbers. "The numbers we do have are usually of limited use and outline only the broadest trends. Big bookstores such as D&R, Remzi and İnkılap have their own bestseller lists, and online bookstores keep their own, but there are huge variations among them," he says, noting that they usually have to make do with a general sense of what is selling best at any given time and that pirate editions are usually a good indicator, even though they have been known to misjudge demand at times.
Eroğlu, on the other hand, argues that there are no real "trust issues" with the existing figures. The problem is that only a few bookstores participate in them. "In order to get more accurate numbers, a lot more bookstores should be included, together with Internet sales," she suggests.
Turkish literature goes international
Turkish literature has gained some international notoriety in recent years, particularly as a result of the selection of novelist Orhan Pamuk for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 and of Turkey as the guest of honor at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair. However, it is still very difficult for Turkish writers to get their work published in foreign languages.
"We have to have perfect translations, but the translation business is very expensive and requires a lot of effort," Eroğlu explains. But she adds that with hard work and sufficient investments of time and money, success can be achieved, as the Timaş Publishing House has seen in recent years.
In 2008 the Kalem Agency alone sold the copyrights to 153 Turkish books for publication in other languages, Mollaoğlu says. "Even this number is an indicator that the situation is going well. The Frankfurt Book Fair and the Nobel Prize are, of course, very important, but the most important part is to be prepared and to put in the effort," she stresses.
Another problem limiting the publication of Turkish books abroad is the preconceived notions of Western readers, Akaş says. "Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, many more Turkish writers are able to find an audience outside of Turkey's borders. Yet I do believe that the European audiences -- an American audience does not really exist for books in translation -- still behave like tourists shopping at the Grand Bazaar; they want souvenirs that are explicitly 'Turkish,'" he observes. "They are mainly interested in women novelists who write about sex, religion or ethnicity, because those are the issues that spring to their minds when they think of Turkey."
Advice for unpublished writers
Despite Turkey's recent spot on the international stage, the publishing sector in the country has been in a state of economic decline since 2004 at least, Akaş points out. "The recent global economic crisis is, for many, just another nail in the coffin. Publishing companies go under, printers fold, bookstores are closed down, no one can afford to take any risks with young writers or off-mainstream writing," he explains.
Akaş warns that the current situation in the sector does not offer much for writers hoping to publish their books for the first time. "I hate to say this, but this is the worst time for being a young, unpublished writer, and yet I have to say it because I have personally seen incredible talent forced to go to waste. One of the best manuscripts I have seen in 10 years, for example, has been rejected by nine publishing companies, and the 10th is probably on its way," he laments.
But for insistent writers, there are new options available. "We now have print-on-demand, a technology that allows writers to publish their own books in very small numbers for reasonable prices. For TL 350, for example, you can publish around 50 copies of your novel and send it to influential critics and hope that some of them will read it and perhaps one of them will put in a good word or two in one of the book reviews, so that you will have a basis to build on for your next book. Another way to go is self-publishing, of course, and this is what we at G Yayın Grubu do. That way, once you invest in your own work and meet all expenses, your book appears on bookshelves across the country, and you also receive all the revenue from sales," he explains.
Another way to increase the chances of getting published is to decide which publishing house is best for oneself. "This, of course, requires reading at least half of the published books of that particular publishing house," Mollaoğlu notes. Eroğlu, on the other hand, recommends that young writers first work to prove themselves in literary magazines.
Though it is not yet large enough to be called an industry in itself, the Turkish publishing sector has witnessed a number of major transformations over the last two decades, according to author and publisher Cem Akaş, from G Yayın Grubu (G Publishing Group). "Its structure and branches still do not function in an efficient and effective way, but things are nonetheless very different from, say, 1995. For one thing, Turkish publishers have gotten much better at keeping up with recent titles that get published in the United States, the UK, France and, to some degree, Germany and Italy. They have also become better at selling their writers abroad. This is thanks to the increased 'visibility' of Turkey, the increased activity of literary agents and, of course, Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize," he explains.
The number of writers going down the road of self-publishing has also increased considerably, Akaş notes. One form of publishing, what Akaş calls "institutional publishing," publishing by corporate conglomerates, particularly private banks, is now "past its heyday." He says, "It is still there, but it is not flourishing anymore."
"The Internet has been warmly embraced by a huge number of budding writers -- a lot is going on there," he continues, concluding, "The general trend is continuing with respect to the constant increase in new publishers, the constant increase in small publishing companies that go under and the constant decrease (as percent of population) in readership."
Emine Eroğlu, the head of the Timaş Publishing House, one of the major publishers in the country, agrees that publishing has reached the level of institutionalization, even if it cannot yet be called an industry. "The fact that it has not completed the process is a disadvantage. Pirate prints are a serious threat for the market. The biggest advantage of European or American publishers, for example, is that they are publishing to the world and selling their books everywhere," Eroğlu says, adding that they are trying to survive off the domestic market alone and that this blocks their growth.
The world publishing industry is like an enormous football game, with the main players being such countries as the US, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain, Nermin Mollaoğlu, from the Kalem Literary Agency, explains. "Sometimes a backup member from India or China plays, but that fashion fades away very quickly," she adds. However, she says Turkey's advantage is that it generally follows a very wide range of high-quality writers from both East and West without being much affected by fluctuations in "fashion."
Bestsellers in Turkey
When it comes to sales figures and bestsellers in Turkey, Mollaoğlu says there is a vacuum in the sector. "I don't trust any of the bestseller lists in Turkey. Internationally, bookstores prepare them according to the books they have sold most in a given week. If you ask most of the bookstores in Turkey how many books they sold today, they could not answer," she complains.
According to Akaş, one of the signs that publishing hasn't reached industry status in Turkey is the lack of dependable numbers. "The numbers we do have are usually of limited use and outline only the broadest trends. Big bookstores such as D&R, Remzi and İnkılap have their own bestseller lists, and online bookstores keep their own, but there are huge variations among them," he says, noting that they usually have to make do with a general sense of what is selling best at any given time and that pirate editions are usually a good indicator, even though they have been known to misjudge demand at times.
Eroğlu, on the other hand, argues that there are no real "trust issues" with the existing figures. The problem is that only a few bookstores participate in them. "In order to get more accurate numbers, a lot more bookstores should be included, together with Internet sales," she suggests.
Turkish literature goes international
Turkish literature has gained some international notoriety in recent years, particularly as a result of the selection of novelist Orhan Pamuk for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 and of Turkey as the guest of honor at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair. However, it is still very difficult for Turkish writers to get their work published in foreign languages.
"We have to have perfect translations, but the translation business is very expensive and requires a lot of effort," Eroğlu explains. But she adds that with hard work and sufficient investments of time and money, success can be achieved, as the Timaş Publishing House has seen in recent years.
In 2008 the Kalem Agency alone sold the copyrights to 153 Turkish books for publication in other languages, Mollaoğlu says. "Even this number is an indicator that the situation is going well. The Frankfurt Book Fair and the Nobel Prize are, of course, very important, but the most important part is to be prepared and to put in the effort," she stresses.
Another problem limiting the publication of Turkish books abroad is the preconceived notions of Western readers, Akaş says. "Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, many more Turkish writers are able to find an audience outside of Turkey's borders. Yet I do believe that the European audiences -- an American audience does not really exist for books in translation -- still behave like tourists shopping at the Grand Bazaar; they want souvenirs that are explicitly 'Turkish,'" he observes. "They are mainly interested in women novelists who write about sex, religion or ethnicity, because those are the issues that spring to their minds when they think of Turkey."
Advice for unpublished writers
Despite Turkey's recent spot on the international stage, the publishing sector in the country has been in a state of economic decline since 2004 at least, Akaş points out. "The recent global economic crisis is, for many, just another nail in the coffin. Publishing companies go under, printers fold, bookstores are closed down, no one can afford to take any risks with young writers or off-mainstream writing," he explains.
Akaş warns that the current situation in the sector does not offer much for writers hoping to publish their books for the first time. "I hate to say this, but this is the worst time for being a young, unpublished writer, and yet I have to say it because I have personally seen incredible talent forced to go to waste. One of the best manuscripts I have seen in 10 years, for example, has been rejected by nine publishing companies, and the 10th is probably on its way," he laments.
But for insistent writers, there are new options available. "We now have print-on-demand, a technology that allows writers to publish their own books in very small numbers for reasonable prices. For TL 350, for example, you can publish around 50 copies of your novel and send it to influential critics and hope that some of them will read it and perhaps one of them will put in a good word or two in one of the book reviews, so that you will have a basis to build on for your next book. Another way to go is self-publishing, of course, and this is what we at G Yayın Grubu do. That way, once you invest in your own work and meet all expenses, your book appears on bookshelves across the country, and you also receive all the revenue from sales," he explains.
Another way to increase the chances of getting published is to decide which publishing house is best for oneself. "This, of course, requires reading at least half of the published books of that particular publishing house," Mollaoğlu notes. Eroğlu, on the other hand, recommends that young writers first work to prove themselves in literary magazines.
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Press reacts to attempts at print media censorship
ISTANBUL - The Turkish press has been vocal, or in one case, silent, over the weekend in declaring its loyalties to freedom of expression in the latest round of conflict between the government and the fourth estate.
Press reacts to attempts at print media censorship
Turkey’s printed voices reached a crescendo yesterday as a new national daily, Haber Türk, launched its first issue from the ashes of media assets seized by the government; venerable Cumhuriyet printed a nearly blank front page in protest of pressure on the press; and the feisty Taraf carried a front-page defense by the prime minister, saying that freedom of the press is alive and well in Turkey.
Meanwhile, daily Hürriyet, the flagship of the besieged Doğan Media Group, or DMG, set aside a full page to explore how Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship began with the shuttering of the liberal Vossiche Zeitung newspaper in 1933. Hürriyet is part of the DMG and the parent company of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
"If we are silent, who will speak?" daily Cumhuriyet asked yesterday. The question, posed in a column next to the empty front-page space, recalled the pressure the Democrat Party, or DP, government put on media outlets during the 1950s, which later brought about military intervention. As one of the oldest continuously printed dailies in Turkey, Cumhuriyet is known for its sensitivity towards secularism and republican values.
"[The ruling Justice and Development Party, or] AKP, through the prime minister and state’s instruments, first started a fight against Cumhuriyet and those who support free media and freedom of information," yesterday’s column read, adding that its warning was necessary not only for the sake of the newspaper, but for Turkey’s very existence.
Haber Türk is owned by Ciner Media Holding, whose previous media assets, including broadcaster ATV and the daily Sabah newspaper, were seized by the state and later purchased in a single budder-auction by pro-government Çalık Holding.
Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was the general manager of Çalık Holding at the time of the purchase. In his first column yesterday, Fatih Altaylı, editor-in-chief of Haber Türk, wrote, "We will continue where we left off." Altaylı resigned as editor-in chief of daily Sabah when the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund, or TMSF, seized the paper in April 2007.
"Today is like April 2, 2007, for me. On April 2, 2007, our newspaper was seized and we had a break in our long media journey," Altaylı wrote in his column yesterday, adding that the new newspaper would work for a more free Turkey. "This newspaper will not be at anyone’s side or against any idea," he said.
The prime minister began calling for a boycott of the Doğan Group publications last September, after the company ran a story on German authorities prosecuting, and then convicting, three men involved with the Turkish charity Deniz Feneri, or "Lighthouse." Erdoğan started to ask AKP members and supporters not to buy Doğan’s newspapers, saying: "I tell you to start your own campaign and not to let the media outlets that give false information and lies into your houses."
The $500-million tax fine imposed on Doğan Media Group last month over the sale of a Doğan television station’s shares to German publisher Axel Springer AG came after months of castigation directed at Doğan publications by Erdoğan. Many local and international media organizations, and members of opposition parties in Turkey, have called the fine a threat to the freedom of one of the biggest press organs in Turkey.
In its article about Vossiche Zeitung on Sunday, daily Hürriyet described the ill-fated newspaper as "Germany’s Hürriyet" of its day. Soner Yalçın, a Hürriyet columnist, said the liberal German newspaper featured writers with a wide range of opinions and was owned by the liberal Ullstein family. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was to shut down Vossiche Zeitung, which had been in the news business for 230 years. Daily Hürriyet said this was one of the things that allowed facism to creep into German politics.
Daily Hürriyet made another analogy to the Nazi era, calling Kurt Tucholsky, a German-Jewish writer who met an unfortunate end, "Germany’s Bekri Coşkun." Hürriyet columnist Coşkun is a fierce critic of the AKP, who is well known for using his wit to critique politicians. Erdoğan has used Coşkun’s love for dogs in his attacks against the columnist, recently describing him as one of the "men who sleep with their dogs." Tucholsky, a journalist who described himself as democrat, anti-militarist and pacifist, criticized rich people who supported Hitler’s rise to power. Prime Minister Erdoğan now says he never called for a boycott of Doğan media outlets. In a front-page piece by daily Taraf, he said he would bring the Doğan Holding matter up at his upcoming meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"I will ask Hillary Clinton what the U.S. Treasury Department does when faced with this kind of tax evasion," he said. The Taraf reporter who was following the prime minister on the campaign trail said Erdoğan was holding exclusive interviews only with the Turkish representatives of foreign-press organs, and that the denial of any effort to call a boycott of Doğan came at one of these meetings. The Taraf reporter, Amberin Zaman, suggested the prime minister was trying to repair his tarnished image.
Press reacts to attempts at print media censorship
Turkey’s printed voices reached a crescendo yesterday as a new national daily, Haber Türk, launched its first issue from the ashes of media assets seized by the government; venerable Cumhuriyet printed a nearly blank front page in protest of pressure on the press; and the feisty Taraf carried a front-page defense by the prime minister, saying that freedom of the press is alive and well in Turkey.
Meanwhile, daily Hürriyet, the flagship of the besieged Doğan Media Group, or DMG, set aside a full page to explore how Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship began with the shuttering of the liberal Vossiche Zeitung newspaper in 1933. Hürriyet is part of the DMG and the parent company of the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
"If we are silent, who will speak?" daily Cumhuriyet asked yesterday. The question, posed in a column next to the empty front-page space, recalled the pressure the Democrat Party, or DP, government put on media outlets during the 1950s, which later brought about military intervention. As one of the oldest continuously printed dailies in Turkey, Cumhuriyet is known for its sensitivity towards secularism and republican values.
"[The ruling Justice and Development Party, or] AKP, through the prime minister and state’s instruments, first started a fight against Cumhuriyet and those who support free media and freedom of information," yesterday’s column read, adding that its warning was necessary not only for the sake of the newspaper, but for Turkey’s very existence.
Haber Türk is owned by Ciner Media Holding, whose previous media assets, including broadcaster ATV and the daily Sabah newspaper, were seized by the state and later purchased in a single budder-auction by pro-government Çalık Holding.
Berat Albayrak, the son-in-law of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was the general manager of Çalık Holding at the time of the purchase. In his first column yesterday, Fatih Altaylı, editor-in-chief of Haber Türk, wrote, "We will continue where we left off." Altaylı resigned as editor-in chief of daily Sabah when the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund, or TMSF, seized the paper in April 2007.
"Today is like April 2, 2007, for me. On April 2, 2007, our newspaper was seized and we had a break in our long media journey," Altaylı wrote in his column yesterday, adding that the new newspaper would work for a more free Turkey. "This newspaper will not be at anyone’s side or against any idea," he said.
The prime minister began calling for a boycott of the Doğan Group publications last September, after the company ran a story on German authorities prosecuting, and then convicting, three men involved with the Turkish charity Deniz Feneri, or "Lighthouse." Erdoğan started to ask AKP members and supporters not to buy Doğan’s newspapers, saying: "I tell you to start your own campaign and not to let the media outlets that give false information and lies into your houses."
The $500-million tax fine imposed on Doğan Media Group last month over the sale of a Doğan television station’s shares to German publisher Axel Springer AG came after months of castigation directed at Doğan publications by Erdoğan. Many local and international media organizations, and members of opposition parties in Turkey, have called the fine a threat to the freedom of one of the biggest press organs in Turkey.
In its article about Vossiche Zeitung on Sunday, daily Hürriyet described the ill-fated newspaper as "Germany’s Hürriyet" of its day. Soner Yalçın, a Hürriyet columnist, said the liberal German newspaper featured writers with a wide range of opinions and was owned by the liberal Ullstein family. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, one of the first things he did was to shut down Vossiche Zeitung, which had been in the news business for 230 years. Daily Hürriyet said this was one of the things that allowed facism to creep into German politics.
Daily Hürriyet made another analogy to the Nazi era, calling Kurt Tucholsky, a German-Jewish writer who met an unfortunate end, "Germany’s Bekri Coşkun." Hürriyet columnist Coşkun is a fierce critic of the AKP, who is well known for using his wit to critique politicians. Erdoğan has used Coşkun’s love for dogs in his attacks against the columnist, recently describing him as one of the "men who sleep with their dogs." Tucholsky, a journalist who described himself as democrat, anti-militarist and pacifist, criticized rich people who supported Hitler’s rise to power. Prime Minister Erdoğan now says he never called for a boycott of Doğan media outlets. In a front-page piece by daily Taraf, he said he would bring the Doğan Holding matter up at his upcoming meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"I will ask Hillary Clinton what the U.S. Treasury Department does when faced with this kind of tax evasion," he said. The Taraf reporter who was following the prime minister on the campaign trail said Erdoğan was holding exclusive interviews only with the Turkish representatives of foreign-press organs, and that the denial of any effort to call a boycott of Doğan came at one of these meetings. The Taraf reporter, Amberin Zaman, suggested the prime minister was trying to repair his tarnished image.
Monday, 23 February 2009
Nationalism can rear head in crisis
ISTANBUL - An eerily familiar pattern emerges from reactive protectionism in the face of crisis. A panel of historians remember the Turkish-Greek population exchange of 1923, and the perceived need for demographic homogeneity which may have destroyed ’cosmopolitanism for good’
Nationalism can rear head in crisis A panel of Turkish, Greek and British academics has claimed that the strong nationalist sentiments like the one that resulted in the Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1923 poses a risk in times of financial crisis.
At a conference held Friday at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, the represented academics warned that such attitudes were an underlying and dangerous precept in Turkish policy.
"Turkey and Greece would both be very different places today had there been no abrupt change in demographics, said Bruce Clark, the international security editor of the Economist magazine and author of "Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey, and the Minorities They Expelled." The book focuses on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which marked the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the founding of the modern Republic, and the demographic displacement of about 500,000 ethnic Turks from Greece and 1.5 million ethnic Greeks from Turkish territory.
Clark describes the Lausanne Conference as "successful in its own perverse terms." but questions the legitimacy of its basic assumptions, as nearly a century later debates on the importance of a homogenous nation are again at the forefront. In times of crisis, it is particularly easy to turn to ideas of ancient hatred, all the panelists warned. Nationalist feelings and harsh stereotypes are usually fickle and quickly formed, but a nationalism that "deals in eternal truths and almost religious value" is dangerous for the successful development of a healthy national identity, Clark said.
Population exchange
The population exchange was an essential tool in the formation of the young republic, Clark said, as it facilitated the grounding of Turkey’s "self-conscious" secularism in the fertile land of religious uniformity.
With the advance of industrialization inevitably bound to create class division and inequality, he explained, it would be easier for poorer classes to accept domination from groups religiously or ethnically similar to them, rather than foment hatred toward those perceived as foreign.
Clark sees Lausanne as an "overwhelming convergence of state interests at the cost of the lives of ordinary people" and warns that prioritizing government interests over the well-being of the people they govern is still an all-too common reality in politics today.
Harry Tzimitras, the Greek co-director of the Division of Turkish-Greek Studies at Bilgi University, noted that a confederation between Turkey and Greece had been a popular idea among academics at the turn of last century, but that the population exchange managed to turn "states against state, and parts of a nation against itself."
The academics warned against the dangers of historical determinism and short-term collective memory, which impedes people from seeing beyond present prejudices. In divided Cyprus today, the demographic group most opposed to a return to pre-1974 co-habitation are those between the ages of 18-25, the very ones who never lived among the people they have been told are different, Tzimitras explained. The professor mused that "one can’t help but be nostalgicÉ and wonder if cosmopolitanism has been lost for good."
Nationalism can rear head in crisis A panel of Turkish, Greek and British academics has claimed that the strong nationalist sentiments like the one that resulted in the Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1923 poses a risk in times of financial crisis.
At a conference held Friday at Istanbul’s Bilgi University, the represented academics warned that such attitudes were an underlying and dangerous precept in Turkish policy.
"Turkey and Greece would both be very different places today had there been no abrupt change in demographics, said Bruce Clark, the international security editor of the Economist magazine and author of "Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey, and the Minorities They Expelled." The book focuses on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which marked the end of the Turkish War of Independence, the founding of the modern Republic, and the demographic displacement of about 500,000 ethnic Turks from Greece and 1.5 million ethnic Greeks from Turkish territory.
Clark describes the Lausanne Conference as "successful in its own perverse terms." but questions the legitimacy of its basic assumptions, as nearly a century later debates on the importance of a homogenous nation are again at the forefront. In times of crisis, it is particularly easy to turn to ideas of ancient hatred, all the panelists warned. Nationalist feelings and harsh stereotypes are usually fickle and quickly formed, but a nationalism that "deals in eternal truths and almost religious value" is dangerous for the successful development of a healthy national identity, Clark said.
Population exchange
The population exchange was an essential tool in the formation of the young republic, Clark said, as it facilitated the grounding of Turkey’s "self-conscious" secularism in the fertile land of religious uniformity.
With the advance of industrialization inevitably bound to create class division and inequality, he explained, it would be easier for poorer classes to accept domination from groups religiously or ethnically similar to them, rather than foment hatred toward those perceived as foreign.
Clark sees Lausanne as an "overwhelming convergence of state interests at the cost of the lives of ordinary people" and warns that prioritizing government interests over the well-being of the people they govern is still an all-too common reality in politics today.
Harry Tzimitras, the Greek co-director of the Division of Turkish-Greek Studies at Bilgi University, noted that a confederation between Turkey and Greece had been a popular idea among academics at the turn of last century, but that the population exchange managed to turn "states against state, and parts of a nation against itself."
The academics warned against the dangers of historical determinism and short-term collective memory, which impedes people from seeing beyond present prejudices. In divided Cyprus today, the demographic group most opposed to a return to pre-1974 co-habitation are those between the ages of 18-25, the very ones who never lived among the people they have been told are different, Tzimitras explained. The professor mused that "one can’t help but be nostalgicÉ and wonder if cosmopolitanism has been lost for good."
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Turkey's New Middle Eastern Approach
Historical Background of Turkish Rule in the Middle East
Ottomans governed the region for 400 years and before the Ottomans there were other Turkish origin groups, such as the Mamluk Dynasty, Aq (Ak) Qoyunlu, Qara (Kara) Qoyunlu Turcoman. Apart from them, many Turks occupied important positions in the Abbasid Dynasty's military and governed Iran, one of the most important countries in the Middle East, for hundreds of years. For example, the spoken language in the Shah Ismail's palace was Turkish, and many of the Iranian shahs were of Turkish origin.
Although there were many ethnic groups in the region, Turks quickly gained a privileged status among them. Of course their ruling style and positive/negative aspects of their governance are debatable. But, when compared to French, British or American powers' rule in the 20th Century Middle East there is no doubt that the Turkish periods were more successful in providing security and stability in the region. Palestine, for instance, was one of the most significant symbols of coexistence during the Ottoman period in the region, and witnessed bloodshed after it broke off from the Ottoman State in 1917; dreadful conflicts have not stopped in the region since that time. Likewise, Lebanon was a place in which different ethnic and religious groups lived together for centuries but after the governing passed from the hands of Turks to the French, Lebanon became a symbol of conflict, ethnic-religious intolerance, and civil wars. French did not respect the Lebanon's multi-ethnic and multi-religious structure and made efforts to Christianize the country. They support some of the groups against other groups, they brought Christian Armenians and encouraged the internal intolerance among the groups for their narrow national interests.
On the issue, Iraq was also not so different from Lebanon or Palestine. Under the governing of the Turks, Shia and Sunni groups, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other groups all lived together without any serious conflict among them. At that time Baghdad was called "the Sultan of the cities" and Iraq was at the forefront with its welfare and calmness compared to other regions. We see decentralization approach was adopted in the Middle East under Ottoman sovereignty. Each region's conditions were taken into consideration by Istanbul Government and special measures were taken according to region's demographic features.
Despite the Turks' successes in governing, after the First World War, British and French powers blamed the Ottoman Turks for everything that went bad in the colonized Middle Eastern countries and they tried to create an animosity among the Arabs towards the Turks. In time, the Middle Eastern countries began to declare their independence from the colonizers one by one, after which some leaders, such as Gamal Abd Al-Naser and Saddam Hussein, used the rhetoric of Arab Nationalism and tried to decrease local people's interests in Turkish people. In other words, colonizers, followed by Arab nationalists in the nation-state process, supported anti-Turkish policies.
Indeed, changes in Turkish policies towards the Middle East also contributed to this process. Kemalists in Turkey searched for the reasons of the Ottoman collapse in its religious and traditional roots, and in this context they related the Ottomans' underdevelopment and ‘backwardness’ to its Islamic roots and eastern orientation. Even in the conservative-liberal Adnan Menderes period, Turkish understanding didn't change drastically and Turkey's alliance with NATO prevented it from developing an independent Middle Eastern policy. For a long time Turkey's relationship with the region remained on the basis of its urgent and conjectural necessities and security issues. In the 1950s, Turkey identified its interests in the region with Western World's interests, and as a result, it was perceived as an agent of the West in the region. However first the Jupiter Missile (IRBMs) Crisis, then the Johnson Letter Crisis in 1964 and the arms embargo on Turkey in 1975, the ban of opium poppy cultivation in 1971, and all other disappointing experiences with the US made Turkey conscious about the problems with one-dimensional foreign policy.
United States’ president in the Johnson Letter threatened Turkey not to intervene in Cyprus problems. NATO and the US clearly told Turkey that it would be abondoned before the Soviet threat if Turkey does not strictly follow the Western ‘orders’. The Johnson letter represented a complete failure in Turkish foreign policy. Until the letter, Turkey was one of the rare countries, where ‘no one said go home to the Americans’, yet when the US did not behave like a ‘normal’ ally, Turkey searched new alternaties in foreign policy. Imagine the US imposed an embargo in 1975 on military shipments to Turkey during the high tension years of the Cold War. The US thus became may be the first country in history who imposes embargo on its own military ally. Apart from the US, other European countries’ pro-Greek attitudes let Turkey down, and forced the Turkish policy makers to search a new foreign policy. In the Cyprus crisis particularly Turkey turned its face to the Muslims states and the Third World to balance its NATO allies ‘partial policies’. Turkey was now aware of the disadvantages of its fully Western foreign policy and paid a heavy price for it. As a result, Turkey realized its need for a multi-dimensional foreign policy. In this context, Turkey tried to improve its relationship with the Middle Eastern countries too, but for many reasons, could not develop a foreign policy approach different from the West's till the 1980s.
The first reason for this inefficiency in Turkish Middle Eastern policy was the Cold War. With such strong competition between the US and the Soviets, it was not possible for Turkey to follow an independent foreign policy. The Cold War hostility left very limited manoeuvre area for the regional small and mid-size countries.
And Turkey's own economic problems also prevented it from following a different foreign policy in the region. It is not easy to understand Turkey's situation at that time by approaching the issue with today's conditions. We are talking about difficult times in which even the costs of government officials' visits to other countries were a problem. Imagine the intercity between Ankara and Istanbul was not paved asphalt before the 1950s. If you are poor, your foreign policy will not improve.
Continue reading: Turkish Weekly
Ottomans governed the region for 400 years and before the Ottomans there were other Turkish origin groups, such as the Mamluk Dynasty, Aq (Ak) Qoyunlu, Qara (Kara) Qoyunlu Turcoman. Apart from them, many Turks occupied important positions in the Abbasid Dynasty's military and governed Iran, one of the most important countries in the Middle East, for hundreds of years. For example, the spoken language in the Shah Ismail's palace was Turkish, and many of the Iranian shahs were of Turkish origin.
Although there were many ethnic groups in the region, Turks quickly gained a privileged status among them. Of course their ruling style and positive/negative aspects of their governance are debatable. But, when compared to French, British or American powers' rule in the 20th Century Middle East there is no doubt that the Turkish periods were more successful in providing security and stability in the region. Palestine, for instance, was one of the most significant symbols of coexistence during the Ottoman period in the region, and witnessed bloodshed after it broke off from the Ottoman State in 1917; dreadful conflicts have not stopped in the region since that time. Likewise, Lebanon was a place in which different ethnic and religious groups lived together for centuries but after the governing passed from the hands of Turks to the French, Lebanon became a symbol of conflict, ethnic-religious intolerance, and civil wars. French did not respect the Lebanon's multi-ethnic and multi-religious structure and made efforts to Christianize the country. They support some of the groups against other groups, they brought Christian Armenians and encouraged the internal intolerance among the groups for their narrow national interests.
On the issue, Iraq was also not so different from Lebanon or Palestine. Under the governing of the Turks, Shia and Sunni groups, Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other groups all lived together without any serious conflict among them. At that time Baghdad was called "the Sultan of the cities" and Iraq was at the forefront with its welfare and calmness compared to other regions. We see decentralization approach was adopted in the Middle East under Ottoman sovereignty. Each region's conditions were taken into consideration by Istanbul Government and special measures were taken according to region's demographic features.
Despite the Turks' successes in governing, after the First World War, British and French powers blamed the Ottoman Turks for everything that went bad in the colonized Middle Eastern countries and they tried to create an animosity among the Arabs towards the Turks. In time, the Middle Eastern countries began to declare their independence from the colonizers one by one, after which some leaders, such as Gamal Abd Al-Naser and Saddam Hussein, used the rhetoric of Arab Nationalism and tried to decrease local people's interests in Turkish people. In other words, colonizers, followed by Arab nationalists in the nation-state process, supported anti-Turkish policies.
Indeed, changes in Turkish policies towards the Middle East also contributed to this process. Kemalists in Turkey searched for the reasons of the Ottoman collapse in its religious and traditional roots, and in this context they related the Ottomans' underdevelopment and ‘backwardness’ to its Islamic roots and eastern orientation. Even in the conservative-liberal Adnan Menderes period, Turkish understanding didn't change drastically and Turkey's alliance with NATO prevented it from developing an independent Middle Eastern policy. For a long time Turkey's relationship with the region remained on the basis of its urgent and conjectural necessities and security issues. In the 1950s, Turkey identified its interests in the region with Western World's interests, and as a result, it was perceived as an agent of the West in the region. However first the Jupiter Missile (IRBMs) Crisis, then the Johnson Letter Crisis in 1964 and the arms embargo on Turkey in 1975, the ban of opium poppy cultivation in 1971, and all other disappointing experiences with the US made Turkey conscious about the problems with one-dimensional foreign policy.
United States’ president in the Johnson Letter threatened Turkey not to intervene in Cyprus problems. NATO and the US clearly told Turkey that it would be abondoned before the Soviet threat if Turkey does not strictly follow the Western ‘orders’. The Johnson letter represented a complete failure in Turkish foreign policy. Until the letter, Turkey was one of the rare countries, where ‘no one said go home to the Americans’, yet when the US did not behave like a ‘normal’ ally, Turkey searched new alternaties in foreign policy. Imagine the US imposed an embargo in 1975 on military shipments to Turkey during the high tension years of the Cold War. The US thus became may be the first country in history who imposes embargo on its own military ally. Apart from the US, other European countries’ pro-Greek attitudes let Turkey down, and forced the Turkish policy makers to search a new foreign policy. In the Cyprus crisis particularly Turkey turned its face to the Muslims states and the Third World to balance its NATO allies ‘partial policies’. Turkey was now aware of the disadvantages of its fully Western foreign policy and paid a heavy price for it. As a result, Turkey realized its need for a multi-dimensional foreign policy. In this context, Turkey tried to improve its relationship with the Middle Eastern countries too, but for many reasons, could not develop a foreign policy approach different from the West's till the 1980s.
The first reason for this inefficiency in Turkish Middle Eastern policy was the Cold War. With such strong competition between the US and the Soviets, it was not possible for Turkey to follow an independent foreign policy. The Cold War hostility left very limited manoeuvre area for the regional small and mid-size countries.
And Turkey's own economic problems also prevented it from following a different foreign policy in the region. It is not easy to understand Turkey's situation at that time by approaching the issue with today's conditions. We are talking about difficult times in which even the costs of government officials' visits to other countries were a problem. Imagine the intercity between Ankara and Istanbul was not paved asphalt before the 1950s. If you are poor, your foreign policy will not improve.
Continue reading: Turkish Weekly
Wednesday, 21 January 2009
Digitized manuscripts: a call to the mysterious world of old books
A manuscript is far more valuable than a printed book. While an e-mail includes no extra value other than the work of the author and a printed book offers only the text created by the author and the page and cover design articulated on computers, a manuscript contains the artistic touches of several people: the author, the copier, the gilder, the marbling artist and the bookbinder.
A less widely known, but nonetheless valuable, story told by the manuscripts is contained in the fevaid, the marginalia of a manuscript, added mainly by the copier. These footnotes and marginal comments around the frame of the pages tell about historical or personal events that took place during the copying or reading of the book.
Niyazi Ünver, a National Library official who manages the manuscripts department, believes that these fevaid explain why people regard the manuscripts stored in their local libraries as such valuable cultural assets. "Usually the person on the street does not read these manuscripts, but they know that on the edge of one of them the birthday of their great grandfather is recorded or that somewhere in the pages of this or that book there is a note that several hundred years ago it hailed so heavily that the hailstones were as large as eggs. This is local information, and it belongs to the region. The book may be a Quranic commentary, but the fevaid added to it belong to that region. It is understandable that people prefer to keep these manuscripts within their cities," he says.
Ünver's remarks are an attempt to explain the resistance the Ministry of Culture and Tourism faced in cities such as Amasya and Safranbolu in the past when gathering manuscripts stored in libraries across Turkey to store them at three well-guarded centers. According to the background information Tuncel Acar, the president of the National Library, provided for Sunday's Zaman, in 1992 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism issued a regulation asking that local libraries holding manuscripts and old printed books send them to the country's three central libraries in İstanbul, Konya and Ankara. The regulation was a response to the increasing number of thefts, fires and floods that threatened the manuscripts. Acar is proud of the current status of the manuscript collection in the National Library, which has incorporated the collections of the city libraries of Adana, Çankırı, Balıkesir, Tokat and some other private libraries. "Just from the Adnan Ötüken Library alone, which used to be in Kızılay, we received about 5,000 manuscripts," Ünver adds.
Both Acar and Ünver remember the bad old times, exemplified by an incident in which they were stoned by locals in Safranbolu when they went to collect the manuscripts stored in the city library. "The people were not able to understand the priority of protecting the books themselves over protecting them in their own city," Acar explains.
The story of the Amasya city library is even more dramatic. Back in 1992 the governor of Amasya objected to the idea of sending the city's manuscripts to Ankara, claiming that the history of one city cannot be sent to another. The National Library informed the Governor's Office that their intention was to preserve the books until the Amasya library met the necessary technical and security standards for storing valuable manuscripts. The Governor's Office refused, and one night the library was robbed. Some time later the books were found buried in the garden of an infamous smuggler of historical artifact in İstanbul. The books were brought to the National Library in the end, but only after having suffered irreversible damage. "We cleaned and repaired some of the books, and when the Amasya library was brought to the necessary standards, we sent them back to the city where they belonged," Acar explains regretfully.
Manuscripts are not only valuable antiquities; they are also sources of information for researchers. But while researchers are the ones who put the manuscripts in the spotlight, most of the harm done to manuscripts also comes from them. "Some may even tear pages out of manuscripts, but the real harm is done by the moisture on their fingers while turning the pages," Ünver explains.
But the days when researchers would touch the pages of the manuscripts are now gone. In cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and other libraries bound to the ministry, the National Library is running a project to digitalize Turkey's manuscripts. "The project started in 2004 with about 1,200 manuscripts out of the 27,000 we have here in the National Library. In the following years we photographed more than 9,000 volumes yearly, and today we are left with only 1,500 volumes to digitize. Researchers can reach these digital copies on our Web site at www.yazmalar.gov.tr," Ünver told Sunday's Zaman.
Similar projects are being run in Konya, İstanbul and Amasya, and the National Library has combined them all within the same database. Today users can search for the catalogue entries of more than 198.000 manuscripts. In total, the site hosts downloadable high resolution digital copies of 73,793 manuscripts. "This comes to about 6 million photographs and, if we remember that every photograph corresponds to two pages, this means 12 million pages of manuscripts," Ünver further explains. He proudly announces that this was the first such project in the Muslim world and the largest of its kind in the whole world. But he is not so enthusiastic about the number of users taking advantage of the Web site.
When the Web site was created, it was a multilingual site with Russian and Persian in addition to the expected languages of Turkish, Arabic and English. Today the site is only available in Turkish and Arabic, and this certainly reduces the number of users. "We are working on putting English back into the pages," Ünver says.
Most researchers still feel more comfortable with the actual manuscripts. Acar recalls many people coming to him asking for a favor, wanting to see and touch the 1,000-year-old pages of a Greek Bible that was found in İstanbul during the Ottoman Sultanate of Mehmet the Conqueror. "This is a treasure in itself, and no real study has been done on it yet," Acar says.
The archives of the National Library are assumed to be protected from fire and conditions that may damage these ancient manuscripts. But this hasn't actually been done yet. Acar is looking for funds to modernize the archive. Under his initiative the National Library has recently established a "book hospital" that employs three chemists and a biologist. The manuscripts are cleaned of dust and fungus, the copper strips that were used to decorate the pages are replaced with magnesium and torn parts of the paper sheets are repaired with ancient methods of paper production. Esra Mert, the head of the book hospital, says that a book of about 150 pages takes three months to "cure." Fungus is one of their prime enemies. In order to fight fungus they literally wash the pages with diluted alcohol. Acar complains that he does not have the financial means to hire more of these book doctors. "This is an expensive project, and we have thousands of manuscripts waiting for attention up in the archive," he says. With the average time of three months to repair a book, it will take more than 1,000 years for the current book hospital to repair the entire collection.
A further challenge for the library is the increasing number of manuscripts. The library not only receives donations from private collectors but also buys manuscripts. Ünver is proud to mention a name like Fahri Bilge, whose inheritors sold his library 628 volumes of manuscripts. Dr. Abdullah Öztemiz, who is still alive and has a large collection of manuscripts gathered during years of service in different cities of Anatolia has also sold manuscripts to the library. "This is an invaluable service to the nation. Most of those manuscripts would have been lost if these people didn't protect them," Ünver says, adding that the National Library and other libraries affiliated with the Ministry of Culture and Tourism are the final buyers of manuscripts in Turkey. "Unaware of the value of the manuscripts they hold, people go to old book brokers and lose quite a lot of money because they didn't come to us first," he says.
A final complaint Ünver has is about the decidedly non-academic intent of some of the people who come and want to work on the manuscripts. "Books of magic, spells and secret sciences have quite an attraction. This shouldn't be what the new generation looks for in the heritage of earlier generations," he says.
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