Rudaw.net
Nov 27 2010
Literary Criticism a la Turca
27/11/2010 09:16:00 By ZAFER YÖRÜK
Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul said in an interview back in 2001 that the
conversion of the South and East Asian peoples into Islam had negative
effects on them, comparable to the effects of colonialism. In revenge,
a Muslim-Turkish philosopher, supported by a lynch mob and Turkish
security authorities, did not allow him in Istanbul, where Naipaul was
scheduled to address the preliminary meeting of the European Writers
Parliament (EWP).
This controversy inevitably evokes the memory of similar events in
recent history, some of which I will outline below.
In 1989, a fatwa (Islamic verdict) was issued sentencing the novelist
Salman Rushdie to death by the Spiritual Leader of Iran, Ayetullah
Khomeini. The fatwa was effective particularly among the British
Muslim communities of South and East Asian origin. Copies of Rusdie’s
novel `Satanic Verses’ were burnt in Muslim British demonstrations and
major bookshops were forced after a series of bombings to withdraw the
copies of this novel from their shop-windows and bookshelves. Since
then, Rushdie has been forced to live under protection.
`Satanic Verses’ was immediately translated into Turkish after its
first publication in English in 1988 but could not find a publisher.
In 1993, Aziz Nesin, the greatest modern Turkish satirist, decided to
publish excerpts from the Turkish translation in his column in a daily
newspaper. In July 1993, Nesin participated in a literary festival in
the central Anatolian town of Sivas, in remembrance of the 16th
Century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal.
Naipaul observes the following on the fall of the Sindh province in
India to Muslim conquest in the 8th Century: `The king of Sindh
resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the
invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became
frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and
it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people.’
This critical commentary on the history of the Islamisation of Asia,
which the Muslim-Turkish scholars find offensive, resembles to what
happened on 4 July 1993 in Sivas.
A thousands-strong fanatic Islamist mob gathered in front of the hotel
in town square, where Nesin and hundreds of participants of the
festival were hosted. They chanted `God is Great!’ `as one man’ and
then set the hotel on fire. Sivas police watched the event from a
distance and nobody in the government ordered the military units to
charge the mob for the protection of the festival guests.
Nesin survived the attack but thirty three participants of the
festival, including poets, writers, literary critics and musicians,
suffered a horrible death. These thirty three gems are the rather
ironic martyrs of Ayetullah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie,
and their families and friends still do not know where to seek
compensation for their loss.
Similar attacks on writers with religious and/or nationalist motives
have continued to our day. Most importantly, prominent Armenian
writer/journalist Hrant Dink was murdered on 19 January 2007. Prior to
his assassination Dink had been sentenced by a Turkish court for
`degrading Turkishness’; during the trial he had been threatened
outside the courtroom by the senior members of the Turkish `deep
state’, including General Veli Küçük and lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz.
The `best pen of Turkish literature’, Orhan Pamuk, was also subject to
similar judicial, semi-official and Mafioso threats and attacks. The
reason for this Turkish style `literary criticism’ was Pamuk’s
statement during an interview that `one million Armenians and thirty
thousand Kurds were killed in Turkey’. As a result, the one and only
Turkish Nobel Laureate had to flee his country for America; since
then, he has been forced to pay only occasional `clandestine’ visits
to Istanbul.
Most recently, Yugoslavian filmmaker Emir Kusturica had to leave
Turkey, during a film festival, under threats to his life. The threats
were issued by the high authorities, including the Minister of
Culture, who argued that a man who denies genocide against Muslims has
no place in Turkey – presumably because you can only have a place in
Turkey if you deny the genocide against Christians, as 72 million
Turkish citizens are forced to do.
The source of the mounting threats against Naipaul, the chief
Turkish-Muslim philosopher Hilmi Yavuz, has showed relief after the
cancellation of the Nobel Laureate’s visit to Turkey: `He would be
anxious to appear in front of the people whose religion he degraded’.
Indeed, `anxious’ is the word: Prior to his assassination, Hrant Dink
wrote that `My heart moves like an anxious dove’.
Religious fanaticism marked the history of Medieval Europe, the most
prominent symbol of which is the Inquisition. It was the heyday of
fanatic Christian `philosophers’, judges and lynch mobs who
traumatized thousands of people around Europe through torture and
execution sessions in public. The victims were exclusively charged
with `degrading Christianity’. Naipaul’s `philosophically condemned’
criticism of Islam implies that contemporary Muslims demonstrate a
degree of intolerance comparable to Medieval Christian Inquisition.
It is far beyond my knowledge to evaluate the world of Islam in
accordance with this claim. Nor, do I have any intention to engage
here in a criticism of the Western colonial influence on Naipaul’s
worldview. But an observation of the recent history of `literary
criticism a la turca’, including Hilmi Yavuz’s `philosophical
criticism’ of Naipaul, supported by a lynch mob, exclusively affirms
the novelist’s critical points on Muslim intolerance at least for this
country.
Zafer Yörük taught political theory at University of London between
1997 and 2006. His research interests range across politics of
identity, discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. He writes a column
for Rudaw every Friday from Izmir.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/3319.html