MODERN TURKEY FACING AN IDENTITY CRISIS
By Sabrina Tavernise / The New York Times
International Herald Trobune, France
Dec 4 2006
ISTANBUL: For every stereotype of a Muslim country, Turkey has a fact
to break it.
It has Islamic feminists (a few), and Israeli tourists (many).
Reality dating shows have had the highest ratings on television and
Islamic fashion sashays down Turkish runways.
For decades in Turkey, the competing forces of the religious
and secular, Christian and Muslim, east and west, were muted, as
authorities scrubbed the country of differences while they built a
modern state. But Turkey has become more democratic in recent years and
those forces have burst into full view, creating a sort of modern-day
identity crisis.
"We have started to think very differently about our history," said
Leyla Neyzi, an anthropologist at Sabanci University, one of Turkey’s
first private colleges. "The past is being re-thought in terms of
the demands of the present."
Nowhere is that questioning more apparent than in Istanbul, the lively
port city that is the cultural and intellectual center of the country.
Aynur Dogan is a Kurdish singer with a powerful voice who grew up
in war. Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists were fighting in the
southern part of the country where she lived, and where talking her
native Kurdish was illegal. Tapes of Kurdish music were buried in the
yard when government forces entered her village. Her family fled to
Istanbul in 1992 to escape fighting by Kurdish guerrillas that was
being brutally suppressed by the Turkish state.
She took an interest in Kurdish music, but in the late 1990s the only
audiences were underground. In Turkish society, Kurdish was a bad word.
"It looked impossible," she said, smoking a Winston Light in a dark
cafe lined with murals.
By 2004, she was appearing on mainstream Turkish television singing
in Kurdish. That year, she released her first album, "Kurdish Girl."
It was temporarily banned by the government, but not before it sold
large numbers of copies and its sale was again permitted. Now, two
years later, she performs frequently in Europe, and a film about
Istanbul’s music scene has featured her singing.
There are still limits in Turkey. Sponsors of Kurdish musical events
are hard to find and it is difficult to get a venue, but young Turks
in the music shops eagerly recommend her album.
"I felt there was this new group of people emerging," she said.
Many forces helped release the river of memory. One has been a
steady series of reforms Turkey has enacted to gain entry to the
European Union.
The push to join, led by the pro-Islamic government of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, elected in 2002, has recently faltered, souring Turks on
the process. But the reforms, which have opened Turkey’s society and
economy, have stuck.
Another factor has been the changing international landscape. The
Muslim world has grown angry at the West, particularly the United
States, for what Muslim countries say is behavior that singles out
Muslims and creates a backlash against Islamic identity. Turkey is
no exception.
But Turkey has also matured. The young professionals who walk along
Istanbul’s central avenues at a New York pace clutching cellphones
and BlackBerry devices are only a few generations away from the time
when Turkey became a state in 1923. Yet they are far enough away from
the secular revolution of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder,
to start to question it.
There has been a flurry of films, books and oral histories about
Turkey’s past in recent years, and it feels more democratic than at
any time in its short history, Neyzi said.
Turkish Jews now have a museum. Turkey last year held a conference on
the Armenian killings of World War I, described as genocide by many
in the West but not by the Turkish state. (Estimates of deaths given
by the allies at the end of the war ranged from 600,000 to 800,000.)
It is a painful process. When Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish novelist who
has spoken out on the Armenian question, won the Nobel Prize for
Literature, the president of Turkey did not congratulate him. That is
because Pamuk is seen as a tool of anti-Turkish forces, whose views
of the country can be critical, instead of being seen as a writer
who made the Turkish novel universal, Neyzi said.
"All the skeletons in the closet are spilling out," said Neyzi,
who chose to return to Turkey after earning a doctorate from Cornell
University. "It’s creating a lot of conflict in society."
The danger, Turks said, is that too abrupt a process would sharpen
nationalist and Islamist sentiments and possibly lead to another coup
by the army, a traditional safeguard of the country’s secularism.
There have been three in Turkey’s short history.
That, in turn, would set back reforms, roll back debate and could
seriously damage the significant economic gains Turkey has made in
the past six years.
To prevent that, intellectuals like Nazan Olcer, an art museum
director, are bringing up the past in small bits. Shortly after the
2002 opening of the museum, it arranged to show a collection of an
Armenian from Ottoman times.
"It was a hot iron," said Olcer, sitting on a gilded love seat in
her office near the museum, funded, like Neyzi’s university, by the
Sabanci family, the Turkish equivalent of the Rockefellers. "Everyone
warned us not to do it."
In the end, people came. By the time they left, they understood a
little more about the collector and were questioning some of their own
assumptions, she said. "You remind people to think twice," she said.
In 2005, the museum brought the first Picasso to Turkey, and this
year held an exhibition of Rodin sculptures. The nude figures did
not seem to bother the Turks, many of whom are devout, Olcer said.
On Tuesday, in another dip into the past, the museum will open an
exhibition of Genghis Khan, including some of the earliest Turkic
writing and inscriptions. "A very important dialogue is beginning,"
Olcer said. "I want to tell them the history. Not with a heroic
approach. Not with strongly accented nationalism. What they were
missing was the knowledge."
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul.