COLUMN: Turkey: among the believers

From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox," Fall '98 From the Western boundary of Morocco to the Sulu Archipelago in the East, the Ummah Islam spans vast, variously imagined territories across the middle world. The West looks East for a tireless tide of romance and adventure, for images of boundless sensuality, cruelty and mysterious custom. We imagine the East shrouded in mist like a Hollywood dream sequence, languid odalisques scarcely clothed in noonday sun, hefty Sultans taking their pleasure with downy-lipped boys, perhaps a snake charmer evoking his cobra with a flurry of modal music. We picture rows of green tarbooshes bobbing simultaneously toward Mecca and onion-shaped minarets ranged about antique mosques. Whirling dervishes spin through spice markets and a disembodied hand drips blood and bone into a brown burlap sac filled with jasmine -- someone was caught stealing! Travelling around Ionia in Western Turkey impressed upon me the tragic aspects of the struggle for statehood, so far removed from the decadence of chinless sultans. You witness the pitiful avatars of a dialectic unfolding, bombed out buildings, abandoned projects and an overwhelming sense of poverty. You realize that democratization, modernization, secularization and all the other -ations that Americans today may take for granted are hard-won luxuries -- not unalienable rights guaranteed every citizen, but something precious and precarious to be protected at all costs. Turkey is a country where history hangs in the air like a distinctive musk, the scent of centuries. Over time and within a small geographic area, dozens of groups have concocted for themselves political identities, and warred and died in their name. The opposite of theoretical American liberalism applies there. Diversity is a cruel dialectic, not something to be celebrated, but the source of ceaseless conflict and a wasteful crimson tempest. It's been this way since the prehistory of Homer, when Achaeans fought bitterly against their Trojan neighbors; and judging by recent history in the area formerly known as Yugoslavia, the trend shows no sign of cessation. People will imagine difference then try to kill the other designation. Could you tell a Serb from a Croat in a police line up? What differentiated a Trojan from an Argive? Why are people willing to die for a nation? Nationalism seems like a secular religion, a divisive counterpart to Turkey's pervasive Islam. To those who have nothing, it grants a grand sense of possession. To those without affiliation, it offers a powerful sense of community. The magic of nationalism is to turn coincidence into fate, to provide a group with the illusion of eternity. While people come and go, the nation lives on, unchanging and forever. Or at least until forever is over. How many nationalities once claimed Anatolian soil as their permanent place, only to fade like a flashbulb in the senile mind of time? Their ruins cover Ionia, a crumbling catalogue of self-importance. Listen: Ephesus, Pergamum, Artemis, Yeni Cami, Sehzade Camii, Hagia Sophia, Sultanahmet, Smyrna -- places all aged and defunct, old icons of impermanence. Ancient Turkey was a crossroads; the clash of cultures and the confluence of peoples yielded its combined character. Today the city of Istanbul remains a monument to many-ness. At once old and new, European and Asian, Muslim and distantly Christian, this syncretic city seems to elude identity. Modernity appears anachronistic beside the treasures of Byzantium and the great Muslim mosques. Yet Turkey today would like to be considered "modern." And it should be. The country's geographic position is once again at the center of things. Instead of spice and silk routes, though, today's issues are oil and water politics in the Near (Middle) East, and the new democratic movements of Central Asia. Following Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the god-like "father of the Turks" who pulled the country, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century, Turkey has pursued a policy of "westernization," for better or for worse. At some basic level, and notwithstanding practicality, the secular US is its model for development. Ninety-nine percent of the country identifies with Islam, yet relations with Israel are relatively good. Most of the population turns out for Friday prayer, but the "blue" Mosque of Sultan Ahmet is now a museum. In short, economics has caught up to religion, but Turkey remains a country of coexisting times, of ambitious and tenuous modernity. Like so many hasty states in Eastern Europe, Turkey is trying to swim in the deep end of international organizations before perfecting its stroke. Fundamentalist Islam may become a centrifugal nationalism, a growing threat to the Turkish political identity. And the Kurdish minority, displaced from their historical place in the southeast and treated as second-class citizens, may increase the use of political violence. Modern history points to the dangers latent in Turkey's religious-ethnic composition, and thousands of years of unreliable history offer few clues concerning a Turkish national character, if such a thing can exist. Conflict produced Turkey's rich and varied and ever painful history, and conflict of one kind or another will most likely evolve the state that emerges from the 20th century.