The Manhattan Institute d.b.a. City Journal
City Journal
Fall 2006
Soundings: "Talking Turkey"
by Theodore Dalrymple
The Turkish government often seems determined to strike propaganda
coups against itself. It put 34-year-old author Elif Shafak on trial
recently for questioning Turkish national identity, and dropped the
charges only after predictably adverse publicity. But the charges
will be a warning to other Turkish writers not to go too far.
In her latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, which has already sold
60,000 copies, Shafak tells the story of a Turkish and an
Armenian-American family. On no subject is the Turkish state more
sensitive than on the massacre of the Armenians in 1915. Was it just
one horrible massacre among others, or the twentieth century’s first
genocide? A lot turns on the question–or at least so both Armenians
and Turks believe.
Shafak specializes in inflaming the sore points of Turkish history.
She wants a Turkey less ethnically and culturally homogeneous than
that of the traditional Kemalist vision, and thus not only questions
the sanctity of Atatürk himself and the army that protects his
legacy, but expresses sympathy for Kurds and even Greeks.
One may doubt whether the realistic alternative to the Kemalist
version of Turkey is a multiculturalist paradise, where the Turk lies
down with the Greek, so to speak, rather than a Muslim theocracy. But
Shafak has every right to her views and should not have faced
persecution for them (apparently, she has received death threats,
too).
That does not make her a heroine, however, all of whose views we must
accept. She subscribes, a recent admiring Le Monde article suggests,
to those hackneyed views of the 1960s that have brought much social
dislocation to the West, and would be more devastating still in
Turkey. She is a feminist who seems not only to deplore Turkish
machismo, no doubt understandably, but also to believe that men,
beyond insemination on demand, are redundant. In reaching this
conclusion, she reflects upon her own experience as an
upper-middle-class intellectual and assumes that it is exemplary for
millions of compatriots.
Her father abandoned the family when she was an infant, leaving her
grandmother and her mother to raise her. Her mother, Westernized and
highly educated, became a diplomat. Shafak was born in Strasbourg and
lived successively in various capitals, including Madrid. According
to Le Monde, "she grew up in a universe in which women were
independent and educated, where the cultural heritage was passed from
mother to daughter, and marriage and motherhood were assaults on
freedom." Having just given birth herself to a daughter, she said,
"As for me, I will always cultivate my independence, and my daughter
will be raised like that."
It seems scarcely to cross her mind (at least as Le Monde presents
it) that this attitude is not necessarily a useful prescription for
all of Turkish society, or at least for that considerable part of it
that does not live in, and was not raised in, cosmopolitan diplomatic
circles. In short, Shafak seems a typical example of the intellectual
who uses personal history uncritically to draw conclusions about
society as a whole.
Dangerous as such intellectuals no doubt are, they should not have to
go to jail for their views. I disagree with what Shafak says, but I
defend (to the death it would perhaps be too much to claim) her right
to say it.