Since I arrived in Turkey, I’ve listened to the calls to prayer thousands of times.
You would think I would have memorized them by now, but they haven’t punctured even my short-term memory, much less long-term. If you asked me to repeat the words, or sounds, or even hum along to the music, I wouldn’t be able to.
I guess I’ve become an adult, and my years of learning through passive absorption are over.
The beginning of one of the calls to prayer does stick out in my head though. It’s sung in the mid-afternoon, and starts with a robust Al-LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. This much I get.
I passively feel like I should at least know what is being sung; but instead, each time I hear this AL-LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH, the LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH of which is exactly the same length and timbre of the beginning of “The Circle of Life” song from The Lion King, that is what I automatically start to sing. Gustily, if there’s nobody around to feel disrespected of if I’m feeling particularly exuberant.
It is now Ramadan. In Turkey, during Ramadan, my sleep is disturbed by the dreaded (for me) Ramadan drummer. Every night, he strolls through Turkey’s neighbourhoods banging a drum to wake everybody up before the sun rises so they can eat. Then, he comes to your door and asks for a tip for waking you up! Unfortunately, there is no option to take money away from him to get him to stop drumming.
This guy has sicker beats than any of the other drummers I’ve heard. Ours is a no-nonsense drummer. Loud, and regular.
Since many Turkish people are, like me, not Muslim, (or Muslim only on their official IDs) I am not alone in being annoyed by the Ramadan drummer. I recently saw a picture of a poster hung up on a building in a liberal neighbourhood of Istanbul. The poster had a picture of Lars Ulrich, drummer of Metallica, with a caption that said, “The only Ramadan drummer you should tip.”
Hear hear.
Anyway, back to the general point. While the mid-afternoon call to prayer inspires me to sing “The Circle of Life,” the regular bang-bang, bang-bangs of the Ramadan drummer inspire me to sing the song “Bang Bang.” It’s not perfect because the bang-bangs come a little too close together to sing the intervening words, but at least the initial bang-bang is roughly at the right tempo.
BANG BANG
Heshotmedown
BANG BANG
Ihittheground
BANG BANG
Thatawfulsound
BANG BANG
MY BABY SHOT ME DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWN
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
During my first trip to Trkey in 2014, I was surprised to see few women sporting Islamic coverings. Although public transit was plastered with advertisements for silk hijabs sported by smiling women wearing shiny trench coats and coordinated makeup, the street itself was relatively bare of covered women. In retrospect, the fact that I spent all my time around the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque explains my experience; touristic neighbourhoods are typically only frequented by foreign women since Turkish women understand that the shops and restaurants there are overpriced and the salesmen typically lecherous and inappropriately bold.
The following summer, I moved to Izmir. Izmir, by Turkish standards, is remarkably liberal – a repository of the deification of Ataturk and his doctrine of secularism. In Izmir, bikini-clad ladies roam the beaches and barely-there sparkly dress-clad women roam the nightclubs (before returning home each night to save their virginity for marriage.) Wearing a hijab in Izmir was an act of rebellion, not a capitulation to a ruling social morality. Even my erstwhile boss, a self-professed Muslim from a more conservative city in the south eschewed it. “No, the hijab is not very good. Anyway the way women wear it these days, it is not modest!” she wailed to me once. “If you wear the hijab for modesty, you shouldn’t also wear makeup!” She showed me a picture on her phone of a Facebook friend of hers, smirking shiny red lips at the camera over a sumptuous meal, an orange hijab of expensive fabric carefully arranged atop her head. “See?” she said. “This woman is wearing so much makeup. She looks not modest.”
My more recent forays into Turkey have allowed me to see a third snapshot of Turkish culture. I now live in a mixed neighbourhood of Istanbul. Here, Turkish students and Turkish and Syrian families of varying levels of conservatism live together. In my neighbourhood, it is a bad idea to eat in public during Ramadan. Shorts are a fairly rare sight on both men and women, even in the heat of summer. About 50% of women wear some sort of head covering, from the hijab paired with jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt to the face-covering niqab styled with matching long flowing black robes.
I’m told that there has been a shift towards covering in recent years – that in the olden days of 20 years ago, women who covered typically only did so following marriage and usually simply tied a scarf loosely over their hair. The new style of more intense covering has been blamed variously on the government, the government, the government, and Arab influence coming in from Syria and the Gulf, a typhoon (apparently) blowing the winds of conservative political Islam Turkey’s way. Of course, these are only the perspectives of the ultra-liberal mostly-Marxist couche sociale that I find myself a part of – it’s not exactly easy for me to gather other perspectives because the people who have them aren’t in the habit of talking to foreigners like me and, as I don’t attend school or work in Turkey, I have equally few opportunities to talk to them.
The prevalence of Islamic covering in Turkey presents an intellectual conundrum for me. As a feminist, I support a woman’s right to wear what she wants. I’m not so blind to the fact that women are presented with many similar messages in the West as they are in Turkey – you should be sexy, but also not sexy. If you’re too sexy, people won’t take you seriously. If you’re not sexy, people won’t think you’re attractive. You should wear makeup to look nice, but not too much because there’s a possibility that people won’t find you attractive if it’s too much. They could also find you too attractive and then it will be your fault if they come onto you inappropriately. You should exercise and keep in shape – but God forbid that a man see the outline of your butt in yoga pants because he might get a boner or talk about seeing your butt to his friends. You shouldn’t care about what men think of you and you should wear what you want for yourself. But be sure that it’s sexy enough to be attractive and modest enough so that nobody can question your character. And don’t forget women. Women are the arbiter of what society thinks too, so if they think you’re not dressing correctly – well, you shouldn’t care, but make sure you’re sexy enough for women to compliment you, but not sexy enough to make their partners be attracted to you.
But back to the hijab. As a Westerner, I’ve always had a live and let live relationship with the hijab. In Canada, whenever I see one I think one of these things:
“I just remembered I forgot to buy dish soap.”
“Oh, a woman wearing hijab.”
“That must be so warm in winter.”
“How does she make it look like a turban? How do the pins stay in place? I wonder if they can prick you by mistake, or are there safety pins specifically for hijabs that you can buy?”
“Is that really all her real hair under that thing?”
“She could be wearing it for so many reasons – it could be because she wants to express her religion outwardly. Or because it’s a way to publicly express her identification with her culture. Or maybe because her family wants her to. Or maybe she didn’t wash her hair today.”
In short, I tend to make the assumption of a more-or-less free choice, or a choice that, at the very least, is just as free as the choice I and many Western women make to dress in ways that tread the brutal line between being attractive and being the sort of person one takes seriously.
This live and let live attitude came with me during my first months in Turkey, and I ardently argued for my perspectives to secularist friends and acquaintances, probably to their great annoyance. After more time spent in the country, however, my perception of the hijab in Turkey has changed; I now understand that pressures to dress a certain way go beyond society and enter many strata of government. To hear my friends tell it, a certain level of conservatism is practically a requirement if you have your eye on a good post in government, and a post in government is like being thrown onto an island of job stability while other Turks drown in the treacherous sea of the Turkish economy. So, while I still affirm an adult woman’s right to wear what she wants, the social pressure that exists in Turkey to dress in a way that covers your body is bothersome to me because the more pressure there is, the less choice a woman actually has.
What bothers me even more is when I see prepubescent girls who are already covered. I have seen a few girls around the age of eight. My sister-in-law told me she once saw a covered little girl around the age of 5. I’m no Muslim theologian, and I haven’t thoroughly studied what Muslim scholars say about Islamic modesty’s links to (female) sexuality. However, this lack of profound knowledge notwithstanding, I do understand that popular perception holds that the hijab is about hiding the body and sexuality or (more generously) about seeing a woman for virtues that have nothing to do with her body and sexuality. So whenever I see young girls with heads already covered, I can’t help but resent the implicit sexualization of the young girl’s body.
If I’ve learned one thing from feeling frustrated about people who cover their children or people who refuse to admit that the hijab isn’t as free a choice as it could be, it is this: engaging another culture can present real and serious difficulty to people with a particular notion of ethics, morality, and what is good for people; it is not as simple as just “respecting” somebody else’s culture. Sometimes, differing beliefs can even motivate the essentially altruistic behaviour of trying to change something about a culture (although, of course this may not be perceived positively by the culture one is trying to change.) Even though I say nothing when I see eight-years-olds wearing hijab, I feel suddenly empathetic for the bad guy “orientalists” and “missionaries” and “colonists” of history, not because I think all their actions can be justified, but because I understand what it feels like to see something in another culture and believe that it’s basically wrong.
When do we have the right to try to change something? Or to make a moral call? Does anybody have any ideas that are better than mine?
**To be very clear: I believe that adult women should be able to make the free choice to cover or uncover. I also believe that implicit sexualisation of young girls and being forced to cover for economic and other unavoidable reasons is wrong.
Over the course of the last few years, I’ve talked to many Muslim people about faith. For some reason, these are the ones that stand out in my memory for the unexpectedness of what they said, the sincerity of their belief, the difference between my perception of what a Muslim looks like and what they looked like, their personal qualities, or some combination of these things. I’ve tried to write what they said without interpreting it here – although of course the questions that I asked in order to get them to talk more may betray some expectations I may have had.
Azerbaijan, 2015 – Khalid
I met Khalid online while in Azerbaijan. We spent a day walking through the old city talking about life in Azerbaijan, life in general. Many people in Azerbaijan are not particularly religious. Khalid was more religious than many – religious enough in any case to feel the need to impress on me fairly early on that “ISIS and people like them are not real Islam.”
As we were walking through Baku’s old city, he said, “You know, the world is a bit like a video game. Game companies and programmers create video games with certain parameters, and certain rules for winning. I understand that God could have created the world in any way he chose, but he chose this way. So I think that the most important thing about life is to follow the rules of this game, because the rules could be completely different if God had willed it.”
Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – Marina
Marina did my nails at a salon in Bishkek. She was a cheerful ethnically Russian woman originally from Kyrgyzstan, who’d donned a shirt that day which betrayed more than a hint of cleavage.
“Do you like this job?” I asked her. “Oh yes!” she said. “I love this job. I love making people feel happy and beautiful. It is very interesting and funny for me.”
“How did you end up doing this job?” I asked.
“Well,” she said, “I used to live in Dubai. My first ex-husband was Syrian. And I had no job. I was very bored. He said that I would get an education and continue university when I got married to him, but really I was just all the time at home – no education, nothing! And you know, in Dubai you have people to do everything for you so I didn’t even do houseworks. We divorced and I moved back here to where I grew up and got trained to do this job. I’m very happy now doing this.”
“That’s great.” I said.
“So where are you from?” she asked.
“Canada,” I said. “But I actually live in Istanbul with my boyfriend.”
“Is he Turkish?” she asked.
“Yes, he is,” I answered.
“Does his family like you?” she asked. “My second ex-husband was Turkish and his family did not like me.”
“Oh?” I said. “Why not? Because you weren’t Muslim?”
“I am Muslim!” she crowed. “I converted before I even married my first husband – and he didn’t even believe in anything, not anything, nothing. He didn’t want me to become a Muslim. But for me being Muslim felt right. My second husband’s family just didn’t like me because I was not Turkish. They wanted to their son a Turkish girl. You must be careful with your boyfriend and his family.”
“How did you decide to convert to Islam?” I asked.
“Well,” she said. “It didn’t happen immediately. Actually, it used to be, I used to have a job and on my breaks I would go out behind a mosque… to smoke. And I would hear the call to prayer – you know the call to prayer? And it didn’t happen immediately, but I felt something. I really felt it. And for me religion is something you feel. So I converted. Not everybody understands that religion is something you feel. I tried to explain it to my mother once. I said, “If you named your daughter Ayshe, how would you feel?” And she said, “That name is feel wrong for my daughter.” And I said that if I had a daughter named like “Maria,” or “Anna” I feel myself the same way that “Ayshe” is for her. Then she was understanding me.
At the end of the pedicure, I asked her if she drank.
“Of course!” she said. “Yes, of course I drink!”
“What kind of vodka would you recommend I bring home from Kyrgyzstan?” I asked.
“They are mostly all nice,” she said. “If you pay a little more, they are better.”
Kyrgyzstan, Ramadan 2016 – Nurdin
Nurdin was an AirBnB host in his late twenties that I found along the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. Despite being ethnically Kyrgyz (Kyrgyz people are – at least traditionally – Muslims) he was observing his first Ramadan fast. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law were not fasting, so he spent a lot of time in his room until after sunset when he would come and join the rest of us to eat. I didn’t understand he was fasting until I’d been staying at his place for five days already; I invited him to go hiking with me if he wasn’t busy and he apologized for not coming as he didn’t think he could force his body to hike if he wasn’t eating all day.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t realized you were observing Ramadan. Of course you shouldn’t go hiking.”
“Yes,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I just think Ramadan and religion are private things – you do them for yourself, they are between you and God. It is not good to do them only to boast to other people that you’re doing them. You know, here in Kyrgyzstan we have big problems with radicalization these days – these people are not practicing the real Islam, but I want to practice Islam in a good way. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
Turkey, 2014 – Ayse
Ayse was an incongruously kind and patient housekeeper for the first (and last) family I worked with in Turkey. She arrived wearing her hijab every morning, but usually removed it to tie her hair back if the man of the family wasn’t home. One day I tried asking her to help me with something in broken Turkish; she asked if it could wait until after. It was then that I noticed she had her head covered. “Oh sorry,” I said. “Yes, go do your prayers. It’s not urgent.”
“You know the prayers?!” she asked excitedly. “Do you know Ramadan too?!”
As an adolescent, I hated yurts, which smacked of a patronizing variety of poseur-hippie that rubbed me in all the wrong ways. The offensive yurts always seemed to pop up on university campuses, at homeschooling conferences, and random stretches of grass, accompanied by a posse of beckoning dreadlocked evangelists, “Hey, do you want to come and see our yurt? Come inside!”
It’s not that yurts aren’t cool, it was just that they seemed so cliché.
With this in mind, it is with a touch of embarrassment that I confess that my greatest goal for my trip to Kyrgyzstan was to, at some point, sleep in a yurt. I knew it was likely to be a tourist yurt, but sleeping in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan makes me less of a poseur than homeschooling-conference hippies, right?
Maybe not, but people can change.
Anyway, at an undeniably touristic yurt camp where I stayed, where German tourists flock to bask in the natural glory that are the pastures and mountains of Kyrgyzstan, I fell in with a group of Kyrgyz tourists who, like me, were entirely unused to yurt-living. They arrived a few hours after I did, and cheerfully plonked themselves beside me in the dining yurt and began chattering.
The afore-mentioned dining yurt
“I slept in a yurt once before actually,” said one of my new buddies. “But it wasn’t as comfortable as these ones. It was a real yurt.”
“You mean you don’t stay in yurts regularly, not even for vacation?” I asked. “No,” said another girl. “We don’t. We’re from Bishkek.”
The following night, the same girls regaled me with tales of their daytime activity, a show of traditional horse games and archery. As we ate we watched a young Kyrgyz girl dance to traditional music and then stood while she conducted a “master class” which was supposed to be a way for us to experience Kyrgyz dance, and was definitely a way to make us all look like total idiots. The Kyrgyz women were barely better than me at the moves, which surprised me. I’d thought that they would have at least some background, though movies or a lesson in an elementary school gym class – something. It didn’t appear to be the case.
We sat down again to munch on cookies and sip tea mixed with jam. The conversation went on in Russian, so I mostly focused on eating because unless I’m being spoken to directly, it’s hard for me to follow. I looked around at them. They comprised a wider variety of ages than I’d first assumed. The youngest girl I met was 15, and the oldest member of the group was in his early thirties.
“How did you all meet each other?” I asked, as the conversation lulled.
“Actually,” one explained, “This is a program called Muras and it’s about kochman. In Kyrgyz, kochman means nomad, and this program is about bringing youth who are Kyrgyz but who don’t have their culture anymore to experience the traditional Kyrgyz culture. You know, all Kyrgyz people used to be nomads and live in yurts, but now there are also a lot of people like us who live sedentary lives in Bishkek and speak usually Russian.”
“Are there any Kyrgyz people who don’t even speak Kyrgyz?” I asked.
“Yeah, maybe. We go to school in Russian and university in Russian, and maybe there are some parents who speak only Russian at home. In Bishkek, it’s possible. Or people speak Kyrgyz, but not at an academic level. Anyway, with this program we go around Kyrgyzstan for ten days for free, and we see some traditional things like what it is like to live in yurt, riding horses, dances, crafts and things like that. Some of us are writers, bloggers, and journalism students. We take pictures and write about our experience in order to encourage other youth to know more about traditional Kyrgyz culture.”
“I have another question,” I said. “During the Soviet Union, Kazakh people were forced into collective farming and more or less stopped being nomads. Did that happen in Kyrgyzstan too?”
“Actually, yes, there are lots of sedentary Kyrgyz people now,” said the woman sitting next to me, a doctoral student called Gulbara. “What usually happens nowadays is that people in the villages have some animals, but instead of taking them to pasture in the summertime they pay another shepherd to take his animals to pasture. So maybe only five people from every village go to live in a yurt in the summer. The rest stay in town and work. A lot of people don’t want to stay in yurts. Moving is expensive, and being in a yurt can be a bit boring.
Next up was an interview with camp staff, conducted by the journalistically inclined members of the group. The gist of the interview, translated for me later, was that the woman working at her camp loved her job because she saw it as a way to combat the rise of radicalization in Kyrgyzstan. “Why are youth interested in radicalization?” she asked. “Why not be interested in our traditions? That’s why I do what I do.”
I asked one girl, a journalist called Jibek, about her job outside of this program. “I mostly write about success stories,” she said. “In Russian and sometimes in English.” “Not in Kyrgyz?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Actually, my English is better than my Kyrgyz.”
At the next meal, I got a question I wasn’t prepared for: “So, what did you know about Kyrgyzstan before coming?”
I stammered, both because I was expected to answer in Russian because I hadn’t expected the question. “Um, I heard that you have yurts, that you eat a lot of meat, that you used to be a part of the Soviet Union… but you know, North Americans really know nothing about Central Asia. Really nothing. So I can’t say I was raised to think about Kyrgyzstan at all.”
“Well,” said one of my conversation partners helpfully, “Kyrgyzstan is actually kind of a contradicted country. We are right next to China and we look Asian, but we’re not Chinese. We speak a Turkic language, but we’re not Turkish. Many of us speak Russian and we were part of the Soviet Union, but we’re not Russian either. And we have many different ethnic groups – Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek, Muslim Chinese, some Turks and Koreans. And we’re kind of at a strategic location between all of those countries, so everybody wants a piece of the pie – especially China.”
The next day the group was rejoined by a woman working for UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, and the topic of radicalization came up again. “I work with education and things,” she said, “and some healthcare too. There is a big problem with radicalization in Kyrgyzstan, so we had a measles epidemic recently because of it. There were some people that were telling parents that vaccines weren’t halal, and that’s all it took.”
It seemed funny to me. Kyrgyzstan seemed utterly different from Turkey; few women were wearing Islamic coverings and I heard the call to prayer drifting from a nearby mosque only rarely. Still, the topic of radicalization had come up twice, and it seemed as though people were talking enough about it that it must have been current.
I left the yurt camp and my new friends to work for a few days in the nearest large town of Karakol. My homestay host had things to say about radicalization to. “Kyrgyzstan has some very nice, very good traditions and very good things,” he said. “But also some problems. Like radicalization is a big problem. In the south, about 1000 people went to join radical Islamist organizations this year. (Note: I’m just quoting, but this link claims 500.) It is mostly happening in the south, among young men who are not educated and don’t have anything good to do in their life. Yes, it’s a problem. A very big problem.
It seemed almost preposterous to me, as on the surface Kyrgyzstan had none of the overt aggressiveness that Turkey sometimes has, particularly when it came to young men. I occasionally got greeted in the street, but nobody touched me or tried to follow me, and most people did not even extend their greeting to flirtation.
I was standing in line at the airport in Bishkek waiting for my flight to Istanbul when the bombs went off at Ataturk airport. The latest news appears to indicate that one of the bombers was from Kyrgyzstan, so I guess there was something to what everybody seemed to be saying.
The main gist of the trip, however, was not radicalization but hospitality. And yurts. They were as good as I imagined.
Warning: Links in this post contain disturbing pictures. Click at your own risk.
“My cousin’s husband is in prison. He’s an imam and one day, after the prayer, he told people to avoid certain neighbourhoods because they were dangerous. The police came and took him away to prison. You know Kate, we was not allowed to visit, but one day they were telling us that we can visit. So my wife make some food and we go to the prison, but they told us to come back the next day. So we went back the next day, and they told us again to come back the next day. We didn’t go back, because we knew they were lying. Maybe they moved him or something – I don’t know. Or maybe they were doing the thing, you know Kate, with the electric wire, you know put the electric wire on the foot and BLLZZHRT…”
This was one of the earlier conversations I had with Hussein. The political situation in Yemen has always been a thread that runs through our discussions. Hussein brings it up like it’s the most normal thing in the world, before segueing on to other topics that are actually normal or maybe (like camel jumping) just a little bit weird.
In our last conversation, he said, “You know Kate, things in Yemen is not so good right now.” He paused. This was the first time he’d said anything like this; he’d mentioned the war before, how his children cry during the bombings and how it’s impossible to go to Saudi Arabia to see relatives now, but always with a sort of incongruous cheerfulness. (Bedouin people traditionally roamed all throughout the desert between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Hussein was even born in Saudi Arabia, but ultimately ended up with Yemeni citizenship while many of his close family members became Saudi Arabians).
That day, Hussein’s cheerful demeanor seemed to have dimmed. The pause lasted for a few seconds as he shook his head.
“But Kate!” he said, recovering himself “You know, I have neighbour and he is a Jewish. You know, Kate, there is no problem Muslim Jewish in Sanaa. No problem! Usually the Muslims are loving the Jewish and the Jewish are loving the Muslims. But the Jewish, you know they have a very old Torah. And there were some Muslims – not all Muslims, bad Muslims – they were trying to burn the Torah of the Jewish. So the Jewish, they wanted to bring the Torah to Israel. And –,” he looked gleeful, “I helped them!”
Hussein works at the airport. I won’t give any more details because he’s asked that I don’t reveal his identity (as before, his name and a few other identifying details have been changed.) However, having access to the airport in Sanaa gives one a big advantage: namely, you can find ways to transport things in and out of Yemen. It’s not a privilege that many Yemenis have and it’s a privilege that seems to have kept Hussein and his family in good shape even while malnutrition and poverty ravage the country at rates that, by some estimates, are twice as high as they were before the war.
“So yes, Kate” Hussein continued, “My neighbour – the Jewish – he said he would pay me but I didn’t take any money. I said I only needed the money to bribe the baggage handler! So I gave the baggage handler 500 USD and then pointed out which bag he shouldn’t check and then they got the bag to Jordan. I said that I couldn’t help them after Jordan, but they said it was fine. The Israel embassy would pick it up! So in Jordan, the Israeli embassy picked it up, and there are even some pictures of the Israeli prime minister reading the Torah!”
He sent me a few photos.
One of the pictures he sent. Source appears to be Breaking Israel News.
“Could the baggage handler see what was in the bag?” I asked. “He knew it wasn’t a bomb or something?”
“Yes, of course. He knew it is not bomb. Anyway, Yemen doesn’t have a real government really, so no problem. No problem!”
I made a mental note to myself that flying in or out of Yemen was to be done at my own risk. Not that that wasn’t already kind of obvious.
“Anyway, it was good to take it out of Yemen because it would be bad to burn it.” Hussein continued, “And then after, all of the people who worked on the plane or who could have maybe smuggled the thing were taken to the police station. And they asked us if we knew anything and I said no. They let me go. Anyway, the man who asked me to help him – he is safe in Israel now so they can’t get him.”
“Also Kate,” he said, “I just found out that my wife is – you know what is the thing when you have a baby?”
“Pregnant?”
“Yes! Pregnant. She is pregnant. She is starting to have some, you know, sickness. So she went to the doctor and the doctor said she is pregnant.”
Immediately after we hung up, I googled the Torah only to learn that most of the remaining Jews in Yemen had made Aliyah to Israel around the same time, and that it was widely reported in the Jewish press that at least one or two people had gone to prison over the smuggling of the scroll. I didn’t see Hussein pop up on Skype the whole week, and started to worry. Had he been called back into the police station for a course of electric shock torture? Had his house been damaged and family crushed in airstrikes?
I sent him a message on Skype. There was no answer.
Two days later I sent him an e-mail and got a response. “Thank you Kate, we are fine. We can talk tomorrow, if you have time.”
He rang me the next day, back to his normal jovial self. “I have a question for you Kate. You know, in Islam we are praying five times a day. In Christianity, what is the prayer schedule?”
I stumbled through an explanation of how it was basically different for everybody and that the many Christian denominations are quite diverse.
“Oh yes Kate! I am loving this word “diversity.” Thank you for teaching it to me! So you know, Kate, in Islam we have to pray five times per day. But you know, that is a lot. And you have to get up very early. Sometimes I do it … like once in one day. And sometimes just once a week! One time I asked a cleric man about this and he said that I had to pray five times per day. So I told him, ‘well, it is easy for you! You are cleric man. This is your job and you get paid for it. But me, I am busy!’ The cleric man, you know – well, he is a cleric – and he told me that maybe I would go to hell. But I don’t think that God would do that. He knows who is a good person and who isn’t a good person.”
The conversation turned to Hussein’s other main vice, alcohol. “Okay, you know Kate,” said Hussein, “alcohol, it is not allowed in Islam. But you know, the reason it is not allowed is because maybe if you get drunk you will get angry and kill someone! I think this is kind of wrong because I don’t get angry, I get calm. Also Kate, whenever I am speaking English and I have drunk two or three beers, I am so good at speaking English! I am not even nervous. What about you? When you talk to people like me and correct them, I am not sure how you are patient. Maybe if you had a drink before you would be even more calm?”
Before leaving, Hussein showed me a few bottles of olive oil from Jordan that he’d sourced through his aerial shipping networks. “Look Kate, these are some olive oil. I bought them for my neighbours because they are poor.”
Another article this week: “Responsibility when it suits us,” (original article in French, all translations by me.) The article is about Canada’s foreign affairs policy and essentially states that the official position of the Canadian government is that, while we care about the human rights of our citizens, that shouldn’t prevent us from engaging with countries that don’t. Many of these countries are major global actors, and it would be irresponsible to ignore them.
According to Stéphane Dion, it would be irresponsible to break a contract that we have to sell light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia because they are not respecting human rights in Yemen. To wit, Saudi Arabia is not simply targeting military targets, but has also bombed civilian neighbourhoods in Sanaa.
I got angrier and angrier as I read through the article. Apparently, refusing to sell LAVs to Saudi Arabia could result in thousands of lost jobs and a loss to Canada’s credibility. That’s right – Canada might be perceived as a commercial partner incapable of keeping their word for refusing to sell arms to a country engaging in what are recognized by the UN as war crimes.
I told Hussein about it. “I’m really ashamed to say this,” I said, “but Canada sells weapons to Saudi Arabia.”
Hussein did not react the way I expected. “Kate! You know, this is just business! No problem! Just business!” An emphatic denial of what I consider distinctly unethical. Sure, having trade relations with Saudi Arabia might be okay if we were selling wheat or something, but selling weapons that would likely be used to perpetuate human rights abuses? Hussein didn’t agree with me, but that did not change my opinion.
As Canadians, we are not just responsible when it suits us. In the face of over a million malnourished children, I daresay that Canada can lose 3000 jobs. Of course I recognize that Saudi Arabia is not the only actor in the war, but their entry into the conflict appears to have caused more problems than it’s solved.
Hussein wasn’t done talking about bringing things across borders. “You know Kate,” he said, “in Yemen, we have the qat – you know, it is a drug and it is getting us high. But it is illegal in other countries. If you want to bring some to other countries you have to make it very dry and put it in teabags. Then they will look at it when you get to the other country and they will think, ‘this is only tea!’
Paper giving an allure of legitimacy to a harmful substance. It seemed a darkly amusing metaphor for Canada’s contract with Saudi Arabia, but maybe that was just me.
If you’re Canadian, letters protesting this can be addressed to
The Honorable Stéphane Dion House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1A 0A6
Postage is not required. Simply drop your letter in the nearest post box.
**By the way, if you’re American or French you sell even more arms to Saudi Arabia than Canadians. Please feel free to write to your appropriate representatives to protest your involvement.
After jet setting around the world on the hunt for edifying conversations, I turned out to be sitting in my room in Montreal when I met Hussein. I’d come back to Montreal hoping to finish my degree, read a bit more about the places I’d explored, bash out some more articles for my blog and for posterity, and work. I need a break from a constant barrage of new cultures and new history, just to process what I’d already learned. Or so I thought.
Hussein and I met online soon after I came back to Canada. He messaged me one day on a website I spend time on to see if I was willing to help him practice his English. His website profile told me he was from “Yeman” and living in “Yeman.” I’d never met anybody from Yemen before, so I agreed to add him on Skype and see how it went.
I’ve met a lot of people online this way, but Hussein was different. Our first meeting, he introduced me to his two toddlers, who waved through the camera at me and serenaded me with an enthused chorus of “habibi, habibi!” Hussein also introduced me to his wife, who waved politely and left quickly. After she was gone, he said, “My wife was not very friendly to you because she is jealous and doesn’t want me to learn English from a woman who is not veiled. I told her it was not a problem and that you love your boyfriend.”
I started to feel uncomfortable. Not – of course – that I’d had any intention of homewrecking the marriage of some guy in Yemen. But you know, I didn’t want to be that girl.
Hussein continued, “My wife, she is very conservative. Too conservative. Her father is a religious figure in Yemen, and she is always always praying. 5 times a day, can you believe it?! I mean, yes yes, God is One and you are supposed to pray, but one or two times is enough. No problem!”
“Hmm,” I said, non-committally, mentally weighing whether it was appropriate for me to keep talking to this guy if his wife wasn’t okay with it.
“Well, yes, she is very conservative. But actually, she is a good wife and I love her and my kids.”
I decided that if he was unequivocal about loving her, I could continue. Already, he’d piqued my interest with a sort of guilelessness and candor rare among the people I meet online and, for that matter, among the people I meet in real life.
I wasn’t wrong. Hussein seemed to have little understanding of how different my life was from his and did little to filter what he told me. Sometimes his stories were intriguing and different, sometimes shocking. I tried to always react like he was talking about something that seemed normal even though this was often not the case.
Take, for example, the story of Hussein. Hussein was a Bedouin boy from the desert. He lived in a nomadic tent encampment with his father, his father’s several wives, and his siblings. At some point, Hussein found himself needing an education, so he went to Lebanon. There, at the academy, he was treated with contempt. “All those people were telling me, you are just a stupid Bedouin boy, how are you going to do well in school?” he told me. “So I got the highest grade in the class, even in English class. No problem!”
After working in Lebanon for a while, Hussein eventually moved back to Yemen and got a good job in the city, far away from the desert life he had grown up with. When he came back to Yemen, his mother called him. “I think it’s time you get married,” she said, or something to that effect. Hussein agreed, and his mother said, “I’ve found a very nice girl for you. She is beautiful and she is from a good tribe. You can marry her.” Hussein’s sisters corroborated his mother’s story, so Hussein agreed to the marriage.
“In Yemen,” he said, “among the Bedouin, you don’t meet before the wedding. Then there are two marriage parties. One for the women and one for the men. So we had these parties, and then my wife’s tribe veiled her completely and put her on a camel. Then they brought the camel to our tribe, and while they were coming they were shooting their guns to say, “We are coming, we are coming!” Then we were also shooting our guns to say, “you are welcome! You are welcome!” Then my wife arrived on the camel. She got off the camel and I had to unveil her face. Then I wasn’t allowed to touch her for a few days, and then we were married and I could touch her.
Hussein’s stories often follow a few common themes. Contrasts and tensions between his upbringing in the desert and his current life in a city in Yemen and his life in Lebanon, or between conservative Islam and his more liberal belief. Camels. Technological innovation. The war in Yemen. And food. One day, I asked him to tell me about Yemeni food.
“Oh it is so delicious!” he said. “We are having lots of delicious food in Yemen, especially the food that is being cooked in the desert. We actually bury it and roast it underground. Actually, the women do it. Men hunt in Yemen. They don’t cook.”
“Oh?” I said. “So what kinds of things do you eat?”
“Oh, you know, lambs, camels. Also the milk of the camel. It is so delicious. Inshallah, when you and your boyfriend come to visit Yemen, I will introduce you to camel milk. Mmmm.” He smacked his lips. “Also, we don’t eat any cows or pigs. There are no cows in the desert, so I have never eaten cow meat. Do you eat camel meat in Canada?”
I told him we didn’t.
“Oh, that is very sad,” he said, “When you come to visit Yemen inshallah you will eat the meat of the camel. We are also eating grasshoppers. They are very delicious.”
“How do you eat them?” I asked, mentally wondering if Yemenites were in the habit of eating grasshopper soup or grasshopper salad or something.
“Ohhhh,” Hussein paused, “well, here in the city with just my wife and my kids we are eating them with mayonnaise and ketchup, no problem! But when my father is coming to visit, we eat them by themselves because, you know Kate, if we are eating them with mayonnaise and ketchup my father will be telling me that I’m not a real man.”
Another time, Hussein told me about the delectable desert gerbil. “In the desert, we are eating gerbils,” he said.
“Gerbils?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, gerbils. They are very delicious. The women, they make them like roasting. Here, I will send you a picture of a gerbil from the desert.”
This is a desert gerbil.
And this is a desert gerbil kebab.
Camels are another common theme in conversations with Hussein.
“My son,” he told me one day, “my son he is so like camels. Especially small camels because my son is very small. Sometimes he is like, you know, riding the small camels in the city.”
“Do you guys use camels for long distances?” I asked.
“No no!” he said. “We are using cars for this. Camels would take soooo long. But in the city, we are often using camels to go places.”
Another time, he told me about a traditional Bedouin sport.
“You know Kate, in the desert,” he said, “We are doing some sports with jumping and camels.”
“Jumping camels?”
“Yes, yes, we are running, and we are jumping.”
“Can you send me a picture?”
Hussein sent me a picture of a boy in midair, jumping over a camel.
I stared at it dumbly. “Oh,” I said, “You mean you jump over camels.”
“Yes yes!” he said enthusiastically. “We are jumping over camels.”
“Can you jump over camels?” I asked. Hussein isn’t a small guy like the boys in the picture.
“Oh,” he said, “when I was younger I was jumping over camels. But now I am, you know, I am married and my wife cooks very good food. So I have gotten some extra weight. Maybe now I could jump over only one camel. One small camel.”
Hussein’s wife would come up from time to time. Eventually, it would appear that she got used to me, even waving and smiling at me occasionally from the other side of the camera. Although Hussein is still unequivocal about loving her, her lifestyle occasionally grates on his nerves. Hussein pines for his life in Lebanon, where he could go to a bar and enjoy a beer. Hussein’s wife, on the other hand, has no desire to engage in this kind of lifestyle.
“Oh Kate!” Hussein said one day, “I had a very nice day. I went to the market today and I bought some nice clothes for my kids, a Spiderman t-shirt for my son and a dress for my daughter. But my wife – every time I give her money to buy something nice for herself, she is giving it to, you know, the poor people. She is just very religious. And she won’t buy any nice clothes. I tell her she shouldn’t wear an abaya, but she is always saying, ‘No, I want to wear my abaya.'”
“But…” he said again, “I do love my wife. She’s a good wife. But also Kate, you know, I told her that she should learn English. Maybe, you know, she can also practice her English with you. But she told me that she didn’t want to learn English. But then I had a very good idea and I told her that if she learned English she could tell people who spoke English about Islam. Then she said that maybe it was a good idea for her to learn English too. Inshallah I will teach her the alphabet and the she can also start talking to you.”
“Also Kate,” he said. “My father is always telling me that I should get some more wives. He has four wives and lots of children. But he doesn’t understand that I love having only one wife. My wife is enough for me.”
Over all of Hussein’s everyday concerns arches the war in Yemen, a war I didn’t know about until I met him. Hussein mentioned it for the first time in his characteristic offhand way, like it’s something I should have already known about and normalized.
“You know Kate,” he said, “last night there was a lot of bombing here. And my kids were very scared, they were crying.”
“Who is fighting?” I asked.
“Well,” Hussein responded, “nobody exactly knows all the details, but I think Saudi Arabia is wanting control of some of Yemen’s oil and so they invaded. And they are bombing military things. You know, it is very bad. That’s why I am hoping to get a job outside of Yemen with a different company and learn to speak good English so that people can understand me. Inshallah.”
A few weeks later, he sent me a picture of some bombed out passenger planes. “Hey Kate,” he said, “here are some pictures of some planes that were damaged by shrapnel last night when Saudi Arabia was bombing military runways at the airport. Also, you know, these are Bombardier aircraft! They are from Canada.”
“Is this on the news?” I asked. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday,” (February 9th for the first three pictures, a week later for the fourth) he said. “I don’t know if it’s on the news.”
I googled. It wasn’t.
“You are welcome to write about it on your blog if you want, just don’t say who sent you the photographs. You are not allowed to take photographs in this airport. (Hussein, by the way, is not his real name, and I have changed some other identifying details.)” I agreed.
The conversation turned back to more quotidian concerns. “You know Kate,” he said, “I want to show you something.” He brought his computer over to the corner of his living room. “This is my electricity generator. I am hooking up some solar panels and generating electricity through this. This is my converter and this is my router. It is working very well! We are even giving some electricity to our neighbour for her lights because she is poor and she is a widow. I bought this when I was in Lebanon. You know Kate, before the war this was not so expensive. But now because of the war it is becoming very expensive. So I am lucky.”
“Aren’t you afraid that somebody will steal it when you aren’t home?” I asked. “Oh no,” he said. “When I am home, no problem! And when I am not home, my wife she is able to use our Kalashnikov if there are thieves.”
Hussein is also a big fan of the movie Avatar. “Oh, I am loving this movie Avatar,” he told me once. “It is like living in the desert, with the wars between the tribes and stuff, you know Kate. I am, you know, like I am understanding this movie.”
Most recently, Hussein told me about chewing khat. “This weekend, my father is coming, so we are going to chew some khat,” he told me. “I really should quit, but if my father comes he will say, ‘why are you not chewing the khat’ with me. So I will get pretty high.”
He paused and reflected.
“But you know Kate,” he said. “Chewing the khat can be kind of dangerous because they are putting pesticides on it. So sometimes it makes the insides of your cheek hurt. But it is okay because my father has a friend who knows how to identify when the khat has pesticides on it. Yes, it is okay.”
“Well, good luck,” I said. Later, he sent me a photo of chewing khat captioned, “Now I am going to get high.” I didn’t know if I should be proud of teaching him that word, or worried. The constant background of the war and public-health dangers seems to be perceived by Hussein as relative normalcy.
During our last conversation, he said, “There was bombing again last night, and my kids were scared. But, you know, me and my wife are okay. There have been four wars in Yemen. We are used to it. Inshallah, it will end soon but you know, we are used to it.”
I spent the holidays in France enjoying the hospitality of some friends, overindulging in cheese and wine, and trying out a tandem bike. The cheese and the wine were the same and the tandem bike was a nice addition, but France had changed since my last trip there four years ago. Evidence of the recent terrorist attacks on Paris felt immediately present . . . in all the wrong ways.
I’d already planned the trip when “Paris” happened, and as my arrival approached, I began to wonder how France would be different from when I was last there in 2012. Would there be more security at the airport? Would they ask me questions about my plans in the country? Would they give me the same ‘you’re a piece of dirt on my shoe’ treatment that Israeli border guards are famous for?**
I had my passport quickly checked after getting off the plane, but unless my bags were scanned on the tarmac, they weren’t screened. At border control, the agent looked at me for less than two seconds before stamping my passport. It didn’t seem like security had been particularly heightened, at least not for white girls with Canadian passports – not even ones full of Turkish passport stamps.
It wasn’t until I left passport control that I observed the first signs of France’s response to the attacks. A group of soldiers carrying machine guns big enough to make an NSA agent reconsider his position on gun control walked languidly, aimlessly past me. Aha! Finally, the heightened security. The soldiers were nearly all young men; few looked older than 23. This was probably for the best, I thought. If suicide bombers are willing to commit suicide to carry out an attack, opening a round of fire on them post-blast might not be much of a deterrent. The potential civilian casualties, on the other hand, could be enormous.
I did not take this picture, but it is very representative of what the soldiers look like. This is at the Gare du Nord, in Paris. Photo Credit: Evan Bench.
The patrols popped up in crowded places all over the country. Many of my friends shook their heads at their presence and the obvious inefficacy of the French response to the attacks. “There is no verification at many border checkpoints,” an AirBnB host told me. “At the big ones, yeah, but at the little ones, no. I drove to Germany on the smaller country roads the other day, and they didn’t look twice at me – just let me go through.” Later, a friend remarked that if even one of those soldiers had a violent mental illness, they might open fire on civilians, and that access to guns statistically raises the rates of shootings.
Early on in the trip, I learned from television that certain factions in French politics would advocate for stripping a terrorist’s French citizenship if they held citizenship in another country. Half of the group that I was watching with seemed to support this idea. “Well,” one said, “we wouldn’t take away their citizenship unless they had dual citizenship of course. They wouldn’t be stateless. Anyway, why should French people pay to imprison people who kill French people? It’s not like we have any money to spare!”
We had the same debate a few months ago in Canada, before the well-timed demise of the great bogeyman in the oilfields, so it isn’t like I can look down on France for proposing it. Embarrassingly, there are factions within my own country who would support this kind of thing even though Canada has never actually experienced a terrorist attack.
Others have said this before me, and they have said it better. This is a stupid idea. It is a stupid idea in France, and it was a stupid idea in Canada. It is cowardly and unfair. It is risky. It would open the door for human rights abuses. And it would allow France (or other countries who practice it) to shove the responsibility for its own problems on other countries who do not deserve to deal with them more than France does.
There is absolutely no guarantee that law enforcement in a terrorist’s secondary country of citizenship will ensure that the terrorist has no opportunities to be further involved in extremist activities. Once France revokes a citizenship, the French government will have no control over the former citizen. The former citizen could join militant organizations. They could use their understanding of French language and culture to help others carry out other attacks.
But let’s assume that the secondary country of citizenship will use their laws to put this former French citizen behind bars. Who is to say that human rights will be respected in their prisons? Who is to say that the prisons are secure? Terrorists deserve basic human rights – that’s the point of human rights. They apply to everyone, even terrorists and pedophiles. If France did that, how could they claim in good conscience to be a country that respects human rights?
Now let’s assume that this dual citizen has the citizenship of a country like Norway. Prison human rights are not going to be an issue. The French government strips him of his citizenship and ships him off to Norway. In Norway, Norwegian taxpayers shoulder the burden of this man’s imprisonment.
Finally, how can France truly claim to not having money? France has the one of the best standards of living in the world. France uses the Euro, one of the world’s strongest currencies. Sure, it’s not perfect: the unemployment rate is fairly high, but France certainly has more money than many of the places where a terrorist would likely be deported if they lost their French citizenship.
The French response wasn’t all bad. I heard about some programs meant for troubled youth that were opened in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and many French people – friends and otherwise – made it clear that they didn’t agree with the more conservative discourses present in French politics and, like me, thought the military patrols were useless and dangerous.
At the end of my time in France, I had to go back to Istanbul to fly home to Canada. My train to the Paris airport left early in the morning. It was one third full, at best. Over the intercom, a sterile female voice kept telling us to make sure our bags were tagged with our name; otherwise, they would be subject to destruction. My bag was within my line of vision, but not tagged. I asked the woman next to me if it was as big a deal as they said, fully prepared for the afore-mentioned 18 year-old soldiers to board the train and cart my stuff off for some kind of incineration.
“Oh no,” said the woman, “It won’t be a problem. You and I don’t look Middle-Eastern. I don’t agree with the way things are, but that’s the way they are.”
**To be honest, while unpleasant, I think the Israeli approach to airport security is likely more effective than the approach France seems to have adopted.
The first time I came to Turkey to live, I was living in Izmir. Life in Izmir was a constant barrage of Ataturk paraphernalia. People had decals of his signature on their back windshields, tattoos of it on their arms, and pictures of him everywhere – on the wall, on cell-phone cases, on their transit cards, key-chains, you name it. Reading a book about Ataturk in public got me many approving comments and people would stop walking to comment and show me their tattoos/keychains/cell phone cases, etc.
Once, while at the beach in Cesme I saw a woman splayed out on the beach, blond hair seductively spread out on her towel. Her bathing-suit area was barely covered by a black bikini. She had Ataturk’s signature tattooed on her pelvic bone, angled towards her vulva like a Freudian exclamation point.
This is an Izmir transit card. The writing says, “Oh Turkish youth, your first duty is to preserve and defend Turkish independence and the Turkish republic.”
From other people, I heard about a fancy dress display in Izmir where the dress on the right was a big Turkish flag and the dress on the left had a giant decal of Ataturk’s face.
Ataturk’s face and signature on a Turkish government building in Istanbul. Izmir is the epicentre of the Ataturk fan base, but his cult extends into many other parts of Turkey.
This was just my introduction to the Cult of Ataturk in Turkey. Izmir is the epicentre of this, but Ataturk’s popularity ranges far and wide among people of a few different political stripes. Although these people are predominantly secular or secular-ish, the range of their political beliefs can include everything from hoping for Turkey to become more aligned with European ideals (yea) to virulent Turkish nationalism (and it’s bastard child – hating Kurds and Armenians) (nay).
“But I don’t know anything about Ataturk!” you say. Here is a crash course, because I am less here to talk about the history of Ataturk as I am to talk about his current legacy in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was a military leader who became the first president of Turkey in 1923 after securing military victory against the Allies. He is known for implementing a series of reforms in Turkey. This included changing the writing system of the Turkish language to the Latin alphabet and proposing new ethnically “Turkish” words to replace Arabic or Persian loan-words; secularization of the government and country including banning religious-based attire; and providing civil rights for women.
Sounds okay, right?
Ataturk also was a major figure in the Turkish nationalist movement, which gave Turkish people a great common identity but was less beneficial for some other groups living in the former Ottoman Empire, such as Greeks. Much of the “Turkification” of Turkey can be attributed to Ataturk’s efforts, and people who espouse his ideas int he present day are known as “Kemalists.”
Let’s get back to the matter at hand. When I talk about “The Cult of Ataturk”, I’m not being hyperbolic. As one friend from Izmir explained to me,
“Back when I was still a believer [in God], every time I imagined God he had Ataturk’s face. And it wasn’t just me. I’ve spoken to other friends about this and they’ve said the same thing.”
I already believed her, so imagine how unsurprised I was when I had a similar conversation about a month later.
“We, in Turkey, we need to go back to what it was like under Ataturk – not with any of this Kurdish people playing the victim stuff. When I was a kid, Ataturk was like GOD!”
Ataturk postcards I picked up in North-Eastern Turkey
A few weeks before this, I had been to the Ataturk mausoleum in Ankara with another Turkish friend. This mausoleum is, no joke, like a Greek temple of the gods, all pillars, statues, polished stone, gardens, and carefully tended grandiosity. We got there late in the afternoon and weren’t able to go into the museum. My friend said, “too bad we couldn’t go into the museum. The last time I was there, and I could see all of Ataturk’s things and his books, I – I really felt something.”
We got there right at closing time, and soldiers were shooing people out. I snapped this picture as a soldier stared daggers at me for not moving fast enough. Usually, this area is full of throngs of people.
The other part of the “Cult” part of the “Cult of Ataturk” is most Turkish people’s unwillingness to criticize him or his legacy, even just a little bit. Another friend in Izmir told me,
“Ataturk is such a huge figure in Turkey, and people treat him like he was beyond reproach. Even my friends are like this. For instance, I think Ataturk was mostly a good guy – but human. He did some good things, but he wasn’t perfect so he did some things that also weren’t that great. But I can’t even say that.”
Another friend said,
“Turkey in general is very conservative, but in Izmir there is another kind of conservatism – that is, Kemalism. People just aren’t critical and the devotion to Ataturk prevents people from seriously examining their attitudes.”
If you don’t believe these people, allow me to show you several screenshots or comments from a blog post that called Ataturk a “benevolent dictator.” To me, this seems fair, as the word “dictator,” applies to anybody who was not democratically elected, no matter how good at governing they are . . . right?
According to these comments, wrong. Here is one where the person took it rather personally.
Here is my favourite. Somehow, this ‘anonymous’ manages to hate Racists, Kurds, and Armenians all at the same time! I can only dream of one day reaching such impressive levels of hypocrisy!
Of course, may of the comments on the site are quite reasonable, and you can read them for yourself. However, most of them are much more reactionary than the post deserves.
The Problem with the Cult of Ataturk
It bears saying that I fully support when people are fans of Ataturk because of the good things that he did. Even I think women’s rights and having a secular state are a good thing, and there is no doubt that many of Ataturk’s reforms were beneficial to Turkey in general.
However, Ataturk is also a powerful symbol of the Turkish Nationalist movement, and I have something of a fraught relationship with the ideology of nationalism in general. At best, nationalist movements can gain rights for people who lack them. At worst, nationalism can create division or violence, particularly when people belonging to two (or more) previously not-so-clearly delineated groups begin to use a particular identity in order to make claims about how another group is a very bad thing, or when one clearly delineated group decides that another clearly delineated group should become exactly like them.
To add to this, nationalism is difficult to define. In the Turkish case, does being proud of speaking Turkish count? Listening to Sezen Aksu? Eating breakfast for an hour every morning?
When I write about nationalism in Turkey, I am not simply writing about appreciation for Turkish national culture and language, but rather about cultures of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ specifically regarding Turkish people and Kurdish people. A common attitude that I have observed among Turkish people is this: Traditional non-Turks that toe the line and act like Turks are fine, of course. Kurds, however, are not fine because (and I quote somebody I met) “Turkey has given them so much and then they complain.”
(Again, it bears repeating before I continue that they are many fabulous wonderful Turkish people who are not like this at all, some of whom read my blog – guys, I don’t mean you!)
But for those who do think this way, the argument goes like this. Turkey, in its benevolence, gave Kurdish people Turkish passports and the chance to be Turkish (wasn’t that nice of them?) Kurdish people don’t work hard enough and have way too many babies, so they’re poor. If they complain about the fact that they are poor, they are just ungrateful whiners. Some Kurdish people aren’t poor, so that must mean that Kurdish people in general could just be exactly like Turkish people if they would only pull their socks up and behave like proper Turkish people. This includes speaking Turkish, acting Turkish, and calling themselves – you guessed it – Turkish. Also, there are lots of poor Turkish people, which de facto means that things are definitely not worse for Kurds in general in Turkey because if Turkish people can also be poor, discrimination is obviously not a problem.
What is especially frustrating is that many of the Turkish people I talk to don’t understand that their frustrations with Kurdish nationalism are a result of their own Turkish nationalist ideas. In the words of one friend,
“I really hate Turkish nationalism.”
Later,
“I cannot even believe that Kurdish people want to take their government oaths in Kurdish.”
If you aren’t a nationalist, why would it matter what language people took their oaths in???
I am not particularly exaggerating the tone of this discourse. And while I think things get thornier when we talk about the PKK (the Kurdish rebel/terrorist army, depending on who you ask) because they actually engage in combat and I don’t think killing people is ever a good thing, some of the things that people say about Kurdish nationalism seem like non-issues to me. So Kurdish government officials want to take their oaths in Kurdish. If you’re not nationalist, it shouldn’t matter . . . right?
None of this can actually be said to be Ataturk’s fault, as he’s been dead for nearly 100 years. Ataturk’s legacy, on the other hand, is a major contributor to this as Ataturk advocated for the Turkification of Turkey. And instead of allowing Turkish people to be critical of this “True Turks act Turkish” ideology, the cultish nature of Ataturk’s legacy means that people who express doubts about Ataturk’s ideology or legacy are likely to be lambasted in by similar comments to the ones found in the article I linked to earlier.
Another problem is that Kemalism positions itself in opposition to strong religious factions in the country. One person said to me, “I don’t love nationalism, but I think it might be the only way to work against the conservative religious factions that are gaining power in Turkey right now.”
The only way? It was astonishing to me, coming from a country whose national narrative is basically multiculturalism, that he didn’t envision a middle ground.
Free Speech and the Cult of Ataturk
“Insulting the Turkish Nation” and insulting Ataturk’s legacy are illegal under the Turkish penal code, punishable by up to three years in prison. YouTube has been banned several times in Turkey, allegedly because some people have insulted Ataturk in the comments. Nobody likes to be insulted, but what is this? Could this post be seen as insulting Ataturk’s legacy? As a Canadian, I am unlikely to be tried in a Turkish court, but could I be denied a visa for writing this kind of thing? I don’t know and I hope not.
And here we are today!
Today there are parliamentary elections in Turkey, and I have my fingers crossed into knots that Turkey will elect somebody good to parliament.
These elections are taking place in order to try and correct a snafu that Turkey has been dealing with since the last parliamentary elections five months ago. During those elections, Erdogan’s party failed to secure a majority, which meant that they couldn’t form the government unless they were supported by another party. Everybody got very excited about the possibility of a coalition, but none of the parties were particularly willing to share the toys in the parliamentary sandbox. Because there was no government, a new series of elections are called.
My hope is that, instead of people sinking further and further into their respective political corners, pointing fingers and screaming “You’re the bad guy! I’m the good guy!”, making it difficult to come to any sort of meaningful compromise or even form a parliament, Turkish people will elect good leaders today, leaders who will work together for some kind of unity within the country for Turkish, Kurdish, secular, and religious people alike. It’s a high hope, to be sure, but maybe not impossible.
Polls have closed now, so I’m off to look at the news. Have a good day everybody!
*** WARNING. This post contains pictures of a dead goat. ***
Not being Muslim, I have little awareness of when major Muslim holidays fall, and so I was happily surprised when my friend Oznur in Istanbul invited me to spend “Kurban Bayram” with her family.
“They’re planning on sacrificing a goat,” she said.
What a chance! It’s not every day that somebody invites me to a goat sacrifice, so I gratefully accepted. Then I realized I didn’t actually know anything about the holiday, although I assumed it was religious. So I asked Oznur whether the idea of it was to give meat to the poor. She laughed.
“That might have been the original idea, but mostly these days I think people just put the meat in the freezer.”
It turns out that Kurban Bayram is the same holiday as Eid al-Adha, which I had heard about before. For the Christians and Jews out there, it is sort of like the Muslim equivalent of Easter or Passover and follows the basic theme of “a lamb is slaughtered in the place of a person.”
Not Christian or Jewish? Simply confused? Allow me put my bachelors degree in religion to use (for once!) and offer a very simplified explanation.
Early on in the Bible, God commands a guy named Abraham to slaughter his only son, Isaac. Abraham, being very obedient and devoted to God, begins to obey only to have God tell him that,while he’s actually pretty impressed with his devotion, he doesn’t actually have to slaughter his son. Instead, he can slaughter a ram that has conveniently appeared on scene.
But wait! There’s more!
After that, the Israelites become enslaved in Egypt and God tells them that if they slaughter a lamb and paint their door frames with its blood, they will be protected against the Angel of Death. People who do not do this, however, will find their first born son dead in the morning. After that, the Jewish people will be able to up and leave slavery and Egypt because the Egyptians aren’t going to be in any condition to chase them. The Egyptians, apparently, deserve this harsh punishment because of the stubbornness of their Pharaoh vis-à-vis the Israelites. Jewish people still commemorate this holiday as Pesach, or Passover.
Many years later, Jesus appears on the scene and, after spreading his message, he falls afoul of the authorities and is crucified. Subsequently, his followers lay the foundations for Christian theology, which maintains that Jesus was a. God’s only son (kind of like Isaac) and b. a sacrificial lamb of sorts who volunteered his life to save humankind. Jesus’s crucifixion is celebrated by Christians as Easter.
One more thing: In the Muslim account, it is not Isaac who Abraham is supposed to slaughter, but Abraham’s other son Ishmael. In the Judeo-Christian account, Ishmael kind of doesn’t count as Abraham’s son because he is his son via Hagar, a slave woman. I have never really understood why it was okay that Abraham accorded Isaac so much more value than Ishmael, but my theological botherations have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
So while Jews celebrate their version of the holiday be not eating leavening, and Christians by hiding chocolate eggs and waving palm leaves, Muslims, at least in Turkey celebrate it by actually slaughtering an animal.
Now if you thought that I might think that this is primitive and barbaric, you would be wrong. I understand that if I eat meat (which I do) it has to be slaughtered somehow, and while many a belief system has promoted things that I would consider objectionable, I honestly think a once-a-year goat slaughtrifice is neither here nor there.
That being said, however, the literalness of the interpretation of the holiday is very different from what I am used to.
The day before Bayram, we drove to Oznur’s family’s village in Eastern Turkey. On the way, we spied several markets selling sheep and goats for slaughter the next day. We also passed many a goat and/or sheep that had found itself being transported to its death in a variety of (sometimes very funny) ways.
My favourite was this goat riding in a motorcycle sidecar. His last rites may have been a bit perfunctory, but he sure got a good last ride.
This is a man. On a motorcycle. With a goat in the sidecar. I only wish the picture quality were better.
That night, as we slept over in the village, the strangled cries of all the animals who would be slaughtered the next day filled the air. I don’t know how they knew they were going to die, but I have never heard a cow make a sound like that before, and I am sure that somehow it knew. This was the most disturbing part of the holiday for me.
The next morning a few people (not me) took pictures next to the goat, and then the family dug a hole in the ground for the blood to pool, pinned the goat down, and cut its throat.
This is the goat in question.
They continued holding it down until it died about three minutes later. As near as I could tell, the whole thing was about as humane as possible. The goat couldn’t see the knife before it cut him.
Still, I didn’t take any pictures of the goat during the slaughter.
After the goat died, he was dragged over to the house to be skinned. To make separating the skin from the rest of the goat easier, they cut a hole in the goat’s leg, inserted a pipe and, I kid you not, blew that goat up like a balloon.
Seriously! He is blowing it up like a balloon!
With a layer of air between the goat’s skin and its innards, it was time to hoist it up into a tree. This took a bit of effort because goats are heavy.
Q. How many Turkish people does it take to hoist a goat? A. Three, duh.
After that, they skinned the goat, removed the organs, and threw the meat into pots to be prepared for lunch. While they were working, they told me that they actually did give a third of the meat to the poor. For some reason, I felt glad and a bit relieved.
This was the final result.
Those things that look like ribs in the centre are, in fact, ribs.
Thank you very much Oznur, Ozge, and family for the invitation and the hospitable welcome!
