Missions Resources - Bibliography
Crescent & Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds
Authors: Stephen Kinzer
ISBN: 0374528667
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Number of pages: 252
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
Reviewed by Barbara Hampton
Overarching the seaside entrance to a large outdoor market in Turkey, a labyrinth
of open-air stalls and modern shops, is a neon sign with the bulbs spelling out “Allah.” I
do not know whether the author of
Crescent & Star, Stephen Kinzer, has ever seen it, but he could have used
it as a symbol for the theme of his book on turn-of-the-millennium Turkey.
When I caught sight of “Allah” this summer, I realized that Kinzer was right about this secular but schizophrenic country. He argues that Turkey, straddling the divide between East and West, seeking entrance in to the European Union [ed. note: on which the EU was voting as we went to press] and the fulfillment of Ataturk’s dream of bringing his country into the modern West, suffers from a “deep uncertainty about its identity and future” (22). This uncertainty, he claims, compromises the daily lives of its people. Kinzer is a correspondent for The New York Times whose love for Turkish culture is clearly evident in his book, which intersperses its journalism with raki-hazed reveries of swimming in the Bosporus or joining friends in the meyhane [a kind of café] or smoking a water pipe in a nargile salon or being interrogated by the police in a “Kurdistan” jail.
| Barbara J. Hampton is adjunct instructor at The College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio. Ms. Hampton attended Trinity Christian College and Calvin College, completed her B. A. at the University of Michigan, and completed her M. A. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her current research involves field-testing with Christian and Muslim students a Bible/Qur'an study she has written. |
Although the brutal killings of the last three decades have slowed down in collective exhaustion, the divisions between Turks and Kurds remain real. The Kurds’ challenges to the central government are partly economic—Kurds are as a group far poorer than Turks; partly geographic—Kurds, though now dispersed, are primarily from the rugged and more isolated eastern provinces with their own language and culture; and partly political—Kurdish nationalism has been fueled by a revolutionary group, the PKK. In all these forms, the divisions threaten the stability of the country and reveal what Kinzer calls its “deepest and most troubling contradiction,” the fact that “Turkey has the worst human-rights record of any free country” (144).
In what becomes his mantra, Kinzer criticizes the Ankara government for responding to these Kurdish challenges in paranoia. Afraid that its own power and the Turkish dream would unravel if it made any concessions, and perceiving its fight against Kurdish uprisings as “a heroic struggle against terrorism” (113), the government retaliated against its own citizens by a scorched earth policy that took an appalling toll on both Kurds and Turkish soldiers alike. Even though the Turkish military prevailed, it “made it impossible for moderate Kurdish leaders to emerge” (114) who might have worked out a compromise worthy of a modern multicultural state. Just this summer, three different PKK bombings near the Aegean Sea disrupted the tourist industry and heightened the anxiety of all Turkish citizens that the conflict may not be over.
Almost uniquely in the Muslim world, Turkey is a secular country. Secularism was Ataturk’s premier accomplishment; the one he thought would make Turkey “modern.” When Osama bin Laden explained why he had initiated the September 11 attacks in America, he claimed he wanted to undo the wrongs of 80 years ago. Those wrongs were precisely the dismantling of the caliphate-based rule in Turkey and the installation of a non-religious government. It is ironic then that a religious divide so disfigures Turkey. The Sunnis are the majority group there as they are in the rest of the Muslim world (80% worldwide). Perhaps a quarter of the population, the Alevis are a minority heterodox group which rejects many of the pillars of Islam for a more inward, less legalistic experience and who in the past were some of Ataturk’s greatest supporters; however, now they feel persecuted and marginalized. The Religious Affairs Directorate builds new mosques and pays the salaries of imams, all for Sunnis. Unlike Alevis, Jews and Christians are state-protected minorities although in practice they must be so very circumspect that they must sometimes wonder how they can even exist. My observations this summer certainly confirmed this hard reality, a reality that extends beyond minority religions. Turkey’s secularity, which has fostered a strong Muslim identity but weak religious convictions, did not create an empty public square and simultaneous life-filled, private-yet-discussable religious experiences of modern western democracies such as in America. The country, declared one Christian worker with great sorrow, is spiritually like concrete.
But why should the government even care which religious belief any citizen adopts in “private”? One hallmark of modernity is the public/private split, hallowed in the notion of freedom of conscience. Cannot anyone believe what he or she wishes without coercion of the secular state? Why should the Turkish government prefer and even underwrite Sunni Islam but not Alevi Islam? Kinzer highlights this Turkish paradox, again pointing to the fear that drives the government’s illogical and even irrational policies. Ataturk, he says, would have preferred the Alevi beliefs concerning alcohol (they allow its consumption) and fasting and pilgrimages and mosque attendance (none required). However, the current rulers “see Alevis as guarantors of the secular state but fear them because many of them resist authority and are by nature skeptics, individualists and freethinkers” (64)—all qualities that would undermine their own tenuous grip on power.
The political divide, that between those who want to keep religion out of the public square and those Islamic fundamentalists who want it to shape public life, is the most crucial problem. The contentious issue of women and head scarves lies on the fault line of the divide. Because Turkey wants to keep religion out of the political sphere, laws ban women from wearing head scarves in universities and in civil service even though many Muslim women believe that Qur’an commands such modesty-guaranteeing clothing. Some have been expelled from the university. As I walked around a university campus this summer, however, I observed some young women dressed just as provocatively as their counterparts in any American university, and walking just behind them, other young women covered not only in head scarves but in long coats as well. Seemingly they can attend classes together despite the fact that the ban on head scarves is still in effect.
When Kinzer was reporting in the mid 1990s, however, the head scarf crisis had erupted in ugly incidents. He related one particular incident, in which Tulay Erdogan, 23, one of the younger generation who had taken advantage of secular policies to get a higher education, was denied entrance to an exam at Istanbul University because she—and hundreds of others—refused to remove their head scarves. They had to quit the university. As she told Kinzer, “We love God, we read our Koran, we believe in our religion and we want to apply this religion in our lives….I am protesting as much as possible because I really want to become a doctor. It’s bad to become a fanatic, but they are pushing us towards fanaticism” (79).
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s internationally acclaimed novelist, explores this wrenching issue even more poignantly in his most recent novel Snow, in which an ex-patriot Turkish poet, Ka, travels to a distant corner of Turkey ostensibly to report on a rash of suicides by head scarf girls. The chapter in which Ka replays the tape that records “The First and Last Conversation Between the Murderer and His Victim” captures the intractable passion of both worldviews, the secularist who protests the sincerity of his love for his daughter and his belief in God and his commitment to carry out the laws of the land as well as the agitated Islamist who pleads that a decree from God must supercede a decree from Ankara, a conversation that ends with three gunshots.
As Kinzer himself so ably summarizes, from being simply an innocent part of a traditional Turkish costume, head scarves have become, as a university official told him, “a symbol that represents an ideology…that suggests a totalitarian approach” (80). In their fear of the kind of governmental totalitarianism the Islamic fundamentalists might impose were they to come to power, the Ankara government has refused those who want to express their religious convictions by way of their clothing that right. However, in the process, they “may think they have won a victory by striking such fear into the hearts of observant Muslims, but in the long run that is no victory at all” (81). They underestimate the strength of Muslim religious beliefs, but, Kinzer argues, they must avoid that mistake in the future because all their campaign of fear and repression has accomplished—“retarding their country’s progress toward democracy, alienating themselves from the conservative masses and feeding the polarization of Turkish society”(81)—sadly and ironically reveals just how far they are from the ideals of western modernity.
I read Crescent & Star to prepare for my trip to Turkey this summer. As I studied it again after my return, with fresh memories of its diverse people and stunning scenery, I could not help but return over and over to Kinzer’s theme of fear and cultural schizophrenia. How crippling they are, and how difficult to extricate a whole culture from them! However, John’s claim that “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them…There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4: 16, 18) is the strong antidote. Love should be the centerpiece of the message that his servants—who seemingly have many good reasons themselves to fear in their precarious positions—can offer Turkey. Love should shape our prayers for them all. Only the persistent yet humble power of love can break through the concrete that the fearful people have built around themselves. Would it not then be wonderful if a visitor could look up in a Turkish market and see “Jesus” in neon lights, powerfully proclaiming the freedom which they all long to see take hold in that country.
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