Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I’ve been frantically trying to work out which book I would choose for the history of the modern Republic. It’s really hard. Jeremy Seal’s book, A Fez of the Heart, is really readable, but he’s gliding too quickly. He’s not as bad as Tim Kelsey’s Dervish, which is terribly prejudiced. Seal’s book is lightly prejudiced in a British-travel-writer fashion, but I decided it was taking too many liberties with Turkey. There are many journalists who have written modern histories of Turkey: Marvine Howe’s Turkey: A Nation Divided Over Islam’s Revival is very nice, as is Chris Morris’s The New Turkey from the BBC. You get very pro-Turkish books like Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent and Star and there are others, like Tim Kelsey’s, that are very critical of Turkey. But I’m not sure any of them quite do justice to the overall subject. Perhaps you’re never going to get a really satisfactory picture of the whole country. It’s extraordinarily diverse. You can stand up almost any theory and make a person believe it, because you will find some evidence to support it.
Ultimately, you’ll have to settle on one!
Hmmm. OK, I’ll go with The Turks by David Hotham. It’s from the 60s and 70s, but he gets it, as an outsider. The Turkey of the 2000s has not been written, but a lot of the vectors you can find in this book.
Tell me a bit more about it.
It’s from 1972. It’s written about a Turkey that’s just started out on the track that would bring it to negotiations on EU accession, which is an ongoing situation. It’s about why the country wants to be part of the West. He goes through the issues that are more or less eternal in Turkey. You’ll find that all of these books will deal with the Kurds, the Muslim conservatives; some will go as far as to do the Alevis (who are a minority somewhat inspired by Shia ideas), the economy, the rural population. Turkey and Europe, Turkey and the Middle East, the Turkish military, Turkey and Russia/the Cold War. All those themes are eternal and everybody deals with them. And people normally come away with almost the same answer.
Which is?
Turkey is Turkey. You can’t put it in a block; you can’t pin it down; it will always make its own decisions. The old adage that ‘a Turk’s best friend is a Turk’ is uppermost in most people’s minds. There’s not much trust in the outside world. Look at the latest WikiLeaks, about when Turkey is offered negotiations on full membership to the EU. It comes through in December 2004 and WikiLeaks has the reaction of the Dutch, who held the presidency of the EU at that time. The Dutch prime minister is really upset because he’s just offered the same thing to Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, and they’re absolutely delighted, backslapping and hugging each other. The Turks, on the other hand, show no sign of appreciation whatsoever. They’re absolutely po-faced, and then they go back to Ankara and criticise the way the decision was given. David Hotham gets it. It’s a little unfair to choose his book ahead of the others, but I think it’s very interesting to go back to a book written a generation ago and find that actually not much has changed.
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Hugh Pope is the Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group, the independent conflict-prevention organisation. Prior to this he was a foreign correspondent for 25 years, most recently spending a decade as The Wall Street Journal’s Turkey, Central Asia and Middle East Correspondent. Based in Istanbul since 1987, Hugh Pope is the co-author of Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (a New York Times notable book), author ofSons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World (an Economist book of the year)and, most recently, Dining With Al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East (excerpted by the UK’s Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy in the US).
