The elite in Turkey

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  True, in every country there is a cultural, social and economic gap between the elite and the people. But in Turkey we like to go overboard on this issue. Some of the members of the Turkish elite give the impression of being afraid of the people. Their distrust is almost visible on their faces. They seem to believe that if they did not control and guide the masses, that is to say “control from above,” those masses are bound to go wrong and therefore, ordinary people cannot be trusted with the democratic machinery. Pursuing similar arguments the elite sound as if there is a “civilizational gap” between themselves and the common people in Turkey. As if the former belongs to the Western civilization while the latter belongs to another, rather unnamed “Other.”By the same token, for many members of the Turkish cultural elite, when “Islam” is the word, the implications that pop up in their minds are almost always negative. Especially when “women” and “Islam” come side by side, they almost seem an impossible pair to construe positively. Whenever, wherever these terms are matched, almost automatically the issue is problematized, if not traumatized. It then doesn t take too long for a gloomy picture to ensue -- a picture bearing the hallmarks of honor killings, polygamy, and the erasure of the female body behind veils. While the importance of discussing these points can on no account be denied, it is equally important to recognize that this is not what “gender and women” is all about when Islam is the issue. The relations between the two sexes in our traditions is not only about customs and prohibitions, much less captivity and confinement. It is also about delight and joy, physical pleasure, emotional gratification and spiritual euphoria. Accordingly, there is a longstanding tradition of narrative on love in Turkey, dating back to the Ottoman times. This resonates with a larger tradition that did exist in the history of the Middle East in general. To cite a few examples, the Book of Pleasure (Bah Nameh) was several times translated and widely circulated in the Ottoman Empire, just like The Perfumed Garden was widely read in Iran; not to mention The Thousand and One Nights, wherein sexuality was depicted and celebrated as a prolific force of life in numerous stories. The irony in hastily modernized Muslim countries like Turkey is that the cultural elites have lost their connections with the old traditions of storytelling. The Turkish cultural elite have been alienated from their own cultural background. They sure are well acquainted with Balzac and Flaubert and Woolf, but little do they know about folk Islam or Sufi literature or religious stories. Modernization alla turca embodied a rupture in time where the past and the future have been clearly distinguished from one another, and the latter has been valued at the expense of the former. Today in Turkey, in the name of generating “highbrow art,” the old sources of narration have been exiled from literature in general and the genre of the novel in particular. The less the elite know their people, the more fearful they become of them. When the elite have so little touch with the other segments of the society one of the many negativities that ensue is the “politics of fear.”