Turkey’s Divisions... on Display in Istanbul’s Museums

[ailamos]

ISTANBUL — If you stand in the center of the Hagia Sophia here and gaze upward at what is one of the world’s tallest domes, you can be staggered by the overlapping layers of ruination and grandeur in this Church of Holy Wisdom. And I don’t just mean the scaling paint, the scaffolding promising overdue restorations, the haunting mosaics disclosed under layers of plaster.

 

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For a millennium after its construction in the sixth century, this was the world’s largest cathedral, the most prominent monument to Byzantine Christianity. And it still manages to seem delicate and weighty, introspective and commanding — quite an amazing accomplishment, given the centuries of religious conquest and plunder that have stripped it of nearly all its trappings.

 

The crusaders of the 13th century were so offended by the cathedral’s alien Eastern Christianity that they looted its treasures. After functioning as a Roman Catholic cathedral for a short time, it again became a Byzantine church. Then in 1453, after the conquest by the Turks, Sultan Mehmed II turned the church into a mosque; later rulers erected minarets that still give the exterior a strange ambiguity. Even now, enormous calligraphic roundels in Arabic impose themselves on its cavernous space, affirming that if this is a house of God at all, the commanding spirit is Islam.

 

Finally, in 1934, by order of the founder of the secular Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the mosque was turned into a museum, though the incomplete restoration suggests that after almost 80 years, it is still a work in progress.

 

These were not innocent transformations, and few structures here remain as solid and firm as this one, weighted down by more than 1,500 years of battles, bloodshed and commingling influences. Something similar, of course, always happens in the wake of religious wars; the great mosque of Córdoba, in Spain, for example, was transformed into a Roman Catholic cathedral after the Christian reconquest in the 15th century.

 

But maybe because in Istanbul transitions have been so violent and go back so far (and not just in this building), and maybe, too, because I visited the city recently, just as debates over Turkey’s identity as a secular state were heating up, everything here seems to shimmer with unsteadiness. You can see all the layers at once. Nothing is allowed to become comfortably familiar. And right now, the forces of secularism and Islam are in contention.

 

Walk down this city’s main pedestrian mall on Istiklal Caddesi, and eventually you seem to be strolling through a cosmopolitan European shopping area with upscale stores and restaurants, or negotiating crowds like a theatergoer in Times Square. But pass the mosques around prayer time in the neighborhoods of Fatih or Balat, and secularism seems like an alien fantasy.

 

In some cases, like the museum that was a mosque that was a church, these forces overlap. In other areas — like right now, in Turkish politics, in which debates about the nature of the judiciary and prosecutions of military figures are being led by the governing Islamic-oriented party — they clash. For an outsider, the threads intertwine with almost byzantine complexity.

 

I get this feeling, too, from reading the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk. In his novel “Snow,” a poet is stranded by a blizzard in a Turkish border village in the 1990s, trying to make sense of what he finds. There have been a spate of suicides of young women, at least some of whom have killed themselves because their secular schools have outlawed Islamic headscarves; meanwhile, an Islamist is running for town mayor. There are Islamic radicals who are fearsome, ruthless, and there are secularists who are also fearsome, ruthless. The conspiracy theories by the secularists match those of the Islamists, and both may be true. Mr. Pamuk keeps things slippery.

 

Though there is something almost too facile in Mr. Pamuk’s establishment of equivalence, this may be close to the way things look, at least here, partly because secularism has a different set of implications in Turkey.

 

Usually, in the West, we think of secular life almost as a negative thing. It comes from the bracketing off of religious belief, or by transcending it altogether. Secularism’s origins are in the Enlightenment; its dominant conviction is that Reason rather than Faith should reign in the public sphere.

 

But that isn’t really the nature of secularism in Turkey. Until the early 20th century, so intimate was the connection between political and religious power that when Ataturk founded the republic in 1923, he imposed secularism almost as a religious doctrine. The concept of a secular republic had to be forcibly developed from the ruins of an Ottoman Empire, whose sultans were Islamic warriors. At the same time, the secularism of the modern republic had to embrace the Islamic history of that empire.

 

You can see the nature of the problem in the museums of Topkapi Palace, where the sultans once lived. In one gallery there are sacred relics once viewed only by the royal family and its guests. The labels tell us we are looking at hairs from Muhammad’s beard, the staff that Moses used to strike a rock in the desert, King David’s sword and a turban worn by Joseph. Secularism has to be more powerful than it is here to contend with such objects (let alone examine them for authenticity).

 

And secularism here was a form of militarism: the veil was prohibited in schools and in the government. Religious services and sermons were controlled. And the military became the arm of secular authority. Democracy was trumped by secularism.

 

In that sense, the most powerful, double-edged tribute to Turkish secularism may not be the commerce of Istiklal, or the nearby art galleries, but the enormous Military Museum, a building whose cabinets are stocked with body armor, scimitars, revolvers and 20th-century weaponry. More than a thousand years of Turkish history are told in the form of military history, and the narrative winds around an imposing building that was the military academy where Ataturk himself studied. The exhibitions begin with an inspirational quotation from Ataturk: for more than 7,000 years, it portentously declares, “have these lands been the Turkish cradle”; now, out of “thunder and lightning and the sun” emerges, triumphant, “the Turk.”

 

The museum is nothing less than an attempt to shape a modern mythology in which Turkish history becomes part of a single coherent tradition culminating in the modern secular state.

 

This effort to shape a tradition accounting for the triumph of the Turk may also be the reason for the way the 1915 massacres of Armenians are treated here. Though the killings predated the republic and were clearly related to religious differences, the interpretation in the Military Museum makes it an issue of state.

 

In the Hall of Armenian Issue With Documents, we read that there had been an era when Armenians had demonstrated the principles of “Tolerance, Affection, and Justice,” the basics of “traditional” Turkish rule. But then, in the 19th century, the Armenians turned hostile. An “Armenian terrorist organization” killed “thousands of innocent Turks.” The gallery is full of photographs meant to provide evidence not of the Turkish massacres of Armenians, but of the Armenian massacres of Turks — signs, supposedly, that the Armenians had abandoned the doctrines of tolerance embodied by the secular state.

 

This sometimes perverse association of militarism and secularism must have also led to a compensatory association of Islam with liberalism, which has been tapped into by the current governing party (and, sentimentally, by some in the West). But this is a precarious association.

 

There was undoubtedly a tradition of tolerance of minorities in Islamic Istanbul under the sultans, though it was exercised only in the presence of varying degrees of deference and demands. But why is it so difficult to recognize this? The Jewish Museum of Turkey here seems deliberately to ignore qualifications; it opened in 2001 under the auspices of a foundation established to celebrate 500 years of tolerance and harmony between Turks and Jews. Many of the Jews in Istanbul (once one of the largest urban Jewish population centers in the world) were exiles from the 1492 expulsion from Spain and Portugal.

 

The displays in this small museum repeatedly stress the welcome Jews found here, and the religious freedom “provided by both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.” Panels celebrate the triumphs of Turkish Jews in civil society. For more than 500 years, it seems, no shadows are worthy of mention. But this is far too eagerly sweeping and wildly out of sync with the empire’s bloody history and its sultanic power.

 

The very presence of the museum inspires some skepticism on this point. It is housed in an old synagogue, not because of any imposed idea of secularism, but because whatever remains of the Jewish community here has dwindled. In recent years Islamist terror has struck: attacks against other city synagogues have killed dozens and wounded hundreds. And though the museum is near one of Istanbul’s main thoroughfares, it is almost impossible to find. It is in a small alley in a neighborhood dominated by hardware stores and marine equipment.

 

At the end of that alley, there is a little sign that says, without elaboration, “Museum,” with an arrow. The sign is mounted on a closed white booth housing an armed guard.

 

More information about the Hagia Sofia, the Military Museum and the Topkapi Palace is at http://english.istanbul.gov.tr. More information about the Jewish Museum of Turkey is at "">www.muze500.com.[/i]

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/arts/design/26museums.html