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Turkey Yesterday... and Today: An Interview with Jenny White

Anthropologist and Boston University professor Jenny White has just published The Winter Thief, the third book in her “Kamil Pasha” historical novel series.  The book takes place in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire as Kamil, an Ottoman magistrate, investigates a bank bombing and illegal weapons shipment.  As events unfold he ends up in the midst of a massacre of Armenians in eastern Anatolia.  I sat down with Professor White in a cafe near the New York University campus to talk about her novel.

For a detective (or magistrate) novel I was impressed with the body count. This was not Columbo or Monk with just two or three corpses to account for. There were many people dying, some quite horribly.  Given the book takes place at the end of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, how close to reality is this?

One reviewer objected to my going from intimate family relationships at the beginning of the book to mass murder at the end.  I wondered why that disturbed the reviewer.  Mass murders don’t happen without individual people playing a part in them.  Maybe we’re so used to reading about them in separate narratives -- one as a history narrative at the macro level and one as a narrative of interpersonal relationships.

What interests me is what happens to people when they are placed in these horrible situations, where right and wrong isn’t clear any more.  What kinds of choices do you end up making?  If you had to defend your family, what would you do?  How far would you go, and how would you live with that?  You can’t ask questions like that unless you put people in situations that are truly horrible.

What was the historical context?

In the period of the 1880s and the preceding decades, the Ottoman Empire lost many of its provinces to local independence movements and revolts that were supported by Russia and the European powers.  Russia occupied a big chunk of the eastern provinces.  Istanbul, the capital, was filling with Muslim refugees.  The Sultan was head of a dynasty that stretched five hundred years, which gave him his legitimacy as ruler.  He was also the caliph, head of all Muslims in the world, which gave him additional legitimacy.  So, in many ways, the Ottoman Empire was a secular bureaucratic government that, at its highest point, ruled a multi-denominational and multiethnic empire that covered most of North Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans and parts of Europe.

So this is a reasonably sedate period, but are there elements where you can see where World War I came from and all that surrounded it?

There is rising tension, but things haven’t blown up yet in the center of the empire.  The events in The Winter Thief presage actual events eight years later, when Armenian nationalists really do blow up the Imperial Ottoman Bank, unleashing a pogrom that killed thousands of Armenians in Istanbul.  The Ottomans feared that the Armenians were working together with the Russians to take more Ottoman territory.

In describing Sultan Abdulhamid you write he “was fanatically religious and tirelessly modern.”  Could you explain what you mean?

The sultan loved opera and had the latest Sherlock Holmes mysteries translated and read to him.  He modernized education and the army, and built railroads, believing that the success of the empire’s European opponents was due to their superior technology.  He wanted to modernize the empire in order better to safeguard it.  He and previous nineteenth century sultans had sent their best officers to France and Prussia to study military matters.  When they come back, they modernized the government and lived secular, urban, modern lifestyles, but also demanded the reinstatement of a parliament and brought back nationalist ideas.  The Young Turks that eventually overthrew the sultan and founded the nation state of Turkey in 1923 were from this group.

Sultan Abdulhamid in the 1880s also surrounded himself with Muslim scholars and sheikhs.  Since what remained of the empire was more and more Muslim as the European provinces became independent, the sultan proposed that a focus on Islam (“We are all Muslims”) might be a way to unite the fracturing empire.  A decade earlier, there had been a parliament to advise the sultan, but when it criticized him, he closed it down. This was a bone of contention for decades and led eventually to the sultan’s overthrow.

Other people disputed a pan-Islamic identity because they felt that the Ottoman Empire’s strength lay in its diversity.  They believed that if the minorities were given more rights to participate in governing themselves, they wouldn’t rebel against the empire. Local councils were set up, but weren’t particularly effective.   Kamil – the special prosecutor in The Winter Thief – is a modernist who believes in the intrinsic virtue of a multi-ethnic, multi-denominational empire ruled by a just and secular bureaucracy.  He tries to defend this principle against all odds.  There actually was a pasha (a Turkish lord), governor of an Ottoman province, who tried to protect his Armenian residents during the anti-Armenian violence of 1915, much as Kamil does in The Winter Thief.

What about the ethnic cleansing that went on?

In the 1880s, the center – Istanbul – was fairly quiet, although increasingly tense because the empire was bleeding at the edges.  The city was full of refugees, different political and ideological factions, and widespread fear that the empire would be destroyed.  The Russians armed the Armenians in the east to help them take over more of the empire’s territory in Anatolia.  When the Russians’ own Bolshevik revolution took their attention away from the Ottoman territories, the Armenians were left in the lurch, leading to retaliation and mass forced migrations in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian civilians died.  This, however, was later, in the years surrounding WWI, not the 1880s.  Nevertheless, the fear of Armenian-Russian collusion was very strong even then, and allowed Vahid, the head of the secret police in The Winter Thief, to convince the sultan that a socialist commune that had been set up in a village in the east, and the illegal weapons and bank robbery, pointed to a Russian-backed Armenian revolt that must be suppressed.  There was no nationalist plot, of course – Vahid manufactured this  “threat” to the empire so that he could “foil” it and thereby earn a promotion.

It wasn’t unusual for empires to move groups of people if they revolted or were seen as problematic in some way.  The government would forcibly move them to a place where they had no natural allies and thus would be unable to cause any more trouble.  In the case of the Armenians, they were marched on foot from Central Anatolia to Syria, which is a very long way.  They weren’t properly protected, and most of them died on route or were killed before ever reaching Syria.

Some Armenians in Istanbul escaped relatively unharmed, and there are many stories coming out in Turkey now of people who believed themselves to be Muslim Turks, but who discovered that their grandmothers were Armenian.  These women had been adopted or forcibly converted as children by Ottoman army officers and their families.  One scholar I know has estimated that there are 200,000 or more of these hidden Armenians whose ancestors were taken from this refugee stream.

What does Turkey say about this today?

Turkey says that many Armenians were killed in the fog of war, as were many Muslims.  They put the number at 300,000 Armenians.  The Armenians say it was one and a half million.  Armenians say it was a purposeful annihilation of the Armenian people, rather than a consequence of war.

As I said earlier, what interests me is what happens to people when they are placed in these extreme situations, where what is right and what is wrong isn’t clear any more.  I grew up in Germany as a child, and all my relatives lived through WW2.  I’ve listened to many stories of their experiences during the war.  The larger historical events – the war itself, the Holocaust, the bombings – all are personal stories.  People they worked for and had relationships with, who engaged in acts of heroism or iniquity, or simply disappeared.  People who were friends and neighbors, but acted selfishly when the opportunity presented itself – or perhaps chose to protect their family over their neighbors and friends.  It’s not always easy to judge right and wrong when your choice is between two wrongs.

The minute you take away the law and people feel they can do whatever they want with impunity, the rules change.  Suddenly it’s possible to kill or turn in the person next door in order to take their land or possessions.  It’s not always the army that comes in and finishes people off, it’s ordinary people, like Vahid, who orchestrates a massacre to get a career promotion.  The tragedy of war is always personal.

What was the influence of Islam in the Ottoman Empire?   

The bureaucrats in Istanbul who ran the government for the Sultan were westernized people.  Kamil in The Winter Thief had been set to Cambridge, but the civil servants of the 1880s mostly trained in Germany and France.  They were living in a very Westernized way; many of them spoke French to one another, even back living in Istanbul.  They were Muslim, but lived a secular lifestyle.  Elite urban Muslim women veiled when they went outside, but the veils got thinner and thinner, so by the late nineteenth century, you could see right through them.  In the countryside, which in the 1880s was isolated because there were few roads, people lived a traditional, conservative lifestyle.  Turkish Islam was, and is, heavily flavored by Sufism, which is based on networks and rituals, rather than the text-based orthodoxy of, say, present-day Saudi Wahhabism.  Turks believe Turkish Islam to be more egalitarian and moderate than what they call  “Arab Islam.”  To be Turkish is to be Muslim, though, and although non-Muslims can be Turkish citizens, they are never fully accepted as Turkish.  Even secular Turks have this understanding of Turkishness as Muslim, though they are opposed to public demonstration of religiosity, like wearing the headscarf.

Where is Turkey at today politically, and in particular what is the relation of secularism to Islam?

An Islam-rooted party has come to power, the AKP [Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/ Justice and Development Party].  It was elected by a landslide.  They are pro-EU and are orchestrating the process of meeting the criteria for membership.  To become an EU member, Turkey needs to change its laws and regulations, including regulating the army.  Parts of the secularist state bureaucracy and the army have been in positions of power since the founding of the republic -- and have several times brought down elected governments they thought were straying too far from the ideals of Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an officer and later Turkey’s first president.  The Kemalists believe that allowing the introduction of religion and ethnicity (like Kurdish identity) openly into Turkey’s public sphere will undermine the country’s unity and cause it to split apart.  They are now faced with a democratic electoral system and a powerful AKP that is undercutting their authority and their ability to step in if the country appears to be spiraling out of control.  Over the past few months, more than fifty officers, some of them high-ranking generals, have been arrested, accused of plotting a coup against the AKP.  Tensions are very high right now.

Many people in the West would assume that it’s the people with an Islamic background who would be anti-West, anti-EU, anti-globalization, but in Turkey that’s not the case.  The AKP is trying to get into the EU because the party believes it will make it easier to institute religious rights, individual rights that would make it impossible to ban wearing a headscarf to university, as is presently the case under the Kemalist system.  The EU membership process also reduces the power of the army.

They are pro-globalization.  The members of the new pious Muslim classes that have risen to political and economic prominence since the 1980s have set up huge businesses with global reach.  The AKP government is busy making economic ties with many disparate nations in order to secure Turkey’s economic and political security, including Arab countries, Iran, Russia, and  all the regions that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire.  The AKP believes that Turks are the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire, so why should there be a problem with boundaries?

The Kemalists are still focused on 1923, when the Europeans undermined the empire, and they remain suspicious of the intentions of the West, despite sharing a secular, Westernized lifestyle.  Some Kemalists are anti-globalization because they think Western ideas like freedom of speech will come in and, as a result, they will no longer be able to control divisive forces, and things will fall apart.  The courts have tried to control the Internet; YouTube has been banned for a couple of years.

I’m not leaving AKP completely off the hook either. They are extremely conservative.  They’ve passed laws that give people individual rights, but they don’t enforce them.  For instance, there are improvements of women’s rights on the books, but only twenty-six percent of women work and there are very few women in politics.

If the AKP controlled the military, do you think they would be more deliberate in instituting conservative policies?

Yes, I find that a scary thought.  At the moment the only major opposition party is irrelevant and ineffective.  The only real opposition is the military.  It’s the only safeguard that power won’t go to AKP’s head and they’ll do whatever they want.  In many ways, Turkey is reliving the same issues and choices that face Kamil in The Winter Thief:  modernization versus tradition, religion and secularism, the divisiveness of ethnicity and nationalism, and the corrosive forces of greed and power.


Jenny White is the author of The Sultan’s Seal (a finalist for the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award), The Abyssinian Proof and The Winter Thief. She is a professor of anthropology at Boston University, specializing in Turkey, and has also published two nonfiction books about contemporary Turkey. For more information about Professor White, visit http://jennywhite.net/ and her blog regarding events in today’s Turkey at http://www.kamilpasha.com