Living History: Turkey from the perspective of a student backpacker
Leila Isa reflects on Turkey’s contentious identity, Islam, and nationalism from a summer spent traveling from Istanbul to Southeastern Anatolia.
To the dismay of progressive, secular Turks, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan narrowly won the 2023 election. Against the backdrop of mass arrests, the 2016 coup attempt, rampant inflation, and the infusion of Islamic values into a sacralised secular constitution, the election result was devastating. If many believe the election to be fairly counted, it was far from fairly contested. Spending my summer backpacking around Turkey- or Türkiye-, I spoke to many who believed that Erdoğan’s far-right coalition signalled the end of Turkish democracy. Turkey seemed to me incredibly divided and unequal. The gulf between the coastal West and the dry, rocky East was huge; the difference between the Bodrum beach clubs of wealthy diaspora Turks and industrial refugee camps of Arabs and Kurds in the Southeast. Turkish history and culture are deeply fascinating to me given my own Turkic heritage. Still, increasingly, Turkey has attracted greater attention geopolitically as a growing power asserting itself across the Middle East and on the broader international stage. While deeply interrelated, domestic Turkish politics, however, is where there seems to be the most contention and the greatest scope for unrest and instability.
Travelling around Turkey for six weeks, one of the many culture shocks was the Turkic logic of patrilineality. Turks did not accept my answer of being ‘from London’; it was always followed up by asking where my father and grandfather were from. When I answered that I am half Uyghur- or from Doğu Türkistan- taxi drivers almost always joked that I was an ‘old Turk’. Central Asians share a glorified steppe past with the Turks; as such, Turkish identity is an amalgamation of the Turkic tribes who migrated to Turkey in 375, the legacy Ottoman Empire since 1453, and twentieth-century Turkish nationalism. In the old Ottoman Topkapı palace, these components seem to jostle for space in the grand narrative of Turkish history. Topkapı Palace sits on the bank of the Bosporus in Istanbul and now functions as a huge and profitable museum. The palace is about the size of Whitehall, made up of a series of courtyards designed with a strange mixture of Oriental Ottoman and nineteenth-century European style architecture. Topkapı functioned as the administrative centre of the empire until 1856 but was also the personal home of Ottoman royalty. Topkapı as a private space is well and truly over; tourists can walk into the Sultan’s bedroom, his bathing room the hammam, and even into the circumcision chamber of the palace. As invasive as it feels to enter these personal, bodily places, it is a clear marker that this dynasty is dead.
Nowadays, Topkapı seems to be more important to the Turks as the old heart of the Islamic Caliphate rather than as a royal residence. Foreign tourists were interested in the romance and intrigue of the Ottoman court, however, for many religious Turks, there was more enthusiasm for the palace’s impressive collection of religious relics. The chamber of relics embodies the interconnections between Ottoman and Islamic history, brought to the fore through how intensely these relics were worshipped. Hundreds of people queued for hours to see relics of the Prophet; the bag where his beard hair was kept, his robes, and even his footprint. With the Qur’an recited constantly the chamber was heavy with spirituality- stark in contrast to the emptiness of the Sultan’s chambers.
One reason this separation between royalty and religion stood out to me is that in Western Europe the monarch and God seem to blur into each other; here the Sultan was undoubtedly the secular ruler, drawing legitimacy from protecting the faith rather than claiming any divine Islamic mandate. More so, I realised I was visiting from a country where our empire still limps on; while more or less on life-support, the monarchy remains, London is still our capital, and we are, in name, a Christian country. The heart of government in twenty-first-century Britain still resembles in place and in practice governance of the imperial eighteenth-century. By contrast, in the Ottoman Empire of the 1920s, the Sultan was overthrown, the capital became Ankara, and the secular Republic of Turkey was born.
The coup of 1923 was not as sudden a break as often made out- if the death of the Ottomans was quick, it was for a long time expected. For decades, if not centuries, the Ottomans were in decline. This drawn-out death explains to me why most Turks are so enthusiastic about the Republic; while the Ottomans seem to be relegated to the tourist industry, it is secular nationalism competing and coexisting with Islam that defines modern Turkey. While often simplified into opposing forces, religiosity and nationalism seem to muddle with the almost obsessive worship of Atatürk, the military general who overthrew the Ottomans and founded the Republic in 1923. Travelling in Turkey, one face you will quickly learn to recognise is Atatürk’s with his blue eyes and the brooding expression of an attractive military man. In a museum in Izmir, a sugar bowl Atatürk used was on display, alongside his old clothes- an eery parallel to the hung robes in Topkapı worn by the Prophet more than fourteen centuries previously.
“This shared Turkic identity underpins the brotherhood and hospitality that Turkish people feel towards Central Asian refugees”
Atatürk translates into ‘Father of the Turks’. Ataturk claims paternity over Turks beyond the modern border to people with common language roots and steppe origins from Turkey to far Eastern Central Asia. This shared Turkic identity underpins the brotherhood and hospitality that Turkish people feel towards Central Asian refugees- a less enthusiastic welcome than extended to Syrian refugees from across the border. Since the ongoing crackdown in Xinjiang in Northwest China, tens of thousands of Uyghurs have sought refuge in Turkey, both due to the government’s hospitality and their cultural, religious, and linguistic affinity. This closeness has meant carving out a Uyghur community has been much easier in Istanbul than in London. While a quiet corner of North London holds a couple dozen Uyghur families, including my own, Zeytinburnu in Istanbul has become a lively Uyghur district with restaurants selling Laghman, Uyghur supermarkets, and etles tailors.
Despite the steppe nostalgia underpinning this hospitality, Turkish nationalism is far more preoccupied with the West. Turkey was born out of the twentieth-century logic that you either became like Europe or you were colonised by it, the latter Turkey managed to avoid by its transition from empire to European-esque nation-state under Ataturk, who went as far as to outlaw the hijab in official settings. In the twenty-first century, part of secular Turkish nationalism has become a pride in being Western but not quite, a NATO member while a self-proclaimed defender of the Palestinians, a Muslim-majority country without being Islamic.
Turkey has thus become a refuge, if a little precarious, for tens of thousands of Central Asian Turks and millions more Muslim refugees from the Middle East. At the same time, Turkey adopted a twentieth-century form of ethno-nationalism that drove the mass expulsion and genocide of minority groups such as the Greeks and Armenians. The Turkish Right continues to discriminate and attack Kurdish groups and imprison Kurdish activists and intellectuals. While many refugees are aware of this dynamic of ethnonationalism, they know the hospitality of the Turks is far from something that can be refused⎯ especially with Turkey’s asylum system being far more humane and accessible than the UK and other European countries.
The defining tension within Turkish nationalism between traditional Islam and a secular Westernisation program is unstable and geographically visible. In Southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, Gaziantep was remarkable in its difference from the more secular Western Turkey. In some ways, Gaziantep was more commercial than Istanbul; its bazaar sold traditional copperware and fıstık baklava alongside overwrought Arab-style wedding dresses and tiaras. Rather than ‘merhaba’, shopkeepers greeted each other with the more formal and Islamic ‘as-salamu alaikum’- peace be with you. There were students, many of them Syrian refugees from nearby Aleppo, spending their evenings in English lessons. Gaziantep is more religious and conservative than Western Turkey, thus, Gaziantep’s population has been one of Erdoğan’s most loyal bases. Erdoğan’s Islamic rhetoric complements his loosening of planning regulations which has allowed the city to expand through cheap, sand-coloured high rises. In a poor, religious, but ambitious city, these policies ensured Gaziantep’s vote.
In 2023, the February earthquake devastated much of Gaziantep, killing more than 50,000 people. These cheap apartments built with little, or no cement quickly crumbled- a year later I could still see neat patches of rubble where these buildings have yet to be rebuilt. Noticeably more people in the city used wheelchairs or had visibly twisted legs; a clear reminder of the trauma escribed on both the bodies and the psychologies of the people of Gaziantep. Despite the huge anger at the disregard for the safety of the people in these flats and the government's lacking response, the city nonetheless voted for Erdoğan’s AK party in 2023 . In his campaign, Erdoğan argued to religious Turks that they could not blame him for the earthquake as it was 'God’s intention'. Perhaps more importantly for securing their vote, some religious Turks preferred Erdoğan to the leftwing opposition alliance, inclusive of Kurdish and Alevi minorities, that conservative, ethnic Turks in the Southeast often perceive as a threat to their religious lifestyle.
Visiting both conservative Gaziantep and the liberal West demonstrated that Turkey cannot claim to have a single worldview. Turkey is a country of 300,000 square miles. The ethnic diversity, the range of the political spectrum, and religious differences mean that any attempt to impose one on the other will undoubtedly lead to tension and conflict. The only generalisations I will attempt to make is that across the country the people were almost always genuinely and incredibly hospitable; they offered us çay, help with directions, and even one woman offered up the floor of her elderly mother’s house in downtown Gaziantep. People were also deeply fascinated by history, more so than I have noticed in the UK, with strongly held and varied opinions that were almost always used as an explanation for the country’s current deep economic and social issues.
“All these tensions and discontents swirl across this enormous yet relatively young country; this balance of ideology, lifestyles, religions, and ethnicities seemed to be increasingly unstable.”
Tuesday the 29th of October was the hundred-and-first anniversary of the Turkish Republic, celebrated across the country with what I would guess were several million Turkish flags hung anywhere and everywhere possible. For a country so quickly growing and fluctuating between East and West, history seems to act as an anchor for the national identity while simultaneously being a fiercely contested battleground for what this national identity is. The summaries of complicated Ottoman history on the tourist boards of Topkapı Palace failed to encapsulate how deeply contested Turkish history, and by extension, Turkish identity is. Across Turkey, there is a deep-set anxiety that something has been lost from what the fledgling democracy promised. All these tensions and discontents swirl across this enormous yet relatively young country; this balance of ideology, lifestyles, religions, and ethnicities seemed to be increasingly unstable. I cannot help but wonder how much longer it can hold.