Coming home

Nothing is certain in Turkey,” my friend D., an engineering professor in Istanbul, says. “You can’t count on anything, not even your life.” The uncertainty plaguing D. is partly the normal angst of 21st century life, but it is also something peculiarly Turkish as well: the uncertainty of income and expenses because of soaring inflation, the fear of earthquakes because of shoddy construction of apartment buildings, the lurking possibility of martial law. It is good to be home in the USA.

My wife and I left for a two-year teaching assignment in Istanbul a month before Sept. 11, 2001, and did not return until June 2003. We were walking home after classes that September afternoon when a friend stopped us and told us what was happening at home. We watched the towers fall on CNN, stunned. Our Turkish colleagues were immediately sympathetic-many Turkish citizens had died in the attack as well. But there was also an undercurrent of understanding of WHY the attack had occurred, an understanding that Americans, especially the present administration, are deaf to. In class in the days following the event, we talked of little else. “Your world has changed,” I told my students. One girl, a quiet thoughtful sophomore, volunteered: “My father said the Americans got what they deserved.”

Everyone looked to see my reaction.

Turks are aggressively welcoming and polite to guests and this broke the code. “Why does your father feel that way?” I asked. “Because the American government – not you, Mr. Moore – doesn’t respect or understand poor people in third-world countries,” she said. A couple of weeks later Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s leading writer, published an article in The Guardian where he argued that “it is neither Islam or even poverty itself directly that succours terrorists … but the crushing humiliation that has infected third world countries like cancer.” It is a failure to be heard and a failure to be respected.

Home in Maine again, we do notice a few changes. We can’t watch some films we want to because they are only available on DVD, and we haven’t figured out phone cards yet. We also see a proliferation of yellow ribbons and American flags and so hesitate to voice our opinions about the Bush administration.

Are we unpatriotic? I don’t think so. We “support our troops,” but we never supported the invasion of Iraq; it seemed to be one man’s obsession with no justification for war and the killing of innocent civilians that war always “justifies.” Evidence that the regime was an imminent threat was exaggerated as were the regime’s connections with al-Qaida. But we do support a strong respect for foreign cultures and the separation of church and state, one American ideal and one Constitutional guarantee being eroded by the Bush administration.

In March of this year anti-war banners were hung from highway bridges and anti-war demonstrations were common in Istanbul. When the Turkish legislature decided, after an open debate and democratic vote, not to allow American troops to use Turkish bases, it was Turkey’s finest hour-and emblematic, ironically, of the democratic ideals the USA stands for. The government had listened to its people. Now post-invasion Iraq has become a magnet for al-Qaida sympathizers and other Islamic terrorist groups and the Middle East is – predictably – even more destabilized. We have been dragged into a debacle by one man’s crusade, the President’s, and a never easing thirst for oil. Continued U.N. surveillance would have been enough in Iraq. Worldwide peace marches and most world leaders were ignored.

As was history. Crushing Saddam Hussein’s regime is one thing; imposing democracy on Iraq is quite another. Iraq is made up of several Arab tribes as well as different ethnic and Islamic groups. Iraqis have never lived under representative government, and democratic processes cannot simply be imposed on them by a foreign military force. Neighboring Iran, a non-Arab Middle East state, does not operate as a true democracy either, though we hear hopeful rumblings from students and brave journalists. In Iran, twenty-five years of the brutal United States supported Pahlavi monarchy were followed by the present theocracy with the Ayatollah as the head of government. True, Iran did have a two-year window of democracy in the early 1950s under Mossadegh, but only until the CIA helped to oust Mossadegh and install Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Turkey is quite a different story. A longtime U.S. ally, it has had a democratic system of government in place since Atat?rk – albeit with a strong military in the background and several episodes of martial law. Democracy works when the people create it, not an outside power. I don’t think our current President has a view of history that goes back much further than the first Gulf War. I don’t think he feels the terror that former United States Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz summons: “There’s hope for you as long as you keep on being terrified by history.”

So what did we learn about another culture in our Turkish sojourn? We learned that if Christianity is a religion of peace, Islam is a religion of peace as well. We watched Turkey watch their national soccer team do splendidly in the World Cup: teahouses, school auditoriums, corner groceries, and sidewalk cafes all packed with ecstatic fans. We read about, walked over, and photographed layer upon layer of history. We stayed in Aristotle’s Aegean village where he met and married a local girl, stood where Saint Paul preached in Ephesus, visited the church where the language of the Nicene Creed was debated in 325 A.D., examined countless Pontic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman ruins, and crossed and re-crossed the new Bosphorus bridges reveling in one of the world’s great views: cargo ships, ferries, villas, the Galata Tower, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi, the Golden Horn, Rumeli Hisar, and Dolmabah?e Palace.

Turkey is a vivid country with warm and welcoming people, and we are glad to be home with a sharper sense of the complexity of Middle East cultures and their histories – and our homegrown uncertainties.

Thomas R. Moore, of Brooksville, is a professor of Humanities and Communications at Maine Maritime Academy and recently returned from two years of teaching in Istanbul.