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November 15,
2001 Issue Orhan Pamuk,
translated by Mary Isin I used to
think that disasters strengthened people’s sense of community. Right
after the
great Istanbul fires of my childhood and the earthquake of two years
ago, my
first instinct was to share my feelings, to discuss the disaster with
others.
But this time, seated facing the television in a small Istanbul
coffeehouse
near the quay frequented by carters, tuberculosis patients, and porters
as the
twin towers in New York blazed and collapsed, I felt desperately alone.
Immediately
after the second aircraft hit the tower, Turkish television channels
commenced
live broadcasting. A small crowd in the coffeehouse watched the
unbelievable
images on the screen in detached amazement, astonished but apparently
without
being deeply affected. At one point I felt like standing up and
declaring, “I
spent three years of my life in Manhattan. I lived among those
buildings. I
walked those streets without money in my pocket. I kept appointments
with
people in those towers.” But, as in a dream in which one feels
increasingly
alone, I remained silent. I went out
into the streets because I could not bear to see what was happening,
and even
more because I wanted to share what I had seen with other people. A
short while
later I saw a woman on the quay weeping as she stood in the crowd
waiting for a
ferryboat. From her expression and the faces of those around her, I saw
immediately that she was not weeping because she had a relative in
Manhattan
but because she thought the end of the world was approaching. In my
childhood,
when it was feared that the Cuban crisis would give rise to a third
world war,
I had seen similarly distraught women weeping, as middle-class Istanbul
families stocked up with packets of lentils and macaroni. I went back
to the
coffeehouse, and resumed watching the scenes on television with the
same
irresistible obsession as the rest of the world. Later, as I
walked the streets again, I met one of my neighbors. “Sir, have you
seen, they
have bombed America,” he said, and added fiercely, “They did the right
thing.” This angry
old man is not religious at all. He struggles to make a living by doing
minor
repair jobs and gardening, and gets drunk in the evening and argues
with his
wife. He had not yet seen the appalling scenes on television, but had
only
heard that some people had done something dreadful to America. I
listened to
many other people express anger similar to his initial reaction (which
he was
subsequently to regret). At the first moment in Turkey, many spoke of
the
brutality of terror, and how despicable and horrifying the attack was.
Still,
they followed up their denunciation of the slaughter of innocent people
with a
“but,” making restrained or resentful criticism of America’s political
and
economic power. To debate America’s role in the world in the shadow of
terrorism that is based on hatred of the “West” and brutally kills
innocent
people is both extremely difficult and perhaps morally questionable.
But in the
heat of righteous anger at vicious acts of terror, and in nationalistic
rage,
some will find it easy to speak words that might lead to the slaughter
of other
innocent people. In view of this, one wants to say something. Everyone
should be aware that the longer the recent bombing lasts, and the more
innocent
people die in Afghanistan or any other part of the world in order to
satisfy
America’s own people, the more it will exacerbate the artificial
tension that
some quarters are trying to generate between “East” and “West” or
“Islam” and
“Christian civilization”; and this will only serve to bolster the
terrorism
that military action sets out to punish. It is now morally impossible
to
discuss the issue of America’s world domination in connection with the
unbelievable ruthlessness of terrorists responsible for killing
thousands of
innocent people. At the same time, we should try to understand why
millions of
people in poor countries that have been pushed to one side, and
deprived of the
right to decide their own histories, feel such anger at America. We are not
always obliged, however, to look with sympathy at such anger. Moreover,
in many
third-world and Islamic countries, anti-American feeling is not so much
righteous anger as an instrument employed to conceal their own lack of
democracy and to reinforce the power of local dictators. The forging of
close
relations with America by insular societies like Saudi Arabia that
behave as if
they were determined to prove to the world that Islam and democracy are
mutually irreconcilable is no encouragement to those working to
establish
secular democracies in the Islamic countries. Similarly, a superficial
hostility to America, as in the case of Turkey, allows the country’s
administrators to squander, through corruption and incompetence, the
money they
receive from international financial institutions and to conceal the
gap
between rich and poor that in Turkey has reached intolerable
dimensions. There are
those in the US today who unconditionally support military attacks for
the
purpose of demonstrating America’s military strength and teaching
terrorists “a
lesson.” Some cheerfully discuss on television where American planes
should
bomb, as if playing a video game. Such commentators should realize that
decisions to engage in war taken impulsively, and without due
consideration, will
intensify the hostility toward the West felt by millions of people in
the
Islamic countries and poverty-stricken regions of the world—people
living in
conditions that give rise to feelings of humiliation and inferiority.
It is
neither Islam nor even poverty itself that directly engenders support
for
terrorists whose ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human
history; it
is, rather, the crushing humiliation that has infected the third-world
countries. At no time
in history has the gulf between rich and poor been so wide. It might be
argued
that the wealth of the rich countries is their own achievement and
should not
affect the concerns of the poor of the world; but at no time in history
have
the lives of the rich been so forcefully brought to the attention of
the poor
through television and Hollywood films. It also might be said that
tales of the
lives of kings are the entertainment of the poor. But far worse, at no
other
time have the world’s rich and powerful societies been so clearly
right, and “reasonable.” Today an
ordinary citizen of a poor, undemocratic Muslim country, or a civil
servant in
a third-world country or in a former socialist republic struggling to
make ends
meet, is aware of how insubstantial is his share of the world’s wealth;
he
knows that he lives under conditions that are much harsher and more
devastating
than those of a “Westerner” and that he is condemned to a much shorter
life. At
the same time, however, he senses in a corner of his mind that his
poverty is
to some considerable degree the fault of his own folly and inadequacy,
or those
of his father and grandfather. The Western world is scarcely aware of
this
overwhelming feeling of humiliation that is experienced by most of the
world’s
population; it is a feeling that people have to try to overcome without
losing
their common sense, and without being seduced by terrorists, extreme
nationalists, or fundamentalists. This is the grim, troubled private
sphere
that neither magical realistic novels that endow poverty and
foolishness with
charm nor the exoticism of popular travel literature manages to fathom.
And it
is while living within this private sphere that most people in the
world today
are afflicted by spiritual misery. The problem facing the West is not
only to
discover which terrorist is preparing a bomb in which tent, which cave,
or
which street of which city, but also to understand the poor and scorned
and
“wrongful” majority that does not belong to the Western world. War cries,
nationalistic speeches, and impetuous military operations take quite
the
opposite course. Instead of increasing understanding, many current
Western
actions, attitudes, and policies are rapidly carrying the world further
from
peace. These include the new visa restrictions imposed by many Western
European
countries on travelers from outside the EU; law enforcement measures
aimed at
impeding the movement of Muslims and of people from poor nations;
suspicion of
Islam and everything non-Western; and crude and aggressive language
that
identifies the entire Islamic civilization with terror and fanaticism.
What
prompts an impoverished old man in Istanbul to condone the terror in
New York
in a moment of anger, or a Palestinian youth fed up with Israeli
oppression to
admire the Taliban, who throw nitric acid at women because they reveal
their
faces? It is not Islam or what is idiotically described as the clash
between
East and West or poverty itself. It is the feeling of impotence
deriving from
degradation, the failure to be understood, and the inability of such
people to
make their voices heard. The members
of the wealthy, pro-modernist class that founded the Turkish Republic
reacted
to resistance from the poor and backward sectors of society not by
attempting
to understand them, but by law enforcement measures, prohibitions on
personal
behavior, and repression by the army. In the end, the modernization
effort
remained half-finished, and Turkey became a limited democracy in which
intolerance prevailed. Now, as we hear people calling for a war between
East
and West, I am afraid that much of the world will turn into a place
like
Turkey, governed almost permanently by martial law. I am afraid that
self-satisfied and self-righteous Western nationalism will drive the
rest of
the world into defiantly contending that two plus two equals five, like
Dostoevsky’s underground man, when he reacts against the “reasonable”
Western
world. Nothing can fuel support for “Islamists” who throw nitric acid
at
women’s faces so much as the West’s failure to understand the damned of
the
world. —Istanbul,
October 18, 2001; translated by Mary Isin
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