Stranger to History Read Online Free Page B

light European eyes and the olive colouring of the Mediterranean. They were narrow-waisted and muscular, in close-fitting jeans, small T-shirts and dark jackets. The haircuts were short with cleanly shaved edges and sloping, bristly backs. They walked with a strut, looking ahead, seeming a little vain. The women’s painted faces and peroxided hair took away from their looks. Still, the abundance of idle, well-dressed youth gave the street a heady, sexual character.
    Istiklal, like its youth, was a hybrid: European archways, fashionable shops and stone apartment buildings, with little balconies and pilasters, ran down its length, while its side-streets led into Eastern bazaars, selling fish and vegetables. It had seen better days, then worse days, and now again its fortunes were turning. There were pick-up bars, cafés, bookshops, an Adidas store, nightclubs, gay saunas, health clubs, embassies and offices. Varied music poured into the street from all sides, not just popular music but Sanskrit chanting with hidden techno undertones.

    I had arrived a few days before by train, dropping south from Budapest to Sofia and then to Istanbul, a slow movement through the ghostlands of the old Ottoman Empire. Very little remained of its once deep European reach: in Budapest, a reconstructed, tiled shrine, Europe’s northernmost Muslim monument, dedicated to a Turkish dervish; and in Sofia, the last of its sixty-nine mosques: small and slightly run-down, it sat at an angle to a busy main road with one stone pillar stepping gingerly into the pavement.
    In Istanbul, I was staying in a squat, modern hotel on a central square with a view of the Bosphorus. On the morning after I arrived, I witnessed an amazing scene on the strait’s leaden waters. I had come down to the shore, and next to me a few soldiers and old men sipped coffee at a kiosk doing steady business. Then everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the water. The man at the kiosk turned off his stove and looked too. The soldiers jittered.
    The first horn that sounded over the now quiet Bosphorus was like the moan of a great mammal, an elephant or a whale, in lament of a fallen leader. The soldiers stood to attention and their arms snapped into salute. Then other horns, with the eagerness of the young in a tribe, responded. The traffic behind me stopped. Some pedestrians, new on the scene, froze in mid-step. The city ground to a silence. The minute stretched and the city waited. White gulls circled overhead as if fastened by cords to the ships. The horns faded gradually, and after a few stray sounds lost over the water, the Bosphorus came to life again and, with it, the roar of the traffic behind me.
    It was 9.06 a.m. on 10 November and the man being honoured in the minute-long silence was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern republic of Turkey and the man who had given the state its fiercely secular identity. When Atatürk had founded the modern state in the 1920s, fighting off foreign incursions on all sides, he had shut down the traditional Sufistic centres, thrown out fez and veil, cleansed the language of its Persian and Arabic borrowings, changed the script to roman and abolished the office of caliph. He brought to an end the idea of a sanctifying political authority that had existed in Islam since its founding. It was as if he wanted to break the new state’s cultural links to the larger Islamic world, rendering unto Turkey what was Turkey’s and throwing out the rest.
    My father had mentioned the caliphate in his letter: ‘European countries occupied by Muslims for hundred of years, like Greece and Spain, did not enforce conversion. In fact, throughout history the Jews were protected by the Muslim caliphates and Christians were allowed to flourish.’ The caliphate was part of my father’s idea of a collective Muslim history, which he could possess without faith. It was one of the things – the idea of the great Islamic past – that my small