The characters in Orhan Pamuk’s novels are complex, hybrid identities. They are neither purely Islamic traditionalists nor secular fundamentalists, but, as Turkey’s most celebrated writer and Nobel laureate has put it, of “two souls.” “To have two souls,” Pamuk once told me, “is a good thing. That is the way people really are. We have to understand that, just like a person, a country can have two souls.”
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s military-allied, authoritarian and Western-oriented modernization from above bolstered one aspect of that soul in the last century. Over the last 13 years, current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Islamic-based …read more
Source: The Huffington Post
