Kurban Bayramı

The feast of sacrifice/Eid al-Adha begins tomorrow, so everyone will be off with family and businesses closed. A good time to sit down and write my dissertation proposal I suppose. 

I’ve been reading Jenny White’s book “Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks” and was thinking how her portrayal of incredibly polarized identity markers and claims about Others and “enemies within” the country that paper over actual variety in ways of being Turkish and Muslim is a bit alarmist. It’s not unusual to see mixed groups, especially of young people, with “conflicting” identity markers—headscarves, bleached blonde hair, che guevara shirts, etc.—walking laughing arm in arm. Then I fell into a first political conversation with my landlady and she was checking off boxes on White’s list of ridiculous claims and taxonomies sentence by sentence. Claim that the AKP pays girls to wear headscarves, check. Claim that the US are actually behind the AKP, check (she was a Gezi park protester so Erdogan has implied the same about her and her ilk [there was an amazing headline in a nationalist tabloid the other day proclaiming Ivan Something, a CNN reporter, was “messing with Hong Kong too”; suspicious no, how American journalists are always there when “local” protests are being stirred up? Like how there are always firemen hanging around fires—put two and two together, people!]). Likening the AKP to the Islamic Republic of Iran, check. We actually got to talking about politics because I had mentioned noticing a lot of Iranian tourists around and she said Yes they have been coming a lot in the last few years, paused for a second, and then launched into a diatribe about the AKP without any segue. I guess the obvious connection is that the Islamist AKP invited Islamist Iranians to Turkey as part of their plot—never mind that the Iranians who come to Turkey tend to be middle class and secular-minded or that their version of Islam has very little to do with the AKPs. There were others but I’ve forgotten—I should ask if she thinks the AKP are crypto-Jews. UPDATE: Another one: she prefers to speak English with me but during this conversation she was having difficulty and I was translating words for her and sometimes repeating myself in Turkish. Ugh, she grimaced, I can't do this. Speaking part English and part Turkish is wrong. It doesn't feel good, she said. Abhorrence of hybrid cultural forms (she has no problem with English when it is purely foreign, only when it is polluting Turkish), check.

I’ve been sitting in a fancy cafe in a cafe neighborhood writing this and three fancy women were the only other customers here on the upper floor. A cat (the waiters seem to know her, though she may well be feral) came over and pooped on a shelf right next to them at face level. The ladies squawked and the waiter simply moved them to another table and clean the poo and sprayed a little Lysol. The cat went on climbing around and making mischief with impunity. I really really like the way the ferals and pets here.
UPDATE: Today 10/4 sitting reading on a bench near fisherman at the edge of the Bosphorus, I saw a cat dart forward and grabbed a fish about a third its own size from one the the fishermen's buckets. They all just laughed as it escaped and one threw a sardine to another cat that had watched the abduction jealously.