Ramadan in Istanbul
ISTANBUL, Turkey
ON A RECENT evening here, I went from the courtyard of a pilgrimage mosque thronged with more than 10,000 Muslims waiting to break their Ramadan fast at sundown to a modern dance performance in which the dancers' shoes were attached to 10-inch-high rubber lifters. The dancers clumped about to outer-space movie music, or no music at all. The setting could have been Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires, not a hall in this overwhelmingly Muslim city.
All big cities are about contrasts, usually in extremes of wealth and poverty but also in cultural practices. What gives the two worlds of Istanbul such poignancy is the sense that the ground on which they have coexisted might be shattered by a political and social seismic tremor as dramatic as the earthquakes that periodically strike this land.
The Istanbul of dancers in leotards and ready availability of alcohol has been protected by the secularism instituted by the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That secularism, which went so far as to ban women wearing head scarves from universities, is now being challenged by the success of an Islamist political party. After the most recent election, that party, many of whose leaders are members of a rising Islamist business class, controls not just the parliament but also the presidency.
The one part of the power structure the party does not control is the military. Since Ataturk, the military has protected the secularism that Ataturk thought necessary for Turkey's modernization and unity - it is a country with many ethnic minorities.
The dominant Islamist party is now pushing for a new constitution that will take from the military some of its power, which it has often abused. The party also wants to end the ban on head scarves. Less devout Muslims worry that without the head scarf ban women will be under great pressure to conform to religious rules by covering their hair in public and behaving in other prescribed ways.
The Islamist party's success has been a victory for democracy, but it might be a defeat for the pluralism that has aided Turkey's economic growth and made Istanbul such a vibrant magnet for visitors and businesses - a New York of the eastern Mediterranean. Whatever happens to the hard scarf ban, Turkey's secularists want the new constitution to protect individual and minority-group rights. There is a history of it here: The Muslim Ottomans welcomed Jews fleeing persecution in Christian Spain 500 years ago. That is the Istanbul that fosters modern dance and puts on a cutting-edge arts biennial. Economic self-interest alone should convince the Islamist party not to allow democracy to diminish pluralism in a city that flourished under the autocratic Ottoman empire.
- DONALD MacGILLIS
