Just out of curiosity, I went into a grocery store called “Straight from the Market” on First Avenue and Ninety-First Street a week or so ago and was delighted to discover that it was a specialty store owned by Turks and featured goods like simit, a kind of Turkish bagel that is sold on the streets of Istanbul.
Meanwhile, the other night me and the wife went to Marmara, a new restaurant across the street that featured Turkish cuisine. It used to be called Benelli’s, an Italian joint, even though the owners were Turkish and the same people now running Marmara. They figured out that the market for Italian food was saturated. My wife, who is Turkish, generally has little use for Turkish restaurants in New York but was pleased with this one, especially the zucchini pancake called mucver (pronounced mujver) that was on the meze, or appetizer, section of the menu.
Now I don’t give a good god-damn if the people working in the grocery store or the restaurant were “legal” or not. They are not stealing jobs from anybody but helping to keep the cultural diversity of New York intact. For as long as I have lived in New York, this is one of the things that appeals to me most.
I love the fact that I can walk ten blocks north on 3rd Avenue and enter Spanish Harlem with its rich variety of bodegas, Mexican tortilla stands and botanicas. Who in their right mind would want to pressure such people to speak English and open up McDonald’s?
In some ways New York strikes me as a modern-day version of the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan centers of the Ottoman Empire. Istanbul ruled over a vast empire but left people to their own devices as long as they provided tribute to the precapitalist ruling families. Columbia University’s Mark Mazower wrote a book in 2004 titled Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 that chronicled the lifestyle of an earlier version of New York. A review that appeared in the October 22, 2004 Independent noted:
Chronicled by Mazower with great erudition and impeccable research, it turns into a mental and moral feast. Salonica’s dramatic life grips us inexorably. We rub shoulders with a host of her peoples – Turks, Greeks, Jews, Macedonians, Slavs, Bulgars, Vlachs, Gypsies and Albanians – and learn about their religions, arts and cultures. We empathise with the terror unleashed by brigands, invaders and plagues. We feel the religious fervour of Greek martyrs, Sufi sheikhs, and the crypto-Jews, the followers of Sabbatai Zevi, “the false Messiah” who converted to Islam…Above all, as Mazower intends, by absorbing the “experiences of Christians, Jews and Muslims within the terms of a single encompassing historical narrative”, we snatch the much-needed hope that cultural and religious co-existence is possible.
That co-existence was generated by Ottoman rule. Today, when much of the Western world yields to Islamophobia, it is imperative to understand, as Mazower brings to light, that true Islam has been a model of tolerance, particularly towards other religions and their worshippers. That Turks, Greeks, Jews and many other Balkan peoples lived in peaceful co-existence for centuries was not an accident, but entirely the result of the tolerance prescribed in the Ottoman Empire’s persuasion of Islam – the Hanafi school of Sunni law.
Ironically, when Turkey became a modern state based on a nationalist ideology, all that was lost. It became illegal to speak Kurdish and the Armenians were annihilated.
At the risk of sounding like Woody Allen in “Annie Hall”, I take a very dim view of Arizona and most of the Southwest. As someone who lived in Houston for three years and witnessed the nativism there, I am not surprised that Texas is considering enacting copy-cat legislation that would turn Mexicans into unpersons.
One would think from the chatter emanating from the punditry that the state was forced to adopt such stringent legislation because of a crime wave that matched Medellin in the 1980s. The facts do not support such hysteria.
In 2008, Phoenix had a population of 1,585,838 and the total number of violent crimes was 659. Meanwhile Indianapolis had a population of 808,329 and reported 1204 violent crimes. So the issue does not seem to be crime per se but the perception that brown-skinned peoples are some kind of foreign body that has to be expelled, just like Jews in Germany in the 1930s.
In some ways, Phoenix is an apt symbol of American capitalism in decline. With its punctured real estate bubble and nostalgia for a white bread America that never really existed, it is the perfect spawning ground for ultraright movements. It is also a place whose long-term environmental sustainability is in doubt.
Arizona’s cities rely on water provided by the Colorado River that was dammed up in the 1930s as part of FDR’s shortsighted project to turn the Southwest into a commercial and industrial powerhouse. Back in 1986, environmentalist Mark Reisner wrote Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water that was turned into a documentary that can now be viewed on Youtube:
It’s true what you say about the multi-culturalism of the Ottoman Empire, a remnant of declining semi-feudalism in a Europe of capitalist nation-states. Salonica is a Greek city now, the Greek state having forcibly rid itself of most Turks after the war in 1920-22, and gradually extinguishing any other language, forcing the children of anyone who remained to become Greek through the education system. The German invasion during WW2 “took care” of the vast majority of Jews. The mayor of Salonica is a fascist who has filled the city’s plazas with statues of Alexander; i doubt that Alexander himself would have commissioned that many during his lifetime. Ironically, many of the nationalists who often indulge in sabre-rattling towards Turkey and Macedonia, have themselves Turkish and Slavic surnames
Immigrants started moving in again in the 90s, though not as many Turks at the moment, and facing great resistance from reactionary politicians and right-wing folk, and it’s gonna take many decades to make Salonica what it once was, but it looks like there’s no turning back the tide.
Comment by Antonis — May 4, 2010 @ 7:17 pm
Salonica has always been dense with mystery for me.
Even before reading Mazower’s great “City of Ghosts” the past seemed thicker there. In the flesh, it was gone. No more Bulgarians, no more Jews, no more Turks, and too many “new” Greeks with a phony, nationalist idea of their history. Not many monuments remained, either. The Ottoman dimension had been expunged. Still, for some reason, it had more nobility than Athens whose few ancient gems were surrounded by gimcrack “patriotic” neo-classicism. Thirty years ago you could still hear some Ladino in the Salonica market. Let’s hope the Molho Bookstore with its whiff of cosmopolitan, pre-nationalist days will go on forever
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 4, 2010 @ 8:35 pm
re: water. Phoenix, the biggest city by far has centuries’ worth of water in underground aquifers which are still untapped; at the moment it uses water from the Salt River project as you mentioned. Building is pretty carefully regulated in the area over water concerns.
Phoenix is actually a pretty multi-cultural area, as are all the major cities in Texas now (look at the census numbers). At one time the so-called Left Coast of California had its anti-immigration initiatives and before that, elected Reagan twice. Texas and Arizona nativists are on a similar curve in terms of their reaction to immigration from Mexico, but it is a reaction, and they will lose. Rejecting outright Nativism is fine with most wealthy people too, many of who have been at the forefront of arguing against the AZ bill because it will kill their business.
Comment by purple — May 4, 2010 @ 11:29 pm
Your old buddy John Salter has a wealth of knowledge about the history of the class struggle in Arizona, which was written in blood. Phoenix & the surrounding area has always been the more backward and reactionary population center. Tucson is the more progressive section of the state, what with the large Chicano & Mexican population and the heritage of the militant Mine Mill & Smelter Workers Union.
As a native Arizonan, let me say I’m glad I escaped that hellhole.
Comment by John B. — May 5, 2010 @ 2:08 am
The presence of Turkish and Slavic surnames in Salonica is no surprise. From 1850 to 1912 both the Jewish and Turkish communities outnumbered the Greeks. And there were Slavs on all sides. Salonica is, after all, a gateway to the Balkans.
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 5, 2010 @ 9:47 am
Relatedly, Le Monde Diplo had published an interesting article on rebetiko in 2008:
http://mondediplo.com/2008/08/06music
Comment by epoliticus — May 5, 2010 @ 12:07 pm
My wife’s cousin in Izmir is married to a guy who makes a living on and off as a cabaret singer, as does his brother. The first time I was in Izmir, on New Year’s Eve, they sang all night long. The words were Turkish but the style was Greek. One of the most fucked up things about the aftermath of WWI was the kind of ethnic cleansing that forced Greeks out of Izmir and Turks out of the Balkans. If you want to read an interesting account of these troubles, read Eric Ambler’s “A Coffin for Dimitrios”. Dimitrios is a Greek bad guy who was expelled from Smyrna, the old name for Izmir. Izmir still retains some of the old-style tolerance of the Ottoman Empire, referred to by many as “dinsiz Izmir” or impious Izmir.
Comment by louisproyect — May 5, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
There’s a readable book on the subject that came out in 2008, 2009 in paperback: Giles Milton: “Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922, The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance”. Paradise was the name of a local American gated community, complete with college, missionaries and, of course, factory owners.
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 5, 2010 @ 3:06 pm
I’d like some advice on how to discuss this issue with my white working class relatives and friends who are struggling now. They’re very threatened by the idea of legalizing undocumented workers. Some of them have worked in trades like construction and seen their wages fall or jobs disappear. What is the best way to convince them that legalizing undocumented workers is in their class interest?
Comment by Rosa — May 5, 2010 @ 6:36 pm
I am not sure that you can convince a construction worker right now since this has been such a privileged sector but here’s a good article on the general economics:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Immigration.html
Comment by louisproyect — May 5, 2010 @ 7:00 pm
As an aside, Jeffrey Eugenides’ strange, if entertaining, novel “Middlesex” begins with the Turkish capture of Smyrna.
Comment by ish — May 5, 2010 @ 8:32 pm
Wouldn’t put too much faith in the multicultural, tolerant Ottoman Empire. All non-Muslim subjects had to be identified wearing special clothing and any altercation which occurred between a non-Muslim subject with a Muslim subject tended to heavily favor the latter. No doubt the Kemalists were worse, but to hark back to some golden age of the Ottoman hoşguru is just wishful thinking. Probably the best example you can find was Bayezid II’s refuge policy towards the persecuted Spanish Jews.
Comment by JL — May 5, 2010 @ 10:29 pm
Well, everything is relative. The Spanish tortured Jews while the British threw them out en masse. Meanwhile the Zionists harp on Muslim persecution.
Comment by louisproyect — May 5, 2010 @ 11:01 pm
Agreed on all points, but then that doesn’t exactly give your argument much muscle if all you are saying was that in relation to every other ethnic majority-minority encounter, all of the minorities were worse off. Of course they did. I think what you highlight is exactly the kind of discourse which goes on in academe today with the issue of tolerance and orientalism. I know that’s not the direction you intended for this piece to go in, so I’ll leave the discussion with this: some historians like to point to the great enlightened epoch that was the medieval Islamic world in order to counter the claims by another class of historians who just say that they were all barbarians from the beginning onward. This whole issue of tolerance as we define it today didn’t exist back then and thus far has yet to regardless of all of the bourgeois lip service Atatürk (and all of his perverse, latter-day fascist followers) gave to the legacy of the Enlightenment.
I’m glad to see there some among the left in the West who at least will blog about Turkey in some more detail, and for that I’m glad to have found your blog!
Comment by JL — May 6, 2010 @ 2:14 am
What we want to know is how the Ottoman Empire worked in practice. This isn’t easy because the Ottomans were always seen as the bogeymen of Europe and our historians have always been Euro-centered. The Austrian, Russian, French and British Empires, for instance, have generally been seen with much more sympathy. But who stepped on whose toes –the Ottomans were around since 1300!–isn’t really the point. Empire always in some way crushes the people under it. That’s what it’s all about.
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 6, 2010 @ 9:17 am
The Ottomans considered themselves to be a European empire with a Muslim identity. From about 1300-1600s, the Ottomans reached their apex and started the slow descent downward, with a brief moment of reprise towards the end of the 19th century. I think it would be a mistake to think of pre-modern empires as ones that were engaged in high surveillance; the beauty of feudalism was that local potentates could just go around and collect taxes and deliver them back to the center. If they failed to do this, they were punished. Perhaps in the conquered areas were they a bit more suspicious of the natives and probably fortified the areas more than other areas, but apart from keeping them in feudalism, then later mercantilism, I’m not sure we could say that the empire crushed them per se.
Comment by dialecticalyricist — May 6, 2010 @ 3:12 pm
The people subjected to the Ottomans, apart from the Arabs in the Middle-East, didn’t consider them Europeans. Ataturk, who had to obscure the Ottomans for political reasons,also considered himself a European and hummed along to Verdi. Current Turkish governments still see themselves as European. But the French and Germans built their arguments to keep Turkey out of the E.U. on the contention that Turkey wasn’t European. The Ottoman system, at certain times, did result in an indifference to its foreign subjects that might pass for tolerance. This let cosmopolitanism thrive. That’s why I’d have preferred to live in pre- rather than post- 1920s Salonica.
Comment by Peter Byrne — May 7, 2010 @ 10:01 am
I wasn’t talking about the average Ottoman Muslim peasant but the Porte. I don’t think one can even realistically assess what an Ottoman Muslim peasant considered himself since literacy was extremely widespread. The very concept of race in the von Herderian, Romantic sense didn’t enter into the vocabulary of the Ottoman elites until the late 19th century. It took another three or four decades under Ataturk’s Alphabet Reform in 1928 to bring the concept of “Turk” to the larger masses through literacy efforts. Until then, “Turk” was used in a derogatory sense, denoting an uncouth, backwards country bumpkin. There were “millets” or nations, but this was used more along religious lines. Hence Turk came to mean Muslim as well. Race in Turkey even today is still very much bound up in one’s linguistic and religious identity–a Turk, as the infamous Bernard Louius once said, would have never meant anything else but a Turkish-speaking Muslim.
Under Ataturk, taking up the mantle from his Young Turk predecessors, also identified Turkey as a modern, secular republic with some links to Europe through the ideology of Kemalism, which (allegedly) promoted Enlightenment values. The discourse in Turkey today as to whether or not a Turk is a European or not, mostly stems out of this debate.
In the more multicultural cities of the Aegean and western Anatolia, life might have been better for minorities, but again they lived in organized sections of the city. I’m not so sure I would want to live in the more provincial cities anymore than the countryside, since my modern day notion of tolerance is perhaps a bit freer than it was 90 or so years ago.
Comment by JL — May 7, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
*illiteracy, not literacy.
Comment by JL — May 7, 2010 @ 4:39 pm
Lest we fall prey to romanticizing the more distant past at the expense of more recent times, we should note that the destruction of the Armenians in Turkey was the doing of the Ottomans, especially in their late, ‘Young Turk’ manifestation. By the time that Kemal’s national movement came to power, the Armenians had been reduced to those residing in Constantinople (of whom about 50,000 remain) and those in Smyrna, under Greek dominion until September 1922, when they, along with the Greeks, were either massacred, pushed into the sea, marched inland to form forced labor battalions, or simply expelled.
Comment by Tom Yohannan — September 6, 2010 @ 5:09 pm