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BEARDS, HATS AND CHICKS FORBIDDEN

How's this?  In Turkey, it's illegal to have a beard.

We're talking about the imprisonment of people with strong religious
beliefs.  We're talking the slaughter and continued persecution of Kurds,
Armenians, Azerbijanis. We're talking the abduction, torture, and
disappearance of journalists (gulp). We're talking real dark-of-the-woods
type stuff here, folks.  Of all the EU-aspiring countries, fewer have a
more dastardly human rights record than Turkey.  (And most interestingly,
none get more annual U.S. aid). 

How bad is it? Not long ago, writer Mehmet Bayrak was sentenced to two years
in prison for editing a book called "Kurt Halk Turkuleri", which translates
as -- you're going to like this -- "Kurdish Folk Songs".  He got off EASY;
every month, the bruise- and bullet-ridden body of another writer is found
mouldering next to some picturesque Turkish creek.  Oddest of all, on
Fridays the military performs sweeps of Istanbul University to make sure
nobody's head is covered.

When I was in Goreme, which is essentially smack-dab in the center of
Turkey (put your finger on the map.  Yes, right there), I made friends with
a bunch of South Africans and Canadians.  One of the South Africans, Anton
Botha (yes, one of THOSE Bothas), had a friend of a friend of the race car
driver Michael Schumacher (yes, THAT Schumacher) who lives in Istanbul.
So, bearing $1 beers and masses of barbecue fixins, we piled into two cars
and drove up to the European side of the Black Sea Coast for a beach day.
There were five of us in one of the cars, and our guide narrated our tour
of Istanbul. Being the same age as us, he was BLASTING Turkish rock music,
which is a blend of cheesy '80s pop and wacky occidental bleating. The kind
of music that thinks it's cool when it's really really square.  During our
ride, the music kept going dead for minutes at a time.

"Is there something wrong with your amp?" I asked. (I mean, if I were a
stereo and I had to play that music all day long...)
"No," said our guide. "We're passing a cemetery."
And later on, when it happened again:
"We're passing another graveyard?"
"No. One never plays music during the call to prayer."  
Sure enough, far and wee in the distance sang the muezzins.  I don't know
how he heard it.  But when it's a matter of obeying the law, I guess you
develop super hearing.

More and more, although our hosts were friendly and seemingly as Western as
we were, little things kept reminding us that their country expects
something different from them.  For example, they refused to drink any
beer.  No problem for us (those South Africans can put it away). But not
only is alcohol technically forbidden for practicing Muslims (our tour
guide in Cappadocia offered to take us to see the sunset from a mountaintop
-- if we would buy the wine for him), but to have any in your system on the
Holy Day is a taboo and a half.  

Here we were, frolicking at the beach like the bunch of twentysomethings we
were -- and I couldn't shake the feeling that I have it way too easy. It
was a feeling I never got in the poorer countries; it took the slightly
skewed Westernishness of Istanbul to make me sense it. (I also feel very
guilty about hearing English everywhere I go.  Makes me feel like an
imperialist.  But everyone, it seems, WANTS to speak it. I can't learn
anything about the people I meet because they're busy trying to speak
English to me. English is the language of power -- or so the Middle East
thinks -- which ironically serves to disempower ME.) 

Likewise, there are few women anywhere. My hosts' attentiveness to Renee,
Marina, Janet and Yogurt (not her real name) made me feel like he was
walking on eggshells with them. Driving up the road along the Bosphorous,
past the smart fish cafes and posh suburbs, it slowly sinks in that
something isn't quite right.  All along the quays, there are people
swimming and fishing.  But every one is a man.  When you do see a woman,
she's either at the market (often in full-body-shroud regalia) or on a
dolmus ride home.  

Cape Town Janet and I wandered into a fish market far from the center part
of Istanbul -- and the fishmongers stared [[sounds like the title of a
Hemingway book: "And the Fishmongers Stared."]]. Partly because she was
wearing shorts and an open shirt over her bikini, she began to prance
nervously. "Tourist! I'm such a tourist!" she said to me. Noticing her
cleavage, I had to agree.

Call me a Christian, but I began to feel guilty about this, too. I was
almost always in the company of young, attractive women in various states
of summertime undress. I was always near the focus of a dozen turned heads.
Pretty soon, I wanted to throw robes over the girls, too.

THE CHESHIRE CAT OF TURKEY

No beards? No women? No covered heads?  Just what the hell is going on?
Quite simple: The rest of the world is going on.

I know that, as Americans, we're constantly indoctrinated with the usual
hubbub about how we live in The Best Country in the World and how we're all
so Lucky To Be Americans.  And while I'd be the last person to admit that
the full extent of that dogma is even half true, it took me until this trip
until I brushed up against societies that truly do operate on fear.

Turkey's not the only place where the government maintains control through
such obvious means of suppression, of course.  But it's a snapshot of
reality for us undereducated Americans.  It's not just something that Mom
tells you to get you to eat your lima beans.  Many parts of the world ARE
different.  In Morocco, it's against the law for a local to be seen with a
tourist.  I'm not making this up!  If you're spotted guiding a tourist
around, you will be caught and you will go to jail. It doesn't make sense
until you realize that the government does this because it thinks its
protecting the tourists; all the swindlers and hacks were scaring off big
game, so now only licensed guides can associate with moneyed foreigners.

Likewise, the ironic thing about Turkey is that the goal of all this
suppression is to the make the country MORE free.  It happened like this:
Back in the '20s, a guy called Ataturk led the nation out from under the
shoddy rule of the long-lived Ottoman Empire.  (Boring textbook stuff, I
know, but bear with me.) 

Ataturk was a forward-thinking man.  He considered the illustrious history
of Turkey -- as a stomping ground for the Greek gods, as Biblical homeland,
as seat of Byzantine/Christian, Roman, and Muslim empires -- and decided,
essentially, to unify all the different cultures of its past into a modern
present.  He wanted Turkey to take its place in the twentieth century, so
to do that, he worked to abolish (or at least minimize) the marks of Islam.
 Never mind that Turkey had operated under Muslim rule pretty much since
1453.  By legal decree, he cleaned up everything Middle Eastern and tried
to shape his country into something more European.  "You're allowed to be a
Muslim," Ataturk basically said. "Just not a CRAZY Muslim." 

Among other modernizing/homogenizing effects, that scribbly Arabic language
went down the Bosphorous, to be replaced with a new, more or less synthetic
Turkish. (A similar stroke of scholarship and idealism forged modern Hebrew
at around the same time.) The Muslim tradition of covering your head on
Friday, the holy day, was outruled.  And long flowing beards -- like the
curls of the Orthodox Jew, a mark of extreme faith -- were branded as
traitorous to the new character of the country.  It was no longer Turkey,
home of the ancients; it was the New and Improved Turkey!(™).  And to keep
everything just so, the military were assigned to ensure his bidding was done.

To be fair, Ataturk is revered in his homeland. Everywhere you go, his
benevolent, arched-eyebrow visage peers through walls and columns, a bit
like a studious Cheshire Cat. Only, possibly more absurd. So even if you
wanted to escape his legacy, you wouldn't be able to escape his gaze -- and
lots of Turks like it that way. Then again, to be doubly fair, I would
probably be detained if I wrote this in Istanbul and not London.  Because
among the rules about hygiene and headgear, there's also a law about
dissing Ataturk. You're not allowed to.  It's punishable by death to say
anything bad about him -- so most Turks WOULD appear to revere him. In a
country where the military has a right to enforce the law, guilt is a minor
matter.  Often the only reason you might get a trial is if the government
was cowed into giving you one rather than lose face with the public.  

Lately, Turkey has been facing a rise of fundamentalism, meaning people who
want to practice their religion the way they think God wants them to. Screw
the modern Turkey, they say, and screw Ataturk. Hence the military
crackdowns, the dead journalists who cover them, and the student sweeps
(can you imagine that, fellow Americans?  Students who actually care about
things other than beer or getting laid? Those crazy Turks!).

A quirky footnote.  Laurence Olivier's grandson wants to produce a movie
about Ataturk's life. Never mind that Ataturk LOOKS a lot like his late
grandfather. I read that in America, the Greek contingent is very put out,
since Ataturk displaced quite a few of them and reignited the longstanding
feud between Greece and Turkey. I call those people American whiners; even
given the gag order on bad press, no one has complained about the movie
idea over here. What I DO mind is who's slated to play Ataturk: Antonio
Banderas.  Now THAT oughtta be punishable by death.

ISTANBULLISH

In my last dispatch, I already told you, albeit briefly, about how struck
by Turkey's beauty I am.  And you've likely already heard of Istanbul's
worldwide reputation as being suspended somewhere between Europe and Asia.
Of course, all of that is still true.  A country can have deplorable
internal politics and still be a stimulating place to travel and meet
people.  And honestly, if you don't know about such governmental
strictures, you wouldn't even know anything was amiss.

Istanbul, in fact, is an extremely pleasant place to be.  I never thought
it would be!  I was expecting camels and mangy dogs, blankets of smog and
incense, blind turbaned beggars and man-hunting fleets of speeding
streetcars. In reality, I found Istanbul to be breezy, full of trees,
organized, and impossibly clean.  Maybe it's just because I was coming from
the East, where cities really are like what I imagined.  Whenever I met
someone who was coming to Istanbul from Europe (which was nearly everyone),
they almost always thought the city was tantalizingly exotic.  If you ask
me, it was a like an amalgam of American cities, except speared with
minarets and humming with the five-times-daily call to prayer.  

The city itself is in three major parts, separated by one long body of
water, called the Bosphorous, that goes from the Black Sea to an outlet of
the Mediterranean, the Sea of Marmara.  One day, I took a boat from the
Golden Horn, or the old historic part of the city, up the Bosphorous to the
Black Sea.   I don't know what I was expecting --the Yangtze's cleaned-up
cousin?-- but I saw the Bosphorous as a place where I could live and write.
 There were no barefoot peasants slapping rags against wet stones; there
were handsome three-story wood buildings, built 100 years ago in the New
Orleans or Victorian style and now worth over 2 mil each, nestling the
banks. Where there was once a mighty Roman chain spanning the water to
repel invaders, there are now two mighty suspension bridges, taller and
prouder than any I'd ever seen in America, and gleaming with what seemed
like a secret pride.  On the left side of me was Europe; on the right,
Asia.  Hard to believe that the border between continents can be as simple
as that.  You could get from one to the other with bus fare, and not tell
any difference once you've arrived.  Funny how the world's major milestones
seem to mark almost no changes at all. Kind of like a birthday.

Which I celebrated on my first day there.  I arrived -- literally -- at
about the same moment at which I was born 27 years ago, not long before 7
in the morning.  Later in the day, I went to tour the Topkapi Palace (where
the sultans lived for centuries) the Blue Mosque (named for its interior
tiles and thought by some to be the most fantastic mosque in the world) and
the mesmerizing Aya Sophia, which was built in the 500s (not a typo!) and
was the most important Christian church on the planet for a millennium.
For the last 500 years, though (!!) it's been a mosque.  Most incredibly,
it's intact.  Still a ceiling, floors, walls, mosaics.  All perfect.  A
building, in continuous use since the Byzantine era!!  Being underneath its
enormous dome was the perfect birthday experience.  I stood on the balcony,
which over the years has settled into a slightly sloping horseshoe, and
tried to count backwards through the centuries, imagining all the lifetimes
the Aya Sophia has seen.  I lost the thread at around 1300 -- still less
than half its lifetime ago! I think it's one of the most important
buildings in the world, if not the MOST important.  Yet, strangely, I'd
never heard of it before.  Can I please blame my American education?  Thank
you.  (Anyway, I polished off my birthday with a nap -- I AM aging -- and
then a beer-sotted viewing of the World Cup Finals. The Frogs won.)

Istanbul is full of crannies like the Aya Sophia.  One is a cavernous water
cistern just below the streets of the Sultanhamet district. Built by the
Romans 1500 years ago, it's cool, drippy, colonnaded, and peaceful. They
play classical music down there as you stroll the catwalks above the water,
which has been stocked with plump fish.  Above ground, though, everything
is more Eastern European -- meaning not terribly tangled and not terribly
cosmopolitan -- just pleasant.

Every night, me and my Goreme friends would go to the roof of a nearby
hostel, which overlooks the Bosphorous, and drink beers. Every ten seconds,
the beam from the lighthouse featured in the movie "Topkapi" would sweep
over us.

I could have stayed there for much longer than I did.  But all this quick
pacing has left me exhausted. So, wanting to enjoy Britain in summer, I
called an end to Istanbul (after a week) and returned to Robin and Jenny in
London.

Already, I miss the call to prayer.  It's ludicrous, but I do.  All through
my month and a half in the Muslim world, it was the only constant.  Every
day, five times a day, the skyline would break out in the a cappela song of
the muezzins.  Although every singer's tune is different, they all
translate loosely to the same message: "There is only one God. Come worship
Him." It very quickly became a comfort.

I have made a list of the other things I will miss about the Muslim World.
Maybe they'll shine a light on the alternate reality I've been living.

WHAT I WILL MISS ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST

* Those sublime calls to prayer
* Whenever you go to a store and buy something, they mysteriously have to
send someone around the block to complete the transaction. Whether he's
fetching the shop owner or making change or getting a better example of the
product isn't relevant. By the time it's said and done, one of the staff is
gonna to run out of the front door and vanish into the crowd.
* The incessant power cuts. Especially in Turkey, you can't get through
your day without at least one. I had to wait an extra day to get my plane
ticket because the power went out around the time they sent a guy around
the block to print my ticket.
* The tea delivery men!  They're everywhere, darting through the crowded
streets with their funny, suspended tea trays.
* Being offered tea. You can't make it through an hour without being
offered some tea.  Even if you enter someone's shop with no intention to
buy, chances are you'll be sitting down to a cup before you go. In Morocco,
the big hit is impossibly sweet mint tea. In Turkey, apple tea is the rage.
* The enraged verbal battles in Arabic that come to naught. Doesn't matter
if they're red-faced, spluttering and fingering weapons -- and they often
do. They're not gonna fight. Weird communication ritual, I guess.
* Carpet obsession. I have never been anywhere more concerned about carpets
than Istanbul. ("My cousin has a store..." "Do you need a kilm?") Even when
there's NOT a Turk in the room, conversation turns to them every 20
minutes. ("I got one for my foyer. Gee, I hope they send it.") It's a
rug-centric land, Turkey.  And, for the record, since I didn't buy one, I
believe I was passively made to feel like less of a participant on this
planet. But what do I need a carpet for?  I got rid of my apartment!
Besides, every carpet conversation eventually comes round to the fact that
most of the carpets in Turkey are shocking fakes.
* Forgetting about differences. After a while, seeing women in robes
becomes normal. (And since most of them let themselves go to pot because of
the robes, that's just fine with me.)
* People who leap out at you and ask "Where you from?" No, they're not
friendly. You answer dictates how rich you are.  I started telling them I
was from Poland.  Funny how they laid off.
* No Madonna.  I didn't hear her once.  I'll miss that.
* Men touching themselves. And picking their noses. Probably a consequence
of the No Women Around clause.
* Men denigrating Western women. Since they judge women by our movies, they
think they're easy-to-get trash. One night in Istanbul, as we headed off
for dinner, the boys in our group furtively walked five meters behind the
women in our group, who were dressed to kill. The commentary by the Turkish
men was then reported to us by the women. Most were of the "marry me" or
"fellate me" variety. My favorite: "You won't sleep with me because I have
dark hair, or because I take aphrodisiac?"  
* The heat.  Wait, I take that back. I won't miss that.
* Filthy paper money. I bet Iraq DOES have biological weapons. On its cash.
* Permissive pharmacies.  Don't say prescription; just say please.
* Great vegetarian food.
* The aforementioned (#8) toilet paper bins next to every john.
* Unfinished buildings!  Fully half the structures in Turkey, Morocco, and
Egypt (and Greece, oddly) still have spindly cable reinforcements spiking
from where the top floor should be. Houses will have weathered exterior
paint, but no doors or windows.  I puzzled long and hard over this.  Did
everyone just run out of money?  Were they buying shelter on an installment
plan? A friend in Turkey enlightened me. The laws say you don't have to pay
tax on an unfinished building or a home with no doors or windows.  When the
eldest son of a Muslim family moves into the top floor, they just
half-finish a new one above it.  And if you move your livestock into the
ground floor and use it like a barn (like many people do), you don't have
to install a front door.  Very odd.
* The astonishing shortage of shock absorbers.
* Haggling. 
* "If someone write, we catch."

+++++++++

Good grief but this was a long one!  Probably because this is the first one
I've been able to compose without the fiscal spectre of the per-hour
internet cafe charge. Every other dispatch has been written in about an
hour, with no editing allowed.  [[Perhaps editing would be a good idea
after all.]]

I have a personal plea to make: Would anyone out there be interested in
putting these Dispatches and some photographs of my trip up on my website?
(http://www.bway.net/~bastable)  I think it'd be a really cool thing to
have my travelogue going on there, too -- but I can't do it from the cafes.
 First, I'd need a scanner and second, I'd need a bag o'swag.  Anyone?  Who
wants to be It?  I promise you a gift from the nation of your choosing! All
you need is an e-mail account (check) and a mailbox. Let me know.

It's already been a busy few days in London (seeing a friend in a play,
another in a concert, seeing the Magna Carta and Da Vinci's notebooks,
making my trademark salsa for half the nation). I'll be in Britain and
Ireland for a month or more, I expect.  It's the last chance I have to
visit friends who actually know me.  Plus it's so pleasant and green here.
Then I'm off to Southern Africa.  Think I'll go to Belfast.  My experience
in Wadi Mousa wasn't harrowing enough. Or the Shetlands.  Any suggestions?

Speaking of my photos, I'm so surprised how HEALTHY I look.  Could be the
tan, or the lost weight.  Or just that -- I have to admit it -- I'm really
happy.  Things are okay. So don't worry 'bout me.

Wanna call me in London?  I'm on 171 473 0328, staying with Robin Oakley
and Jen Jellicorse.  In America, dial 011-44 first.  We're five hours ahead
and we don't do mornings.

I love you all!  I miss you doubly!

Not feeling 27,
Jase

Right now I'm in: London (East Ham), England

Days: 85 Countries: 13 (I went through Belgium -- wheeee!)