Memduh Şevket Esendal may be the most famous Turkish writer most English speakers (including this one) have never heard of. In Turkey, however, people will have come across him in school where he has long had a secure place in Turkish textbooks. This has not however always worked in his favour: to paraphrase from translator…
Sertac Karan, a Turkish-Kurd and the protagonist of this absurdist black comedy, is a would-be writer who is alienated from society and much given to procrastination. From childhood, his exorbitant imagination shines at creating outlandish characters, which, when he is an adult, will become actual delusions, as his fantasies invade and undermine conventional reality. First…
Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
An Iranian grandee once asked this reviewer if he had enjoyed a dish of braised sheep brains. I replied, quoting Sa’di, “a lenifying lie is better than an irksome truth.” Face saved on all sides. This incident illustrates an important aspect of Iranian and Persianate culture: the use of poetic language to shape and elevate…
Vita Sackville-West’s novel The Edwardians describes a famous explorer forced to perform as “the lion of the hour” in the drawing room of a great country estate. For this earnest scientist and adventurer, it’s a painful humiliation for him to don white tie and attempt polite conversation with idle aristocrats who have no clue where…
It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and…
A subtle interaction between the human mind, muscle and matter produces music. Over the centuries, these interactions change, as instruments come and go out of favor and the role of music and musicians evolve. A well-documented tradition like Turkish art music (or Ottoman classic music) exhibits a bewildering variety of innovations over its 500 year…
Sometimes you must write the book you want to read. In the afterword to her debut novel Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed remembers growing up with The Arabian Nights as “a cultural touchstone” while always “wanting more of her”. The “her” is, of course, Shaherazade, the teller of life-prolonging fantastical tales.
Travelers to Turkey often return with a ceramic plate or tile as a souvenir of their sojourn, many of these have designs based on or inspired by the ceramics from Iznik (the ancient Nicaea, across the Marmara from Istanbul), a major center of production between the 15th and 17th centuries, a history probably unknown to…
Once upon a time, many of the largest cities in what was at the time called the “Near East” enjoyed the benefits of the presence of thriving Jewish communities. Constantinople, Aleppo and Baghdad were just a few cities with tens of thousands of Jews that have since dwindled down to almost a handful. In award-winning…
Peter Constantine is one of the most prominent—and diverse—contemporary translators. He has published English translations from Russian, German, French, Italian, Modern and Ancient Greek, Albanian, Dutch and Slovene, winning numerous awards for his translations of Machiavelli, Babel, and Thomas Mann. It’s only now that he’s come out with a novel, The Purchased Bride, based on…
While the first two books in Ahmet Altan’s “Ottoman Quartet”, Like a Sword Wound and Love in the Days of Rebellion, could be read as stand-alone novels, the third installment, Dying is Easier than Loving, requires familiarity with the story that came before.
The core of the Ottomans’ political culture could never be replicated. Based on military slaves, forcibly recruited from non-Muslim subjects, a harem full of nubile captives hoping to become sultanas, an emperor who had to murder his brothers to secure his throne, and a pliant clergy that reconciled these extra-legal practices with religion, the “Eternal…
It helps to be reminded from time to time that literature, all other objectives aside, is at bottom storytelling. And Turkish Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel Nights of Plague is storytelling so luxuriant that one cannot help but soak in it.
It’s the 16th century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab learning and culture. But how did these two groups—Arabs and “Rumis”, a term used to refer to those living in Anatolia—interact? How did Arabs deal with these powerful upstarts, and how did Rumis…