In “The Return of the Flaneur,” Walter Benjamin begins his review of Franz Hessel’s Berlin Walks by noting, “If we were to divide all the existing descriptions of cities into two groups according to the birthplace of the authors, we would certainly find that those written by natives of the cities concerned are greatly in [...]
You can often tell whether you’re standing in the East or in the West, just by the way people refer to certain historical events. For Westerners, May 29, 1453, is the Fall of Constantinople, while for Easterners it’s the Conquest of Istanbul. Years later, when my wife was studying at Columbia University, she used the [...]
After a long period when no one of consequence came to Istanbul, and local journalists interviewed all foreigners who turned up at the Hilton Hotel, the Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky published a long piece entitled “Flight from Byzantium” in The New Yorker.
Perhaps because he was still smarting from W. H. Auden’s brutal review of the [...]
In his memoirs, Falaka and Nights, Ahmet Rasim wrote at length about his school days a century ago, when teachers in Ottoman schools held rods so long they could hit their pupils without even rising from their seats; our teachers encouraged us to read these books, perhaps to show us how lucky we were to [...]
My first trip to a mosque helped confirm my prejudices about religion in general and Islam in particular. It was almost by chance: One afternoon when there was no one home, Esma Hanım took me off to the mosque without asking anyone’s permission; she was not so much burning with a need to worship as [...]
Tristesse is not a pain that affects a solitary individual [like melancholy]; hüzün and tristesse both suggest a communal feeling, an atmosphere and a culture shared by millions. But the words and the feelings they describe are not identical, and if we are to pinpoint the difference it is not enough to say that Istanbul [...]
It was in Cihangir [named for Mughal Emperor Jahangir] (where we too would move as our fortunes dwindled) that I first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives—a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what—but an archipelago of neighborhoods in which everyone knew one [...]
I’ve been too busy with other projects lately to follow up on some news reports that relate to my recent excerpts from Rory Stewart’s travels in Afghanistan, in particular Anne Applebaum’s column last Tuesday advocating control rather than eradication of opium, the country’s largest cash crop by far.
Of course it isn’t fashionable right now to [...]
As Shiism spread over time and space it became culturally diverse. This enriched Shia life and thought and added new dimensions to the faith’s historical development that went beyond its roots in the Arab heartland of Islam. The practice of the faith itself adapted to new cultures as its message spread eastward from the Arab [...]
Last March I blogged a few passages from (now) Nobel-prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow.
Pamuk’s Brueghelian Prose (In under 500 words, Orhan Pamuk limns a complex Brueghelian landscape of social as well as material relations.)
Pamuk on Political Means, Personal Ends
Pamuk on the Hectoring “Pappy State” (Pamuk portrays the forces of secularism in the Turkish state [...]
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