Turkish Forum

Tag: Andrew Finkel

  • Istanbul’s Tulip Festival Camouflages The Destruction Of Its Green Spaces

    Istanbul’s Tulip Festival Camouflages The Destruction Of Its Green Spaces

    Tulips in a public garden in Istanbul.

    latitude-0418-finkel-blog480

    ISTANBUL — The city’s parks and gardens and the central dividers of its throughways are a blaze of color this month. It’s tulip season, and over 14 million bulbs have burst into bloom, roughly one for every resident. Istanbul still prides itself on having transformed, in the 16th century, this wild hill flower into a cultivated blossom, and with it capturing the imagination of northern Europeans.

    But instead of indulging in industrial-scale municipal gardening, local authorities would be better off saving what is left of the city’s once-rich natural habitats.

    The history of the Istanbul tulip itself is something of a cautionary tale: There were at least 2,000 individually named varieties in the early 18th century, a period that historians later called the Tulip Age. But not one of these survives, according to the British botanist Andrew Byfield. They were felled by disease and changing fashions.

    Most of the tulips now on display around Istanbul are locally grown, but they are large half-cup Dutch hybrids that had to be transplanted back here. (These flowers originated in the steppes of Central Asia, were cultivated in the Ottoman Empire, exported to the Netherlands and then re-imported to Turkey to replace local plants that had died out.) The original Istanbul tulip was a very different beast: “a svelte, almond-shaped flower with long, dagger-like petals tapering to needle-sharp points,” according to the late Turkish botanist Turhan Baytop.

    The height of Turkish tulipmania, during the reign of Ahmed III in the early 18th century, was a celebration of the unique and the perfect. Florists would spend the entire year cultivating a single flower. Istanbul will spend just over $7 million on this year’s festival, or roughly half a dollar a tulip. In 1725, a single bulb could change hands for 1,000 gold pieces.

    I’m glad that tulips are no longer the fetish exclusively of the elite. But I worry that the display of green-thumbedness at the current festival is camouflage for the wholesale destruction of green spaces elsewhere.

    It now seems impossible to stop the construction of a third Bosphorus Bridge at the northern end of Istanbul, a project that will lead to the urbanization of one of the city’s last remaining green belts. And the government has other mega-projects in mind: including a third airport with six runways — it would be the world’s largest — and a grand canal that would cut through the Thracian Peninsula to create another shipping route. Istanbul is also bidding for the 2020 Olympics, which would entail major construction to the west of the city.

    Municipal authorities dreaming up these grand plans might pause to ponder the fate of Ahmed III, the sultan who presided over the Tulip Age: He was overthrown, and by some accounts, because of ostentatious tastes he could no longer afford. The logo for Istanbul’s Olympic bid is supposed to represent the outline of Istanbul cupped in a tulip. To me, it looks a lot like a Venus flytrap about to swallow the whole city.

    Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

    via Istanbul’s Tulip Festival Camouflages The Destruction Of Its Green Spaces – NYTimes.com.

  • Violence In Afghanistan Has No Religious Justification Say Muslim Clerics At A Conference in Istanbul

    Violence In Afghanistan Has No Religious Justification Say Muslim Clerics At A Conference in Istanbul

    What the Mullahs Are Mulling

    By ANDREW FINKEL

    ISTANBUL — Midday in Istanbul’s historical Beyazit district and the air suddenly fills with the call to prayer from the many royal mosques nearby. It is a reminder that a part of the city that now bustles with shoppers, university students and tourists was once the heart of a great Islamic empire.

    Istanbul is no longer home to the caliphate, but it still transmits to the faithful: At the beginning of the week, leading Muslim scholars from across the world — Indonesia, Britain, Pakistan — met in a modestly sized hotel conference room to hammer out the rights and wrongs of the conflict in Afghanistan.

    Although I was told not to identify participants without their permission for fear of reprisals by the Taliban, no one seemed afraid to call a spade a spade. Much effort was spent debunking the notion that the struggle in Afghanistan is a holy war rather than a straightforward tussle for power.

    The conference, “Islamic Cooperation for a Peaceful Future in Afghanistan,” was the brainchild not of a cleric but of Neamatollah Nojumi, a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University who came to the subject the hard way. At the age of 14 he was a mujahid fighting the Soviets in his native Afghanistan.

    Simply by gathering people of good will in one room, the organizers believe they have succeeded where national authorities have failed.

    Now his mission is to stop Afghans from fighting Afghans. The method is straightforward. Senior Afghan clerics meet with the world’s leading Islamic theologians to discuss suicide bombings, the targeting of civilians, the destruction of historical artifacts — even domestic violence.

    This week’s conference culminated in a detailed and strongly worded resolution that reaffirmed Islam’s compatibility with universal human norms and called on religious institutions in Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring countries to end violence. The document will be circulated to more than 160,000 mosques in Afghanistan so that its findings may trickle into individual consciences there.

    The meeting was the third of its kind, and the overall effort has started to make a difference, according Ataur Rahman Salim, director of the Scientific Islamic Research Center in Kabul. It is now easier to oppose the men of violence. “The majority of Islamic scholars are not afraid to speak out,” he said.

    But “some are sitting on the fence,” he added. Indeed. Several speakers supported the Taliban over the Afghan government and were more critical of NATO bombings than of suicide attacks by insurgents.

    I sat next to the Indian scholar Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, who is closely associated with the ultra-orthodox Deoband community. He believes that NATO, not Pakistan, is complicating the situation in Afghanistan and that government is supported by a mere 10 percent of the population. And yet he parts company with the Taliban when it comes to the use of violence. “Conflict will not solve conflict,” he told me. “Islam does not mean war.”

    Nor does Islam mean denying women access to education and health services, according to the draft of the final resolution. The document also states that the violation of women’s rights contradicts the tenets of Islam.

    Participants did not expect this process to solve Afghanistan’s main problem — “government without governance,” according to Nojumi — but it does allow a burgeoning civil society movement to call both the Afghan government and insurgents to account and to put pressure on interfering neighbors to back off.

    ANDREW FINKEL

    Simply by gathering people of good will in one room, the organizers believe they have succeeded where national authorities have failed. Whereas four clerics from Pakistan attended this conference, the Afghan and Pakistani governments have tried and have not managed to organize a meeting of clerics since the beginning of the year.

    Given the diversity of participants, the degree of unanimity was remarkable. The recourse to violence in Afghanistan had no religious justification, speaker after speaker said. Or, in the words of the final declaration, “A crime committed in the name of Islam is a crime against Islam.”

    Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

    via Violence In Afghanistan Has No Religious Justification Say Muslim Clerics At A Conference in Istanbul – NYTimes.com.

  • Navigating Turkey – NYTimes.com

    Navigating Turkey – NYTimes.com

    Navigating Turkey

    By ANDREW FINKEL

    ISTANBUL — G.P.S. navigator devices have started popping up on the dashboards of Istanbul taxis, but I’ve assumed that, like furry dice and troll dolls with wobbly heads, they are fashion statements more than tools. I’ve never seen a driver use one unprompted or even consult a conventional street atlas.

    Maybe drivers don’t bother because Istanbul’s municipal authorities change the names of streets with arbitrary frequency. My own street, less than 50 meters long, was renamed from one type of flower to another just three years ago, the fourth change since 1939. The other day I was informed that our house number had also been changed — from 4 to 6 — which is odd because there is only one other house on the street. An astonishing 12,000 villages, or 35 percent of the country’s total, were renamed between 1940 and 2000. Many have been Turkified from Greek, Armenian or Kurdish. In the other cases, the reasons for the changes are unclear.

    By far the greatest hurdle to cartographic literacy in Turkey is that officialdom still regards maps with the same sort of Cold War suspicion it once had for Polaroid photos of tank traps or lemon-juice sketches of naval yards. This is an expression of the view that information is power and so is best released sparingly. The military’s General Command of Mapping decides whether a map is in the public interest or could be “exploited in the international arena,” and there are stiff penalties for those who disagree. In practice, this prohibits the publication of maps at a scale larger than 1:200,000 — where one centimeter represents two kilometers — a degree of precision more than adequate if you are driving from town to town but not if you are rambling from hither to yon. The famous British Ordnance Survey paper maps, beloved of British hikers, are typically 1:25,000.

    There are exceptions. Some firms may produce detailed city maps under special license and provide mapping data for commercial use. The Turkish military issues large-scale maps that, despite being marked “TOP SECRET,” find their way to the academics or road builders who need them most. And hotel clerks happily provide guests with fold-ups that show the way to the Blue Mosque and back. But Turkey is the only place I’ve been in Europe with no public contour maps at a scale of at least 1:50,000.

    This is strangely anachronistic in the Google era, when satellite imaging can spot a dachshund on its daily run and Soviet military maps of Turkey at 1:100,000 are freely available on the Web. The Turkish legislation dates back to 1925, when maps were printed on paper and not stored as vectors in digital code. But today the villains bent on using maps to do harm can get their hands on all the data they need, so it’s tourists, off-road bikers, archaeologists and guardians of the countryside who suffer. And in a natural disaster, keeping the 1:25,000 maps under military lock and key means more lives lost.

    The now-legendary example of how mapping can come to the rescue was Haiti during the 2010 earthquake. With breathtaking speed, members of Open Street Map — a voluntary Wiki-army of cartographers around the world — transformed up-to-date images taken by aircraft and satellites into maps that showed not only streets but exactly which streets were blocked by collapsed buildings or bridges. The information was triangulated with on-the-ground data from aid workers trying to reach people buried under rubble: their frantic text messages were translated by the expatriate Haitian community online.

    Crowdsourcing, or turning the interested man or woman on the street — and the Web — into a mini-Mercator, is the way of the future, according to Suha Ulgen, who advises the U.N.’s chief information technology officer on how to use maps for humanitarian responses. A Turkish national, Ulgen tried to repeat the Haiti experiment during the recent earthquake in eastern Turkey. “Google maps just didn’t show enough detail for the worst-hit town of Ercis,” he said. So with the private satellite-imagery company Digital Globe providing the images and Open Street Map interpreting the data, he set to work.

    The result was an instant digital map of Ercis brimming with all the information the rescuers needed. Yet it only had a limited impact. The emergency services were too distracted, and in some cases local responders were too busy rescuing their own relatives to take on a new technology.

    The answer, Ulgen concluded, is to raise map-awareness before disaster strikes, especially in a country as seismically active as Turkey. This means claiming maps as a right rather than something the authorities let us see on a need-to-know basis.

    I’m doing my bit. Now, whenever I get into a cab with a sat-nav, I insist that the driver turn it on. On a recent sortie, I was trying to get to an address at the periphery of Istanbul’s main airport. “It’s no use,” the cabbie told me after the screen came up blank. “It’s a classified zone.” We got there eventually, but the traditional way, following his nose and rolling down the window to ask for directions.

    Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. His latest book, “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know,” will be published next year.

    via Navigating Turkey – NYTimes.com.