Tag: Magnificent Century

Hadeel Al Sayegh   

A man walks into a bedroom where a beautiful woman with dark eyes and auburn hair is sitting on the bed. He moves towards her and she greets him with a kiss. At first, she tries to hold a serious conversation, but it is not long before she succumbs to the man’s seduction.

When the saucy Turkish drama Gumus was first broadcast about seven years ago, it took the Middle East by storm, attracting more than 85 million viewers to the final episode and stirring outrage from Islamist sheikhs in Saudi Arabia and across the wider region.

The show, which ran on MBC as Noor, tells the story of a woman from the countryside who marries into a rich family in Istanbul. The series flaunts Turkey’s relative liberality, with characters frequently drinking wine and kissing on screen: two major taboos in many Muslim societies.

But many Arab fans turned a blind eye, and Turkey’s tourism sector actually saw a boost as visitors flocked to the luxury waterfront villa where Gumus was filmed. That popularity led several other Turkish series to be dubbed in Arabic.

Now, behind the scenes, Turkey is slowly pulling back from such risqué fare, given the tension between Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s secular legacy and the influence of the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr Erdogan’s ascendance has represented a marked shift in Turkish politics. After decades of striving for EU membership, Turkey has turned back towards its Muslim neighbours. Since the Arab Spring uprisings, Mr Erdogan has toured Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and reached out to Muslim Brotherhood-related groups that have been empowered since their respective revolutions.

Closer to home, the AKP has lifted the ban on women wearing headscarves in public areas, introduced religious education and restricted alcohol in certain places. This has an artistic element as well – Mr Erdogan has also tried to prevent the filming of the third season of the popular soap opera Muhtesem Yuzyil, or Harem Al Sultan, that is now showing on Dubai TV.

Muhtesem is loosely based on a true story, depicting the life and women of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire’s longest reigning sultan. The show, which has over 150 million viewers across Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East, depicts the Sultan’s concubines and wives battling for his attention. In one episode, Suleiman kills his own son as a result.

Mr Erdogan has accused the directors of defaming the sultan, who is depicted as a drinker and womaniser, rather than focusing on his political achievements as he ruled the empire from 1520 to 1566.

“That’s not the Suleiman we know,” Mr Erdogan said in a speech late November. “Before my nation, I condemn both the director of this series and the owner of the television station.”

Days after his statement, Turkish Airlines removed the show from its in-flight programming.

This week, it emerged that the national airline had also introduced a new dress code for cabin crew, causing an uproar among secularists, after a leak of pictures of women in modest dress, with skirts below the knees and Ottoman style fez caps. The decision came amid reports that the airline had considered plans to ban alcohol on some routes.

The airline told Turkish media that the new dress code was just one suggestion. But the flagship’s recent statements do seem to show a steady drift away from Turkey’s secular heritage in line with the more conservative views of Mr Erdogan’s government.

It’s a storyline with which soap opera fans should be familiar. In Muhtesem, the household of the sultan is split by the rivalries between the two main wives, who are always immaculately dressed in glamorous Ottoman gowns.

Hurrem is a mischievous woman with her voluminous blonde curls and exposed cleavage, adorned with flashy jewellery. She gradually steals the sultan’s love from Mahidevran – the mother of his first child – who eventually stages a rebellion.

But in Turkey’s political drama, who is the faithful representative of the people, and who is the interloper? The AKP has consistently won at the ballot box for more than a decade, while the opposition champions Ataturk’s principles espoused at the founding of the country. Neither, it seems, nears its final act.

via A more conservative script for Turkey’s relatively liberal culture – The National.

In most countries, it’s unusual for the looming death of a television character to become a source of official anxiety. In Turkey, however, a hit television series chronicling the 16th century reign of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent has riled officials, who are looking to that era to help shape their own conservative message.

For decades, Turkey’s Ottoman heritage was downplayed by a secular governing elite that wanted to make a definitive break from the country’s Islamic, eastern-oriented past. Now, with the country’s star rising internationally, stories that lavishly recall a grand imperial past dovetail well with modern Turkey’s greater self-confidence.

But not all of these tales necessarily reflect the image of the country that the government wishes to project.

The television drama Muhteşem Yüzyıl (The Magnificent Century) offers a case in point. The sweeping historical saga has already enthralled legions of Turkish viewers for two years. But now the story is reaching an especially riveting point, the pending execution of Ibrahim Pasha, the sultan’s grand vizier.

The path to Ibrahim Pasha’s demise was filled with intrigue. And the prospect of reexamining this complicated chapter in the Ottoman past makes Turkey’s incumbent culture minister, Ertuğrul Günay, uneasy. “As there are good aspects in history worth praising, there are also bad sides, which are not tolerable with our consciousness of today,” Günay commented on national television earlier this month.

In recent weeks, The Magnificent Century has angered many prominent government politicians, who have denounced it for depicting entanglements between the Ottoman Empire’s most illustrious sultan and the scheming women of his harem.

“Imposed on Suleiman the Magnificent, a person who spent his life on horseback serving his country and his nation, is a life entirely composed of the bedroom and based on twisted relationships,” Oktay Saral, an MP for the governing, Islamist-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP), commented in December, the Sabah newspaper reported.

Oktay threatened to introduce a bill in parliament that would outlaw the “misrepresentation of historical figures,” but when EurasiaNet.org contacted his office, a spokesperson said the issue was “no longer a priority.”

The MP seemed to take his cue from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who assailed the show in similar terms in November.

Analysts believe that the anger over the drama is rooted in clashing priorities between a burgeoning TV and movie industry riding a wave of so-called “Ottomania,” and a government that wants retroactively to stamp that era with its own political and social values.

Today, the series reportedly attracts one-third of Turkey’s primetime audience on Wednesday nights, as well as 150 million viewers across Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Balkans. It has also paved the way for a string of other movies and television shows hoping to emulate its success by feeding viewers’ hunger for tales of the Ottoman past.

“You would think that the AKP would totally embrace this because it reflects their notion of the new founding moment of Turkey,” said Jenny White, a professor of social anthropology at Boston University, and a self-confessed addict of The Magnificent Century.

The cause of Erdoğan’s anger, White believes, may lie in characters like Hürrem, also known to history as Roxelana, who was born in what is now western Ukraine. As Suleiman’s concubine and, later, his wife, Hürrem played a central role in the corridors of power. Her enormous political influence, which has been documented by scholars, runs counter to the AKP’s own conservative ideas about the role of women in society.

As many historians claim was the case in real life, Hürrem’s machinations, as portrayed in The Magnificent Century, are expected to lead to the on-screen death of Ibrahim Pasha.

“I think the image of scantily-clad women cavorting with these men and having power, even if it’s in this limited sphere, is just too much for them,” said White, in reference to the AKP.

Prevailing attitudes in Turkish politics hold that women “shouldn’t be in [the] public space whatsoever because they should be at home having children.”

Social taboos have governed Turkey’s television industry since private television first got its start in the 1990s, noted Julien Paris, a researcher studying the Turkish soap opera industry at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul.

As the Ottoman history regains a role in Turkey’s political discourse, “it’s important for the government to create a kind of unspoken jurisprudence for how to represent that era,” Paris said.

The controversy may also reflect a debate over how to represent figures from Turkey’s past – whether as flesh-and-blood characters, complete with human weaknesses and, sometimes, sex drives, or as semi-mythical heroes.

The Magnificent Century, and the 2008 biopic Mustafa, which sought to humanize the Turkish Republic’s founder, Mustafa Atatürk, spark angry reactions not because they challenge official positions, but “because they depict their hero as a person who falls in love, who has sex as any ordinary person would,” commented Esin Paça Cengiz, a doctoral candidate studying the depiction of history in Turkish cinema at London’s Royal Holloway University.

“The government and lots of nationalist people object to this kind of representation,” she added.

Some fans say that The Magnificent Century’s scene settings have begun to change in response to official criticism. “There are … noticeably more religious scenes both in the harem … and [of] the sultan and his entourage going to the mosque,” observed Boston University’s White.

Despite its objections to The Magnificent Century, Turkey’s government appears committed to expanding the international reach of the country’s soap-opera industry, seeing it as an effective way to project soft power.

The Ministry of Economy hopes to expand exports of Turkish TV programs to $100 million per year, up from $70 million in 2012.

The largely state-financed public broadcaster TRT has even come up with its own contribution to the Ottoman craze — Cinar, a cartoon that, according to producer Varol Yasaroğlu, aims to educate children about the Ottoman era’s “moral and humanitarian values” of “peace and hospitality and tolerance.”

But with romance and intrigue still the mainstays of Turkey’s thriving soap opera industry, more programming like The Magnificent Century seems destined to go into production, said White, the social anthropologist.