Tag: Naipaul

  • On the Naipaul issue

    On the Naipaul issue

    CENGİZ AKTAR

    Born in Trinidad and Tobago, V.S. Naipaul, an author of Indian descent, couldn’t attend the European Writers’ Parliament in Istanbul because of a disruption initiated by Turkish authors – despite coming to the city last July.

    Recently Emir Kusturica, who was invited as a jury member to the International Film Festival in Antalya, was “welcomed” by a similar attitude.

    Forget about the content of debates surrounding the presence of Naipaul at an international literary event, we can be sure that Turkey is written off as an intolerant country by the majority of foreign observers. Foreign media regarded both issues as part of the clash of civilizations, some considering intolerance as justifiable and some others unjustifiable.

    Let’s now turn to the master. Naipaul is a typical “white Indian.” His thesis regarding Islam appeared concurrently with Salman Rushdie but developed in a different direction. Roughly, he claims that Islam destroyed the cultures of pre-Islamic civilizations that were converted to Islam. For this reason, says Naipaul in his excellent English, Islam is a quasi-totalitarian religion. The plea of the converted people is the main theme of Naipaul’s two books which he wrote after traveling to Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia and Pakistan. In his book “The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief,” on Islam in Black Africa, Naipaul also sets out with a similar prejudice. He asserts Islam is a religion of and for Arabs only; therefore, every nation but Arabs are converts who were harmed by Islam. With such a thesis Naipaul directly ends up in the laps of the most archaic Islamophobia.

    The claim of Islam being a totalitarian religion is quite old. Is there only one single interpretation of Islam? Does Christianity not consider pre-monotheistic beliefs illegitimate? Is it possible that Naipaul, coming from British culture, doesn’t know the odd experiences of Black Africans who were converted by force to Christianity as much as he knows of Black Africans who converted to Islam?

    Obsession with Islam

    In this context, the country Naipaul examined the least is India; the real source of his obsession. Let us recall his attitude regarding the Babri Mosque attack.

    The Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya in Fayzabad was built in 1527-28 following the invasion of the subcontinent by Babur Shah in the 16th century. It was demolished by radical Hindu militants because it was constructed on a holy site, known as the birth place of the Indian divinity Rama. In a subsequent revolt, around 2,000 people died. Before and after the attack, the mosque had become a source of conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim Hindus, just like the al-Aqsa/Temple Mount in Jerusalem between Muslims and Jews. Coincidentally, last October the Indian judiciary announced the verdict on the Ayodhya raid and divided the holy site into three but the holy structure of the Muslims remained in the territory of non-Muslims.

    Our author didn’t condemn the Ayodhya disaster once, and acted insolently by saying that it was the result of Hindus’ “creative passion!”

    Naipaul is a leader in Islamophobia and has gained the fame that came along with it in the West. Other Islamophobic performers who go back and forth between scandals and provocations while peddling occasional pseudo-scientific claims are Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh, who lives in Sweden; Ugandan-Indian Irshad Manji, who lives in Canada; Walid Shuabat of Palestine, Wafa Sultan of Syria and Ayaan Hırsi Ali of Somalia, who all live in the United States; Anwar Sheikh of Pakistan, who lives in Britain; Afshin Elian of Iran, who lives in the Netherlands; and Necla Kelek of Turkey and Bassam Tibi of Syria, who live in Germany.

    However, the way to deal with this trend is not to ban the freedom of expression of its representatives in Islamic countries. Otherwise, there remains no difference between Naipaul’s Islamophobia and pro-ban groups who do not want him to visit a Muslim neighborhood.

    In this, Voltaire’s words, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it,” should be the norm.

    The European Writers’ Parliament, convened recently in Istanbul as part of the European Capital of Culture, was a perfect forum to discuss all these. But that didn’t happen. What a missed opportunity!

  • Can digital networks support the writer’s ‘freedom to work honestly’?

    Can digital networks support the writer’s ‘freedom to work honestly’?

    November 30, 2010 by Pat Kane

    As we queued for the morning’s baklavas at the European Writers’ Conference in Istanbul, I nodded at my distinguished colleague’s remarks. “Much of what is going on here is very international-literary-conference, PEN-protest standard. Statements are being made that could have been composed even before they turned up”. Then he scuttled off for a bitter coffee.

    But I wasn’t going to join in his lofty disdain. I was happy to be the ingenue here, in this intriguing crowd, trying to be on “receive” much more than “transmit”. What I was beginning to sense was the sheer cultural heterogeneity of this place we call “Europe”. But also the common predicaments – from political to economic to stylistic – that beset the European writer.

    In our commission on “Literature in the Digital Age”, what emerged was a picture of European writers as affected by the “digital divide” as any group in society – and perhaps more so, because of the explicit traditionalism on one side of the gulf. It was jaw-dropping to hear a minority of writers doggedly defend their right to love vellum paper, fountain pens, brutal old typewriters.

    They praised how these ancient means of literary production compelled them to make important decisions about their prose: being unable to digitally cut-and-paste made their writing more urgent, raised the stakes. They demanded their right to solitude and concentration, to preserve the moment of witness, to be diligent crafters of language.

    This was a transnational appeal, from Icelandics, Belgian-Lebanese, Germans, Muslim Turks. (The Macedonian poet mentioned tremulously in the last post actually delivered a lovely, subtle meditation on poetry as a “network of meaning”). But I couldn’t get too exasperated with those who wanted to shut out the buzz and twitter of the interactive world in order to wrestle soulfully with their prose.

    Though his science is debatable, the US tech critic Nick Carr has sounded a useful warning about how deep reading might be under neurological threat from the permanent flicker and twitter of social media. And in terms of deep writing, I was reminded of James Kelman’s words that, compared to many other more collaborative and mediated art forms, “in prose fiction the freedom to ‘work honestly’ exists, although you may have to fight for it”.

    It’s a good question: How can digital networks support the writer’s “freedom to work honestly”?

    Perhaps one way would be to help the writer to work with no name at all. A charismatic young Turkish activist (who I won’t name) talked about French radical newspapers during WWII, like JP Sartre and Albert Camus’s Combat, publishing material anonymously in order to evade the reach of Nazi authorities. In his view, modern Turkish society needed a lot more of this “resistance writing”. He noted the Turkish state’s tendency (as exemplified by Penal Code 301) to “surround the Prime Minister and his party with a legal wall in order to protect him… You cannot write ‘Prime Minister’ and ‘traitor’ in the same sentence – it’s illegal.”

    In order to evade the regulators and establishment, he continued, Turkish writers should give up the idea of “copyright” altogether on the web – “a text with no names speaking for all names, for all of those whose speech is being censored or suppressed”. Yet, as the very sharp William Wall from Ireland reminded us, we should suspect our cyber-idealism: the internet could all too easily become the ultimate means of social control, as much as it could be a platform for resistance writing. Not much engineering is required for every click, scroll, copy and paste – particularly in the age of cloud computing – to be centrally observed by the wrong forces.

    The rest of us in the room (including myself) could be classed as digital-literary “reformists”, rather than either “luddites” or “resisters”. How do writers defend the democratic power of the open web, while also finding a way to get a revenue by exerting some kind of property ownership over their works? For musicians, this is decade-long argument – begun with Napster and Bit-Torrent and currently continuing with iTunes, Spotify and YouTube – which we’re only beginning to draw to some kind of conclusion.

    The message I tried to convey from my own sector was that it might be possible, with some combination of collective licensing, good software and usable hardware, to rebuild some kind of money-stream through new distribution channels like the Kindle, iPad or future tablets. But the lesson of the music business is that the price of a digital book has to be sensibly cheap, given the experience of a web generation used to downloading and streaming to their heart’s content.

    The e-book shouldn’t try to rip-off the consumer in the same way as the CD did to the cassette-and-vinyl buyer of the past. We know that the immaterial nature of the object means that prices should fall – and so they will.

    But the even more urgent lesson is that authors need to become as conscious of their power as digital “rights-holders” as musicians now are – and support digital platforms (similar to Tunecore and Bandcamp for musicians) which will enable them to trade their works directly with readers, rather than have a whole army of intermediaries and middle-men take their cut. Perhaps, I also tentatively suggested, authors should also find a more dynamic way to relate to their readers, using web-community tools to amplify the connections they make at readings, in-stores and festivals.

    In a brilliant presentation (here’s an earlier version), the Swedish writer Ola Larsmo proposed the “x plus 1″ theory: “new media does exactly what the old did – plus one thing more … And if we apply the formula of x+1 to the book, we see that whatever wants to replace it must be able to do everything a book can, including standing around for a long while and remaining readable. Whatever wants to replace the book must, by necessity, look very much like – a book.”

    And with that, a few of us skulked off to plan a “United Writers” (in the spirit of United Artists), to help connect the author’s voice to those “engineers and coders” – featured in Hari Kunzru’s opening speech – who will shape the “space of literature”. Watch this space, indeed.

    Our final “Declaration of Istanbul” had a slightly rocky passage to completion – it was perhaps too faithful to the bloviating and theorising that you’d get from rooms full of national intellectuals. But once the objections had been raised and noted, the committee produced a reasonable statement that asserted a few crucial points.

    Primarily, it opposed “the use of penal codes and laws to harass and intimidate writers, such as has happened in Turkey and elsewhere” (not as explicitly stated in the first draft). The importance of funding translation schemes came with a brand-new (and supremely ugly) chunk of jargon: “biblio-diversity”. The declaration was endorsed almost unanimously – with only one Muslim writer complaining testily that he didn’t regret in the slightest “making it difficult for Naipaul to come”.

    Two themes were on my mind as the parliament wound down. One arose from my many conversations with writers from post-Communist states, all of whom exhibited a remarkable depth of cynicism and even despair about the public culture and political structures of their country. Bulgarians satirising their diplomats as venal idiots; Slovaks writing best-sellers on the human face of their mafia gangs; Latvians watching their language wither on the vine for lack of cultural investment; Hungarians terrified at the extreme right-wing elements in their polity…

    Other than the perpetually optimistic Nordics, these writers were describing a Europe in a state of exhaustion and even nihilism – not a good mood for Europeans to be in. I found myself counting my blessings for the consistent temper of the Scottish national mood – no doubt benefitted by the relative development of our economic and public services, and the access to rich markets of our English-speaking cultural producers. By comparison with these countries, our minuet-like steps towards effective self-government, and the pettifogging squabbles about the relevant tactics in Holyrood, seem even more like the squandering of an easy and obvious opportunity.

    And as for nationhood, I’m only beginning what feels like a long investigative journey into the nature of national identity in Turkey. Perry Anderson’s powerful LRB essays on the history and legacy of Kemalism have two main points. Firstly, Turkey cannot become the geopolitical fulcrum between Europe and the Arab world that it craves to be, without fully reckoning with its darker history: the genocide against the Armenians, its many other ethnic and regional pogroms and exclusions, and its current deafness to the self-governing demands of Kurds within its borders (and Cypriots beyond).

    Do Scots, as Tom Devine constantly reminds us, have to face up to the human costs of our eager facilitation of British colonial horror? Or Australians their treatment of aboriginals? Of course we, and they, do: any healthy national identity does, particularly those that once operated as Anderson’s “party of order”. Going by the voices of the Turkish writers at this gathering, there is a similar reckoning coming for the sons of Kemal.

    Anderson’s second, well-argued point is that Turkish secular nationalism was always much more coldly pragmatic about the use of religion to maintain social harmony (particularly via Sunni Islam) than its current advocates claim. Any morning read of Istanbul’s two excellent English-language papers, Daily News & Economic Review and Zaman, is like staring into a clouded pool of coded messages and religious-political strategies it could take years to understand fully.

    And yet, and yet. We closed our visit with a tour round two thrillingly beautiful mosques, the Haghia Sophia and the Sultanahmet (or Blue Mosque) – the latter in particular a mind-blowing orgy of geometric form, pattern and colour, its impact on the caverns of your head and heart undeniable.

    The Istanbul skyline on that final evening looked unreal: a teeming social fabric cast upon its seven hills, the mosques surmounting this tumult like 50’s sci-fi structures. Alongside my urbane companions, it felt like one of the few places on earth where some new discussions might occur – about how to reconcile progress and piety, modernity and tradition, the contingent and the eternal. I hope I’ll be back, and in the meantime I’ll certainly be listening and watching.

    – For more pictures and vids on Pat Kane’s ideas visit his blog Thoughtland.

  • Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks

    Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks

    After protests from some Turkish authors, Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul decided against giving the opening speech at the inaugural European Writers’ Parliament last week. The European Writers’ Parliament was conceived by two other Nobel laureates — Jose Saramago and Orhan Pamuk — and was held in Pamuk’s home city, Istanbul.

    naipaul2

    The protests came from some authors who were uneasy about comments Naipaul has made about Islam. “The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling. I cannot attend the event given all of this,” Cihan Aktas told the media. Naipaul has both a history of being critical of religion, particularly Islam, and of speaking his mind.

    Turkey has an uneasy relationship with free speech; in 2005, it implemented a new penal code making it illegal to insult Turkey and its institutions. For telling a Swiss magazine that Armenians and Kurds had been killed in Turkey, Pamuk himself faced trial. After much international attention, the charges against him were dismissed.

    Was it frustrating for Pamuk that his effort to bring authors together for an open discussion wound up with a kind of self-censorship? If it did, the author who stepped in for Naipaul may have been the best alternative.

    While our Turkey Day was dawning in the United States, British writer Hari Kunzru gave the opening speech in Istanbul. “I feel we would be stronger and more credible if we were to deal with divergent views within this meeting rather than a priori excluding someone because of fear that offence might be given,” he said. Kunzru has posted his speech on his website:

    You have accepted this invitation, presumably because like me, and you have a particular sense of the role of the writer. I don’t believe the writer is merely an entertainer, though we certainly shouldn’t be above entertainment, above giving pleasure. Nor are we just journalists, recorders of the doings of the world, or apolitical bohemians, dedicated to aesthetic shock. We may be any of these things, but this is not all we are. As lovers of language, as people who are dedicated to it and who value it very highly, we are -– whether we like it or not –- always already engaged in the political struggles of our day, many of which take place on the terrain of language — its use to produce social and national identity, its use to frame laws and norms, its use to define what it means to be a human, to lead a good or just or valuable life.

    There’s a saying that culture is something that is done to us, but art is something we do to culture. …

    I believe that the right to freedom of speech trumps any right to protection from offense, and that it underlies all the other issues I’ve been speaking about. Without freedom of speech, we, as writers, can have very little impact on culture. In saying this, I’m aware that this is a prime example of a concept which has been degraded by the war on terror -– that many European Muslims misidentify it as a tool of Anglo-Saxon interests, a license to insult them, rather than the sole guarantee of their right to be heard.

    “Our kind Turkish hosts have invited us here, as an international group, to air our views, and so it is my belief that we must not shy away from recognizing the situation here, where we are speaking,” Kunzru continued. “I know by doing so, as a guest, I risk giving offense, but it would be absurd to assert freedom of speech in the abstract without exercising it in concrete terms.”

    Free speech in the abstract is easy to embrace; exercising it in concrete terms can be uncomfortable. Take WikiLeaks, whose Sunday releases of U.S. embassy cables have sent the State Department and contractors scrambling. The Los Angeles Times reports that the cables “show that diplomats have been asked to gather counterparts’ credit card and frequent flier numbers, iris scans, as well as information on their Internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use.” Wayne E. White, a former senior official with the State Department’s intelligence arm, told The Times that the news that diplomats were gathering such information “could upset a number of foreign governments.”

    Are these documents enlightening? Should they be seen? U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder says that the Justice Department will prosecute if violations of U.S. law are uncovered, condemning the disclosures as having put the nation’s security at risk.

    — Carolyn Kellogg

    Photo: V.S. Naipaul at home in 2001. Credit: Chris Ison / AFP

    via Free speech: V.S. Naipaul, Hari Kunzru and WikiLeaks | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times.

  • To invite or not: Turkey’s dilemma with controversial figures

    To invite or not: Turkey’s dilemma with controversial figures

    Fatma Dişli Zıbak, İstanbul

    V.S. Naipaul
    V.S. Naipaul

    Turkey had a new-born debate last week over the invitation of controversial writer V.S. Naipaul, to the European Writers’ Parliament in İstanbul that was held on Thursday.

    Before the meeting, some Turkish writers announced their intentions to boycott the event if Naipaul attended, citing the writer’s controversial remarks about Islam. Naipaul, a Trinidadian writer of Indian descent who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, offended many Muslims in 2001 when he compared the religion’s effects to “the colonial abolition of identity.”

    He said it “has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples” following his visits to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia, claiming that Islam had both enslaved and attempted to wipe out other cultures.

    Several Turkish authors had threatened to boycott the event after Hilmi Yavuz, a poet and academic, wrote in his column in the Zaman daily that it was inappropriate to invite a writer who had insulted Muslims. His criticism set off a wave of angry comments, prompting organizers of the event to politely tell Naipaul not to come to Turkey.

    Novelist and academic Nedim Gürsel, whose book “Daughters of Allah” led to a storm of reactions in Turkey last year over claims that he insulted Islam, argued that Naipaul was subjected to “an execution without trial” in Turkey because many, who did not read even a single line from his work, made hasty judgments about the writer and launched a campaign against him.

    Gürsel, who read two of Naipaul’s books following the outbreak of controversy over them, admitted that his arguments about Islam and its influence on non-Arab civilizations are open to debate; however, he was treated unjustly.

    “I am not trying to act like Naipaul’s lawyer here to get him off the hook. What I am saying is, let’s read his books, understand them and then debate. Let’s not judge him solely on excerpts from his books,” Gürsel told Sunday’s Zaman.

    Yavuz, who is said to have triggered the debate over Naipaul’s attendance by addressing Muslim intellectuals in his column “Will the consciences of our writers be at ease when sitting at the same table as V.S. Naipaul?” said Naipaul made the right decision by not attending the event.

    “His conscience as someone who directed so many insults at Muslims would be disturbed by being among so many Muslims in a Muslim country. His absence from the event saved him from such a disturbance. It was the right decision,” Yavuz said.

    In remarks to the media last week, poet Cezmi Ersöz defended Naipaul decision to not come to Turkey, explaining that his remarks on Islam were not simply criticism but tantamount to a “hate crime.”

    “He is not someone who criticizes Islam in intellectual terms. He hates Muslims. Just as we cannot make insulting statements against Jews out of anger at the state policies of Israel, the same goes for this as well. Naipaul harbors a remarkable Islamophobia; he committed a hate crime,” Ersöz said.

    Turkey’s test with controversial figures

    This is not the first time that international figures who made controversial statements have sparked protests at cultural events in Turkey. Last month, Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica withdrew from the jury of the 47th edition of Antalya’s Altın Portakal (Golden Orange) International Film Festival as a result of protests against him. What made Kusturica a target of harsh criticism were his reported comments in support of the genocide of Muslims in Bosnia perpetrated by Serb forces.

    Yeni Şafak columnist Fatma K. Barbarosoğlu approached the issue from another perspective. She said what makes the debate over the attendance of such controversial figures to cultural events in Turkey so heated is the fact that different reactions are given according to the background of the institution that invites them.

    For instance, she recalls Kusturica’s uneventful visit to Bursa earlier this year and İstanbul’s Bilgi University inviting Naipaul earlier for another event. Both drew no protests from anyone and there was little, if any, media coverage.

    Kusturica attended an event in Bursa upon an invitation of the Bursa Municipality, which is run by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), several months before the film festival in Antalya. This led many to attack the government because Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay was among those who protested Kusturica’s attendance to the festival.

    “Such controversies are usually used to take revenge for past events,” Barbarosoğlu told Sunday’s Zaman.

    She admitted that it is very natural for authors or poets to boycott events in protest of those they are highly critical of. Some people in Turkey just failed to respect the very right of the authors and poets embarking on a vigorous campaign to defend controversial figures, which in turn increases tension, she said.

    via Today’s Zaman, your gateway to Turkish daily news.

  • Writers at Istanbul conference criticize attitude toward Naipaul

    Writers at Istanbul conference criticize attitude toward Naipaul

    VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU

    ISTANBUL-Hürriyet Daily News

    Participants at the closing session of the European Writer’s Parliament, or EWP, in Istanbul on Saturday criticized the overall attitude toward V.S. Naipaul, the celebrated Indian-British author who stayed away after eliciting reaction from certain writers.

    A total of 65 writers from all over the world visited Istanbul to participate in the meeting. At the end of Saturday’s meeting, the writers criticized the overall attitude toward Naipaul, while also focusing on freedom of speech and thought problems in Turkey.

    Nobel Laureate Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was invited to speak at the opening session of the EWP, which was organized by Kült Artistic Reflex with support from Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Agency, but following a storm of controversy over his past comments on Islam, Naipaul chose to abandon his trip.

    Although the latest invitation resulted in much uproar, Naipaul visited Turkey several months ago without incident.

    Daily Zaman writer and poet Hilmi Yavuz was the first to draw attention to Naipul’s invitation in an article from Nov. 17.

    Yavuz said in his article that it was a disrespectful act toward society to invite a person who had humiliated the Muslim world.

    “I don’t have a personal problem with Naipaul,” Yavuz told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review in a Wednesday interview. “I have a problem with the mentality. I don’t care what the world thinks about me. As a Turkish intellectual, my mission is to illuminate my own society. He might have received the Nobel prize, but it does not give him the right to insult the Muslim world.”

  • Literary Criticism a la Turca

    Literary Criticism a la Turca

    Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul said in an interview back in 2001 that the conversion of the South and East Asian peoples into Islam had negative effects on them, comparable to the effects of colonialism. In revenge, a Muslim-Turkish philosopher, supported by a lynch mob and Turkish security authorities, did not allow him in Istanbul, where Naipaul was scheduled to address the preliminary meeting of the European Writers Parliament (EWP).
    This controversy inevitably evokes the memory of similar events in recent history, some of which I will outline below.
    In 1989, a fatwa (Islamic verdict) was issued sentencing the novelist Salman Rushdie to death by the Spiritual Leader of Iran, Ayetullah Khomeini. The fatwa was effective particularly among the British Muslim communities of South and East Asian origin. Copies of Rusdie’s novel “Satanic Verses” were burnt in Muslim British demonstrations and major bookshops were forced after a series of bombings to withdraw the copies of this novel from their shop-windows and bookshelves. Since then, Rushdie has been forced to live under protection.
    “Satanic Verses” was immediately translated into Turkish after its first publication in English in 1988 but could not find a publisher. In 1993, Aziz Nesin, the greatest modern Turkish satirist, decided to publish excerpts from the Turkish translation in his column in a daily newspaper. In July 1993, Nesin participated in a literary festival in the central Anatolian town of Sivas, in remembrance of the 16th Century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal.
    Naipaul observes the following on the fall of the Sindh province in India to Muslim conquest in the 8th Century: “The king of Sindh resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people.” This critical commentary on the history of the Islamisation of Asia, which the Muslim-Turkish scholars find offensive, resembles to what happened on 4 July 1993 in Sivas.
    A thousands-strong fanatic Islamist mob gathered in front of the hotel in town square, where Nesin and hundreds of participants of the festival were hosted. They chanted “God is Great!” “as one man” and then set the hotel on fire. Sivas police watched the event from a distance and nobody in the government ordered the military units to charge the mob for the protection of the festival guests.
    Nesin survived the attack but thirty three participants of the festival, including poets, writers, literary critics and musicians, suffered a horrible death. These thirty three gems are the rather ironic martyrs of Ayetullah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and their families and friends still do not know where to seek compensation for their loss.
    Similar attacks on writers with religious and/or nationalist motives have continued to our day. Most importantly, prominent Armenian writer/journalist Hrant Dink was murdered on 19 January 2007. Prior to his assassination Dink had been sentenced by a Turkish court for “degrading Turkishness”; during the trial he had been threatened outside the courtroom by the senior members of the Turkish “deep state”, including General Veli Küçük and lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz.
    The “best pen of Turkish literature”, Orhan Pamuk, was also subject to similar judicial, semi-official and Mafioso threats and attacks. The reason for this Turkish style “literary criticism” was Pamuk’s statement during an interview that “one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in Turkey”. As a result, the one and only Turkish Nobel Laureate had to flee his country for America; since then, he has been forced to pay only occasional “clandestine” visits to Istanbul.
    Most recently, Yugoslavian filmmaker Emir Kusturica had to leave Turkey, during a film festival, under threats to his life. The threats were issued by the high authorities, including  the Minister of Culture, who argued that a man who denies genocide against Muslims has no place in Turkey – presumably because you can only have a place in Turkey if you deny the genocide against Christians, as 72 million Turkish citizens are forced to do.
    The source of the mounting threats against Naipaul, the chief Turkish-Muslim philosopher Hilmi Yavuz, has showed relief after the cancellation of the Nobel Laureate’s visit to Turkey: “He would be anxious to appear in front of the people whose religion he degraded”. Indeed, “anxious” is the word: Prior to his assassination, Hrant Dink wrote that “My heart moves like an anxious dove”.
    Religious fanaticism marked the history of Medieval Europe, the most prominent symbol of which is the Inquisition. It was the heyday of fanatic Christian “philosophers”, judges and lynch mobs who traumatized thousands of people around Europe through torture and execution sessions in public. The victims were exclusively charged with “degrading Christianity”. Naipaul’s “philosophically condemned” criticism of Islam implies that contemporary Muslims demonstrate a degree of intolerance comparable to Medieval Christian Inquisition.
    It is far beyond my knowledge to evaluate the world of Islam in accordance with this claim. Nor, do I have any intention to engage here in a criticism of the Western colonial influence on Naipaul’s worldview. But an observation of the recent history of “literary criticism a la turca”, including Hilmi Yavuz’s “philosophical criticism” of Naipaul, supported by a lynch mob, exclusively affirms the novelist’s critical points on Muslim intolerance at least for this country.
    Zafer Yörük taught political theory at University of London between 1997 and 2006. His research interests range across politics of identity, discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. He writes a column for Rudaw every Friday from Izmir.