Tag: Suleyman the Magnificent

  • Malta Yok!

    Malta Yok!

    ‘Malta yok effendi’, which stands for ‘Malta does not exist.’

    “I was shocked upon hearing it in a history class in Israel” says one of the comment writers with the nickname skatanic.

    But why in Israel? Then comes this tweet from Lebanon:

    malta yok twit

    Does “Malta yok” really mean “forget about it” in Turkish? Noting among the many Malta-based proverbs and sayings in the Turkish Dictionary of Sayings, such as “Malta eriği” (Maltese plum = loquat), “Malta humması” (Maltese fever = brucellosis), “Malta palamudu” (Maltese bonito = pilot fish), etc., there doesn’t appear to be the term “Malta yok”.

    It seems to be a saying unique to Levantine Arabic, from which it probably entered Israeli Hebrew, with a folk etymology to follow.

    But how did they get there? There are several points of view. The predominant seems to be as follows.

    According to a story, it was the response of an Admiral to the Sultan (Süleyman), who having been sent with a grand army to conquer Malta, failed to do so. 

    map of malta haritasi

    At one time, during the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan dispatched a naval force against Malta. After some time, however, the fleet returned without completing its objective and the Turkish admiral stated ‘Malta Yok’. This is due to the inability of the admiral to read a map of the era. And as if that wasn’t enough, the excuse also came up. According to the admiral, when he went to the charter room to plot a course for Malta, he ordered his adjutant to bring him coffee. So, as he enjoyed his coffee, he moved the cup on the map and, accidently, it covered Malta. As ridiculous as it sounds, it is better than the other excuse that the devil moved the island to another point on the map for the admiral not to be able to spot it.

    Arab historian Nicola Ziyadeh, who passed away 99 years old in June 27 2007, was Eyyâm fî Malta, where he touched upon the phrase “Malta yok”. In his telling, the Sublime Porte receives news that there is an island called Malta in the Mediterranean which could cause great danger unless it is captured. The admiral then is instructed to take over the island post, haste. However, the admiral cannot discover this island even though he travels East, west, north and south across the Mediterranean. He writes to the grand vizier “Malta yok”.

    Another source recontextualized this to the answer the captain gives not for being unable to find the island but for being unable to capture it.

    The Estonian historian Juri Lina, who wrote a book about freemasonry Les Architectes de la déception — l’histoire secrète de la franc-maçonnerie starts a chapter with “Malta yok”. According to the author, the events of 1565 unfolded as follows: the emperor commands his navy to attack the Christian island of Malta. Storms and bad weather conditions stop the navy from reaching the island. The hopeless captain covers up the island of Malta with the wax from a candle he grabs. And then with a victorious air, he turns to his second mate and exclaims, “There is no Malta!” Before turning the fleet to Crete.

    Sources:

    https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-Malta-yok-culture-tradition-of-unabashed-denials-and-lies-develop-in-the-Turkish-people

    https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pinker.pdf

  • The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

    The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

    The Arab World’s ‘Dallas’

    Sep 5, 2011 1:00 AM EDT

    Turkish Soap operas are sweeping the Middle East and luring viewers with scandalous storylines.

    A handsome ottoman prince is hunting in a forest when a cavalcade of horsemen rides up bearing a fateful message. Meanwhile, a slave ship full of nubile Russian women destined for the harems of Istanbul creaks its way across the Black Sea. So begins Magnificent Century, Turkey’s answer to Showtime’s The Tudors. A bodice-ripping historical soap opera based on the life of the 16th-century Suleiman the Magnificent, it’s just one of more than 100 shows produced last year by Turkey’s booming TV-drama industry. The programs are becoming a wildly popular cultural phenomenon across the Middle East, bringing in their wake a renaissance in Turkey’s soft power and ushering in a low-key social revolution among the housewives of the Arab world.

    Last year the final episode of Turkey’s rags-to-riches soap Noor clocked 85 million viewers from Syria to Morocco. “These serials have a huge impact,” says Izzet Pinto, CEO of Turkey’s Global Agency, which distributes Magnificent Century and 1001 Nights, another Turkish blockbuster set in modern-day Istanbul. “In the Balkans, newborns are being named after 1001 Nights characters.” The secret is familiarity. “Neither the characters nor the subject matter nor the featured locations are foreign” to viewers, says Kemal Uzun, director of Noor. “They do not feel like outsiders to what is taking place. We are close cultures, close geographies; we have close ties.”

    “Ties” is a euphemism for the Ottoman Empire, when Turks ruled over the region that now avidly consumes their dramas. But despite a century of Arab nationalism, Arab viewers have nonetheless become keen fans of shows that hark back to an idealized Ottoman past. The craze began in 2008, when Saudi media tycoon Sheik Waleed al-Ibrahim began buying up Turkish dramas for his Pan-Arab cable network, MBC. Instead of dubbing the shows in classical Arabic, al-Ibrahim rendered them into a colloquial dialect of Syrian Arabic readily understood by ordinary viewers across the Middle East.

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    Sultan Suleiman is portrayed in an advertisement for Magnificent Century., Murad Sezer / Reuters-Landov

    Of course, what really hooks viewers are the rollicking storylines. The secret of a good soap is that all human joys and troubles are there, usually larger than life. The Grapevine Mansion, the first great Turkish soap, debuted back in 2002. It was the tale of an urban sophisticate who marries into a small-town family living in an old mansion. There, she comes face to face with the old Turkey that most viewers left behind just a generation ago: blood feuds, illegitimate children, the bitter rivalries of the women of the house. Noor, turning the same theme on its head, is a Cinderella tale of a village girl who marries a rich Istanbul hunk, overcomes the envy of his evil mother and sister, and (spoiler alert) eventually saves the family textile business. Last year’s crop of Turkish soaps were edgier: 1001 Nights follows a widow forced to sleep with her boss to get medicine for her son’s leukemia; Forbidden Love is a roller coaster of suicide, betrayal, and adultery featuring an immoral mother and a vengeance-driven daughter.

    All successful soaps are aspirational—the key to the worldwide popularity of Dallas and Dynasty in the 1980s. But Turkish soaps are also fascinating to Middle Eastern audiences because they show how Turks-—and particularly Turkish women—handle modernity. “These serials show what the closed societies of the Middle East long to see, hear, even live: being Muslim with a modern lifestyle, a high standard of living, equality between men and women,” says Irfan Sahin, CEO of Dogan TV Holding, Turkey’s biggest media group and producer of Noor. For Noor’s director Uzun, the secret of his show’s appeal is that it depicts the kind of family that the average Arab housewife longs for. “A handsome blond husband, very much in love with his only wife; a wife [who] has the economic freedom to walk away if she needs to because she’s a modern working woman; a family patriarch who is strict yet tolerant to his children and daughters-in-law.”

    The world of Turkish soaps, for all its obsession with adultery and revenge, depicts an idealized Muslim and secular country—a stylized version of modern Turkey. No wonder, believes Sahin, that in real life Turkey has become “a role model with a great impact on its neighboring countries.” The rising popularity of Turkish soaps has coincided with the rise of Turkey’s soft power in the Middle East. Trade with the region has quadrupled since 2002, and last year Turkey announced a free-trade zone with Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Turkey has also been intimately engaged with the Arab Spring, pressing Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to leave and attempting to mediate between Libya’s rebels and Muammar Gaddafi. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, 17 percent of Turks believe their country should look to Europe for inspiration, while 25 percent think that Turkey’s future lies with the Middle East.

    One tangible sign of this regional love-in is a massive boom in Arab tourism to Turkey, fueled by new visa-free travel from Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. This summer an estimated 150,000 tourists from the Arab world were expected in Istanbul. That’s more than triple the number just four years ago. “In Europe, people are hostile and unfriendly,” says Abdullah al-Aziz, a Saudi investment consultant who brought his veiled wife, children, and Indonesian nanny to Istanbul this summer. “Here, people in hotels and restaurants speak Arabic, and they want your business.” The Aziz family was touring Büyükada, an island often used for soap-opera filming because of its preserved Ottoman villas, and planned to take a cruise to visit the Bosporus mansion where Noor is set.

    Not all viewers are as enthusiastic about Turkey and its cultural exports. When Noor first aired in Saudi Arabia, the chairman of the country’s Supreme Judiciary Council called for the murder of satellite-television executives for showing “immorality.” Indeed, as dramas become edgier, touching on taboo subjects such as adultery, abortion, and alcohol, and as they portray women in leading roles in business, not just family life, controversy has grown. Even Magnificent Century caused a row in Turkey, with conservative Turks denouncing its portrayal of Suleiman drinking wine and having a harem full of sexy women (both details are historically accurate). Even Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan weighed in, calling it “an effort to show our history in a negative light to the younger generations.” Needless to say, ratings soared after the row.

    What’s clear is that, like it or not, television changes societies by shaping the aspirations of ordinary people. Over the last 80 years, Turkey’s state-enforced secularism and a heavy exposure to U.S. popular culture made Turkey infinitely more Western than its neighbors in everything from dress to politics to sexual mores. In the 1980s, soaps like Dallas influenced Turkish society at a time when the country was gradually permitting enterprise and materialism. Now, as the Arab world finds itself in a similar period of flux, many television viewers are, consciously or not, looking to Turkey—not this time as resented Ottoman masters, but for a lifestyle that is both Muslim and modern.

    With Deniz Mumcuoglu in Istanbul

  • David Randall: The reluctant king and the bathhouse queen

    David Randall: The reluctant king and the bathhouse queen

    02 dNews has come of two royals rather more exotic than our own. One is perhaps the world’s most unlikely reigning monarch, a man trapped by genetic accident in a palace that has become, if not exactly a prison, then a sumptuous reminder of a burden. The other is a woman abducted, thrown over a saddle, and carried off to be a royal wife who grew to revel in intrigue and the manipulation of her menfolk.

    The first may be a reluctant king, but he is a magnificent quiz question. Here it is: What reigning monarch in South-east Asia is a trained ballet dancer and speaks fluent Czech? The answer is King Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia, the latest in a 2,000-year-old line who, when his father Sihanouk, abdicated in 2004, was impelled by a sense of duty to abandon his life as a professional dancer and choreographer in Prague and return to the palace in Phnom Penh as king. There he carries out such royal duties – largely confined to meeting, greeting, and paperwork – as the powerful Prime Minister Hun Sen allows him. A young civil servant told the Associated Press: “On television, the leaders bow down before him, but behind his back there is no respect.”

    He was nine when he was sent to Prague, and grew up there, graduating from the city’s Academy of Musical Art. He then moved to Paris, staying on after his father’s restoration to the throne in 1993, and he taught, performed, and choreographed classical ballet and Cambodian dance, as well as working for Unesco, the UN’s cultural arm. Unlike his showman father, who had six wives and numerous lovers, he is quiet, contemplative, and never married. He often dines alone, and then retires to watch DVDs of operas and ballets. His voracious reading includes Czech theatre reviews – a reminder, one suspects, of where he would rather be.

    Separated from Sihamoni by the centuries, and by the relish she had for her royal status and what came with it, is our second royal, Roxelana, the wife of Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent. She was born Aleksandra Lisowska, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest, in the Ukraine, but some time around 1520 a raiding party of Crimean Tartars rode into town, and carried her off. She was sold as a slave in Constantinople – now Istanbul – entered the harem, and took the fancy of Suleyman, who later made her his fourth wife.

    Her reputation is that of a devious player of courtly politics, advancing the claims of her son, Selim, to the Ottoman throne. His eight-year reign as sultan, beginning in 1566, was a disastrous time, notable for the invasion of Cyprus and the massacre of 30,000 islanders, plus his addiction to drink so chronic that he became known as Selim the Sot. But Roxelana was a more considerable character than some historians have allowed. She founded mosques, schools, a women’s hospital, and, in Jerusalem, a soup kitchen for the poor. There was also a bath house built in her name, and it is this which has brought her into focus now.

    Roxelana’s hamam, a long, domed structure between the Blue Mosque and the Haghia Sophia in Istanbul, was completed in 1557, just a year before her death. No one knows whether she used the hamam herself, and some think it was built so that bathers could pray for her health. But, gradually, the bathhouses which had once been so central to the life of the city fell out of use. Roxelana’s ceased working in 1906. It finally became, of all undignified things for a royal hamam, a carpet showroom. Then, in 2007, the city decided to restore it, and it is now opening to the public. Visitors can, for a fee of about £76, sample the steam bath, peeling, and soap massage in a marbled, alcove-filled interior built for the favourite wife of one of the greatest Ottoman sultans.

    via David Randall: The reluctant king and the bathhouse queen – Commentators, Opinion – The Independent.