Turkish Awakening Read Free Page B

listed as ‘London, UK’.
    However unapproachable official Turks may appear, you can be sure that a human heart beats somewhere beneath the uniformed exterior. They can make your life hell, and I have heard many horror stories from my expat friends who have tried to get permits or merely an appointment for a permit and failed for no discernible reason. Sometimes palms must be crossed with silver. Sometimes a ridiculous love story must be narrated. Turks are capricious and therefore human, preferable by far to an anonymous computer system or the chillingly anodyne officials in the US or Britain. The more sinister side of the coin is that, quite often, there is no official accountability for the actions of state employees. Police, in particular, are notorious for asking for bribes from traffic offenders and beating up people in detention with no fear ofrecrimination. This is more a fault of the system than anything else. When human beings know they are not accountable for their actions, they can act in horrible ways.
    If you sit by any road in Turkey and watch the traffic go by, you will notice that every so often a car, or more likely a dolmuş or lorry, will pass with brightly coloured block capitals painted across the top of its windscreen or back window. This will usually be the beginning of the standard Arabic prayer, shortened for practical purposes, or simply Allah korusun (‘God protect us’), and will act as a kind of talisman to protect the car and its passengers on the sometimes treacherous roads of this country. In Britain and the US, people use ‘Baby on board!’ signs or messages of that nature to warn off other drivers. Turks bypass the human element of traffic accidents and address themselves directly to the powers that be: praying always helps, and a permanently scripted prayer on your car serves as excellent insurance. The Turks use the image of a blue eye – the nazar – to ward off the evil eye. This universal image is painted on the car or swings in the form of a glass amulet from the dashboard in place of furry dice, as standard policy.
    Turks have a complicated relationship with religion, which I discuss more fully in later chapters, but the interesting element that I discovered at the beginning of my stay in Turkey is the extent of superstition, across the board. Even secular, highly educated Turks who have no time for organised religion and especially not for their devout Turkish neighbours use superstitious expressions unthinkingly, even when these expressions contain religious language. I include myself in this – in fact, while for the most part I saw expressions andgestures used by my mother and grandmother widely mirrored in Turkey, there were a few I grew up with that I think were old-fashioned even by Turkish standards.
    If you keep an ear open on any street corner in Turkey, within a couple of minutes you will have heard Inşallah (‘God willing’), Allah korusun and Maşallah (‘Thanks to God’). The last is equivalent to the universal ‘touch wood’ and is indeed often accompanied by this action. All these phrases flow through Turkish conversation as naturally as taking breath. If you happen to be eavesdropping on a particularly traditional group of Turks, you might hear Tövbe , which is a fearful reaction to someone expressing a potential calamity, no matter how improbable. For example, ‘If you leave I’ll pine away and die’ might be countered with a Tövbe – ‘May God guard against such a thing!’ It is equivalent to using a cancel button and sounds rather comical to a non-Middle Eastern ear but someone like my grandmother would not have felt comfortable without saying it, just in case. In fact, she would have also bitten the end of her little finger as a double precaution – she once told me this was to remind her of the pain that would otherwise result from these reckless words. As a child, I accepted this as a very sensible-sounding practice and adopted it