Circa 1545, Sulayman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey (1494–1566), Ottoman Emperor. Also known as Sulayman the Law Giver. Source: Hulton Archive/Getty Images[/caption]
Ecdat [edge-DAT] n. forefather, ancestor
The Turkish and international press have put forward all sorts of theories as to why Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, nearly a month ago now, attacked a hugely popular TV series about Suleyman the Magnificent.
Because he is authoritarian, said some, not very helpfully. Because he is ignorant about history, said others. Because he needs to divert attention from the fact that Turkey's economy is slowing down. Because Magnificent Century, with its portrait of the most famous of the Ottoman Sultans as a wine-swilling womanizer, undermines his own neo-Ottoman aspirations. Because he is a Mary Whitehouse-like prude who wants to turn the whole of the country into one of those family saloons you find at the back of Turkish restaurants, cut off from the rest of diners by a lattice screen and a line of plastic plants.
The devil, as always, is in the details. Look at what happened that day late in November. Mr Erdoğan was opening a provincial airport in western Turkey. Always a good opportunity for a bit of politicking, these opening ceremonies, with the red ribbon and the scissors and the ecstatic applause of local officials whose jobs depend on the government anyway, and he was having a go at the opposition for criticizing his policy on Syria and Palestine. "We know very well what our duty is," he said. "We will go everywhere our forefathers went on horse-back."
Bing! That is where it all started. Out came the word: Ecdadimiz—our forefathers—a key word in the vocabulary of Turkish conservatism, and Mr Erdoğan's eyes glazed over, like Tintin's nemesis Rastapopoulos in Flight 714 when Kroll accidentally injects him with truth serum. He forgot the prepared speech. He began improvising.
"But I think [the opposition] thinks our forefathers are the ones on the television, on that documentary Magnificent Century. We have no such forefathers...The Suleyman the Magnificent we know was not like that. He spent 30 years of his life on horseback, not at the palace like in the shows you see... In the presence of my people, I condemn the series directors and the television channel owners. We have warned authorities on this issue [a reference to the ostensibly autonomous media ombudsman], but we also expect the justice system to take the necessary decision."
There's a story about a teacher and a class of first year primary school children on 23 April, Turkey's National Sovereignty and Children's Day. The school hall is packed with parents, the headmaster has made the sort of patriotic speech that headmasters make on 23 April and the six-year olds are all on stage, dressed up in costume and ready to demonstrate the dance routine they have been practicing for weeks. Before they start, the class teacher asks them a question. (She wants to show the parents how much their children have learned in their first six months at school.)
"Who is our Father", she asks. To which a little boy in the front row answers: "Adam." The teacher is surprised. "No, Emre," she says. "He's the Father of the Human Race. Who is our Father?"
It has become fashionable in Turkey in recent years, with the fading of the power of the Kemalist establishment, to mock the cult of Atatürk, the Father of the Turks, the laws defending his memory, the new fad among Kemalist protestors for wearing identical Atatürk masks when they go marching, his stern features curving grotesquely round their faces on the flat paper masks like in a fairground mirror. There are people who get Atatürk's signature tattoo-ed onto their bodies. And there are the messages that schoolchildren leave in the visiting book at Atatürk's mausoleum in Ankara. "Father, we miss you." "Father, you live in our hearts." (Atatürk died in 1938.)
What the Magnificent Century affair shows is that obsession with dead fathers is not limited to Turkish secularists. Ata. Ecdad. Whatever the names they prefer to bestow on them, both sides of Turkey's ideological divide are nourished by the same father fetish.
Turkey isn't unique in this, of course. The United States has its Founding Fathers. Russian folk stories are full of references to the Tsars as beneficent "little fathers." What makes Turkey unusual, though, is its insistence on the hyperactive über-masculinity of its father figures. A few years back, secularists kicked up a storm of protest when a biopic of Atatürk portrayed the future founder of Turkey as a child who was frightened of the dark. Today, the prime minister rages because a TV series shows a sultan spending time in the palace. As it happens, Suleyman did spend a great deal of his time campaigning, but this isn't Sultan Selim the Grim we are talking about—this is the man Turks know as Kanunî, the Law-Giver.
Why? What is so shameful about ecdadimiz getting off their horses and going home to their wives, even if their wives are got up in ridiculously low-slung dresses for the benefit of an international audience estimated at more than 150 million? Why the grinding, changing-room-rank butchness?
Part of the answer is historical. The American Founding Fathers were the fathers of an independent, expanding country. So were the "little fathers" of the Russian people, right up to the moment when their children shot them. The Turkish need for a father, on the other hand, and this applies as much to the Islamic conservative faction as it does to the Kemalists, was born from defeat and the corrosive sense of insecurity that defeat brought.
"We used to slice continents like silk," the mid-twentieth century author Cemil Meriç (a favourite of Mr Erdoğan's) famously wrote. "Heads dripped from our swords. There was but us in the world and the land of infidels. [Then] evenings of defeat swept away triumphant mornings and the aging giant took shame at his glorious past." "We became," Meriç writes elsewhere, "the aging suitors of the young West, tolerating every one of her caprices."
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire came to be seen as a loss of honor, the failure of the father to protect the motherland (the Turkish word is anavatan), a sign of impotence. "They came in their muddy boots right into our bedrooms," the Kemalist novelist Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu had one of his characters in a novel about the War of Liberation say, and that tendency to sexualise talk of Turkey is still prevalent today.
You see it in the slogans you find outside pretty much every military police post on the long road that runs west to east along Turkey's border with Syria, heavy with trucks on their way to or from Iraq: hudut namustur—"the border is honour." You see it too in the columnist Fatih Altaylı's notorious attempted put-down of a prominent female human rights advocate active in defending the (mainly Kurdish) victims of military violence in 1990s. How dare Eren Keskin attack the army, he said.
But the ecdad of the Islamic conservatives has a second aspect that is lacking in the ata of the secularists. His masculinity is seen as a sign of his being a good Muslim. This side of the equation is only implicit in Mr Erdoğan’s off-the-cuff comments at the airport. It is much clearer in the more considered and more elaborate attack on Magnificent Century that Turkey’s most influential Islamic cleric made last year.
Fethullah Gülen began by arguing that efforts to excuse the TV series on the grounds that it was fiction were unacceptable. “Insulting and deriding individuals dear to the Nation is an act of effrontery,” regardless of the form it takes, he told followers at his residence in Pennsylvania. Followers inside Turkey—it is perhaps worth noting—took him at his word, launching a campaign to ban “obscenity” in state theatres and a debate on the need in Turkey for a true “conservative art.”
He went on to talk about the Ottoman Empire as standard-bearer of Islam, quoting the opinion of the Algerian writer Malek Bennabi that “had it not been for the Ottomans, there would be no Islam in the world today.” “If the Ottoman sultans had been addicts of the harem, of drink and of debauchery, if the palace had been a nest of debauchery,” he concluded, “then it would not have been possible for them to undertake the never-ending series of military campaigns. If the Almighty gave this great mission to the Ottomans, it means that they had good morals and high ideals.”
“Great missions”,“good morals” and “high ideals.” The belief that the height of the Ottoman Empire coincided with a time of high morals and that its fall was the result of the empire turning its back on Islam has been voiced by Turkish conservatives for over two hundred years. What is striking about Mr Gülen’s formulation of the old idea is how closely it parallels the passage of Cemil Meriç quoted above—morality reduced to an issue of adroitness with a sword and immorality associated with capitulation to women.
Who knows? Neither Mr Gülen nor Mr Erdoğan is commonly seen as a fundamentalist. Yet as the deputies of Mr Erdoğan's party, like Knights of the Round Table, seek to distinguish themselves in their leader’s eyes by proposing a law banning television shows insulting historical figures, the makers of Magnificent Century don’t seem keen to take any chances. Since the outburst in the airport, Hürrem Sultan, the Ruthenian slave girl who became Suleyman’s most influential wife, has been spotted covering her head in the modern style, the scarf folded under her chin and pinned. Thus is the honor of the ecdad preserved, more than 500 years later.
