Missing my planet

I have a home and family in Asia, another place I call home in what is technically still Europe, two nieces, one nephew and a brother in North America and some great memories in South America, though so far nothing in Antarctica and no interest in going there. I thus appear to be very much of this world (though not of Antarctica) but in fact I am an alien. One day I will be discovered and sent back to my home planet, the beautiful, bright red Awkwardia in the swirling Antisocialis Galaxy far, far away from human warmth and irritation, where I will inhabit a cave in one flat, barren island and feel quite at home and at peace with my surroundings mainly because I will not have the slightest interest in them.

It is immensely difficult to achieve that level of disinterest-induced serenity on this adopted blue planet of mine. It is a very strange, conflict-ridden place. I like parts of it (usually parts where no human interaction is available) but overall its inhabitants operate within a system that consumes it, quite literally. After almost half a century here, I consider myself as much an earthling as anyone I have known in this corner of the universe. Our problem here is that some of us always want more. We have to have all the best food, wear the best clothes, be/look the fittest, go to the best schools, have the greatest time, get the best jobs, earn the most money… Some of us then go on to reproduce little earthlings who also must have all the best food, wear the best clothes, be/look the fittest, go to the best schools, have the greatest time, get the best jobs, earn the most money, and then produce their own little earthlings of the same kind… It’s a never-ending cycle. Some of us decide that this is too tiring, or unethical, or stupid, and that we only want ourselves and our little earthlings to be conscientious, responsible and happy and couldn’t care less about all the other things, but then we run the risk of watching our little earthlings get eaten up by the earthlings of the former kind. The worst case scenario is when an earthling of the former kind has offspring of the latter kind (for some reason it’s not too bad vice versa). Then happiness is a long-lost planet for everyone concerned.

Being an alien does not make me immune to ailments that are inflicted by this exhausting mode of existence. Like a proper earthling I have a mid-life crisis. In my case this entails asking myself why on earth I came to Earth, down from barren but peaceful Awkwardia, and assumed a life of good food, clothes, gym, schools, a job and – well, not much money but that’s OK as long as there is success. Time to go back home, before populist, power-hungry narcissists buy their ways up through all the political hierarchies and get themselves elected by millions of earthlings everywhere on this planet, pretending to criticize the earthlings of one kind but actually perpetuating their ways. More importantly, before they start turning against each other. Fighting. Killing. Destroying. I miss the bright red deserts of my planet where none of this meant anything. Pure, lonely bliss it was.

My teen and her wisdom

Why do people choose not to help when they actually can without running any risks? Frustrated with some colleagues over a decision important to me but not to them, I must have been thinking aloud. “By-stander effect” says my teenager, interested in psychology lately, shrugging. “Huh?” I say, and she explains. Damn, she explains it really well!

When did she get so clever, knowledgeable, I mean, simply brilliant? Over the past year or so, certainly, she has taught me much more than I have taught her, and given me more in the way of crucial knowledge about life than any other single person or source of information has. Listening to her explanation of the concept of by-stander effect made me feel instantly good and less frustrated about my colleagues. Everybody needs a brilliant teenager to keep perspective and derive wisdom. Sure, part of the wisdom is the acquired ability to derive it while engaging in mundane activities such as picking up socks from the floor. It’s a package: Socks with wisdom, or nothing at all.

So the bystander effect explains many things and is, in my teenager’s opinion, the reason why important decisions must never be made in meetings where people are less likely to opt for action and more likely to opt for the status quo. Good point, actually. A quick google search has confirmed that some serious research has been done on this issue, but nothing I have found summarizes the situation as well as my brill teen. Very often I find myself wanting to do something more proactive in a meeting and then letting the idea slip by while listening to the older and wiser (compared to me, certainly not to my teenager) colleagues who are not only more eager to speak but also happier to keep things as they are. In the end, too often, very little or nothing at all changes. This may be good or bad.

But seriously, when, and how on earth, did she get so brilliant? I am pretty sure that I have next to no role in this, because I have been an overworked mum for much of the thirteen years I have been responsible for her upbringing, and my genes are hopeless when it comes to applying such wisdom to real-life situations. Maybe I should ask her why they gave me those unusually big and friendly smiles after making that decision? Very bizarre, the human psyche. Good thing that I now have unlimited access to psychological wisdom in the house.

What is wrong?

I wasn’t going to write today. I was going to take the precious time of the first day of my vacation when children are in school, to do laundry, read a bit of a novel and weather permitting, take a long walk. That was the plan.

Then last night, a suicide bomber killed a few dozens of people in my beloved Ankara and I was taken by a storm of news and personal communications, with nose stuck in my phone for hours. Life in this damp English town never really stops, probably because it never really has to, being so slow anyway. We hop off life and hop back on and find that nothing has really changed. So it has been, I suspect, for many centuries. Taking comfort in this fact, I managed to scrape my nose off my phone and even slept, though barely enough, last night. This morning, breakfast was eaten, one child was taken to school with the required clown costume for the end-of-term show, and the other’s key fob was deposited with lunch money just in time for her lunch break. No interruptions. I even exchanged genuine smiles and hellos at the school gate, in the coffee shop and the grocery shop, because it felt good. Of course I’m feeling absolutely hopeless and immensely angry inside, but had some secret service agent followed me through North Oxford this morning, he/she wouldn’t have been able to find the slightest clue to suggest anything was wrong.

Here is what is wrong: My home country is being run by an irresponsible mob. The state forces kill and bully innocent people. The terrorists kill and bully innocent people too. The more the terrorists kill and bully innocent people, the more the state has an excuse to kill and bully more people. Who knows what other massacre is being plotted in the hidden corners of that beautiful, sad place called Turkey as I write this. And I write this in anger as well as fear, hoping that readers will NOT share it, as that might pave my way to a Turkish court on charges of siding with terrorists. This is of course the last thing I intend to do but misunderstandings of this sort are not an uncommon occurrence in the said beautiful and sad place.

All of this is wrong in itself, but there is also this personal situation: I am here in this peaceful place that hardly ever changes visibly, in an adopted country that my children now consider their home. All of this means that it is now impossible for me to even consider making my children live in my home country, so that they get to know it and learn to love it. However beautiful it is and however much I love it, how am I to bring myself to moving them there? At any rate, such a sad place it has become that they will probably never understand why I miss it so much. I am in fact missing a place that no longer exists.

To me, this feels wrong. Very wrong.

Of joy and sorrow in Turkey

As usual, we are in Turkey for the holidays. But this feels different, somehow.

There is pure joy. As when spending whole mornings, whole afternoons bent over manuscripts diligently written, paintings painstakingly made, almost half a century ago in the same city where I would be born many years, fires and earthquakes later, amid a growing concrete monster engulfing the vestiges of the imperial ambition that produced and safeguarded those manuscripts. Meeting a dear old friend in her house to talk, but really talk, for hours. Getting together with the whole family at mum’s, in the family home I grew up in. Three generations of siblings, siblings’ spouses, in-laws, cousins, nephews, nieces and more, all dressed up, all happy to see each other, all in a good mood. Good food and drinks presented in impeccable festive atmosphere, according to plans made many days in advance by mum, who still manages to emanate a light of kindness and serenity after all that hard work. The three-four hours of wilful self-deception that nothing can ever go wrong, that we are all bound to be happy, and the rest of the world may as well not exist. Priceless. Returning to Ankara from Istanbul, suitcases still in the trunk and longing for a portion of Iskender each, Kutal and I sit down at a table in Uludağ Yeşil Vadi as the kids run to the play area. We let out a simultaneous sigh, and confess that we love Ankara for its calm. It feels good to be away from the hectic crowd in Istanbul. It feels good to be together, and good to be agreeing on this basic matter.

Doorknob from the Great Mosque of Cizre, thirteenth century. Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, Istanbul.

Then there is deep sorrow. As when reading the news, which one mustn’t do, mum and friends keep telling me, if one is to keep sane in this country. I do it anyway. I see the video shooting of a very different family home being searched by a special antiterrorism squad in a very different neighbourhood of the same concrete-engulfed city.  In the background to the footage of men searching (for a suicide bomber, they say) inside a cupboard, under a bed and in a bedside trunk, we hear a man telling someone to do as they are told and the 27-year old daughter of the family asking “what are you doing?” right before being shot. Shot by a policeman. In her house, in her pyjamas, at around 4-4.30am when she should be sleeping as in a few hours she has to embark on her daily journey, tiresome in itself, to work. Those were her last words. She couldn’t go to work the next day and never will. I read reports of a baby shot dead while waiting for an ambulance in auntie’s or granddad’s arms (reports vary) in war-torn Cizre, another historic city at the other end of the same country. Still the same country, but for how much longer? The mental image that the name Cizre, home of the brilliant inventor al-Jazari (d. 1233) and famous for the medieval door panels of its Great Mosque, used to bring up in my mind was one of two elegant dragons holding hands on a doorknob. Now it’s the bullet hole in the face of a three-months-old baby that is astonishingly still cute. So painfully cute and dead is that face that I feel like my heart instantly freezes when I look at it. One mustn’t look at such pictures, I’m being told as well. I do it anyway, but that’s only because I still have not reached that level of overload where I couldn’t take any more. [Considering those who have reached it, I have deleted the picture from this post after some deliberation.] Were I to stay here longer, sooner or later I would have to adopt the same complete shut-off tactic to avoid insanity. I already do this for limited periods when I feel that I have to, in order to keep sane and keep working. It is much easier to do when you’re physically away from that which you want to block out. To block out all the gore in the country you actually live in, you really need to be committed to deliberate emotional detachment, and once you’ve managed to numb yourself fully, you may no longer be the same person.

Children in Cizre, September 2015. Photograph: Murat Bay, sendika.org.

The country I normally live in gives me neither of the above as long as I can stay away from the news from the Middle East. No big joys. No deep sorrows. A mostly flat, occasionally mildly undulating line could easily make up the course of my life. As long as the whole family is healthy, I could have a constant, not too high level of reasonable contentment lowered only by the ripples of minor nuisances here and there. I am still unsure whether that is or should be my choice. I certainly keep going against it by reading and worse, caring about, the news from my home country. It promises a far less tiresome form of family life; this much I am sure of. Surviving as an individual is one thing. Raising children among the sharp turns of the extremes that make up urban daily life in today’s Turkey is another. I’ve tried it again for one year and enjoyed it thoroughly. Yet all the immense joys aside, one inevitably gets protective, seeking safe environments for education and child-friendly entertainment, which in turn makes life not only restrictive but also expensive, and by extension stressful. Safe/good school, safe neighbourhood, safe transportation, safe outdoor and holiday activities with adult supervision at all times – all of this comes at increasing prices, monetary and otherwise. It worked. We bought safety and education for a year, and child counselling at the end to deal with the anxiety caused, it seems, mainly by the restricted environment. We could have continued to buy more of it, but at the price of growing debts, nerves stretched to the extreme and children prone to anxiety. Maybe later on we will try again, but for now, I am fine with a duller, humbler but more effortless life in an adopted country. Whether this will make us a happier, less anxious family is yet to be seen.

My forthcoming coaster

I am full of admiration for people who can continue to work as efficiently as ever even when the world seems to be falling apart. Aziz Sancar, a Turkish Nobel laureate in chemistry based in the United States, said in an interview that he does not follow the media of our shared home country because if he does, he gets too upset to do research. Not that there is a Nobel prize in art history or that I think that I would have deserved one, but I do understand him and regret not being like him. I envy his quiet, purposeful existence in a lab, where I understand he spends more time than anywhere else. It was reported that he even lived in a lab and showered with a fire hose for several months at an early stage in his career. Admittedly, his research on the DNA has a chance of eventually curing cancer. Nobody can blame me for not having a sense of purpose in my research on a bunch of bureaucrats and artists whose purpose in life was kissing the sultan’s you-know-what, or failing that, the current grand vizier’s.  If my research had the slightest chance of making anything better in this world, I swear I would have camped in a library (not lab, thankfully) until I found the answers to all my questions on those brown-nosers.

As that chance is non-existent, I choose to procrastinate. It’s great during term time as I am so insanely busy with teaching and the kids that I don’t have to find excuses to keep me from writing my book. But now that the term is coming to an end, I will need proactive ways of dragging my feet to see me through the Christmas vacation with minimum intellectual activity. I could have a go at Minecraft if my children allow me. Cook lentil soup. Watch Big Bang Theory or any other sitcom that has been on forever. Read news. Write a blog. Clean the kitchen.

I don’t need convincing to prioritise any of these over my book. To me, clearly, a squeaky clean kitchen top is far more crucial an element of a perfect world than a(nother) book on Ottoman illustrated manuscripts. My friend Evrim would disagree. He is a firm believer in the contribution we are making as humanities scholars. I envy and respect his dedication, but don’t quite understand how he can even imagine his book being more important than my kitchen. My book, thanks to friends and colleagues who pushed me very hard to finish it, has proven to be a satisfying achievement. It is, at this very moment, a coaster. I am delighted to have put it in good use, and feel that all those years spent reading hagiographies, examining shrines, writing and rewriting would have remained a sad saga of a wasted youth otherwise. But how can Evrim guarantee that his book will fill an equally vital void between wooden furniture and cups of tea?

Since we are clearly not curing cancer with our books, motivation can escape us just as easily as hope can when we listen to the news. What do we do if the world seems too far removed from being humane for the humanities to make any sense? Is there really any point in forcing ourselves back into an often truly pleasant but nonetheless painstaking, long-winded endeavour that is likely to return a book-length coaster every five years or so?

When I put my teacup down five years from now I will surely find something to protect my furniture, whether I write another book or not. But who knows which country will be bombing whom.

Wake up, little Islamic art historian

Importance is a relative concept. Whether fourteenth-century Iberian craftsmen were familiar with the scientific literature of tenth-century Iraq, how Iraqi lustreware was made, who made the illustrations in this or that manuscript based on which drafts, are all extremely important questions in their own right. So important that they will surely save us from the mayhem that the world seems to be going headfirst into. When Islamic State militants come for me, for example, I will be fully prepared to give them a well-structured lecture on geometry and pattern in Islamic art, with powerpoint, handout and all that, which I am sure they would love. I expect them to ask good questions before cutting my head off and would be happy to schedule tutorials for when we are all in jahannam, but I will stop here, only because there now seems to be a constantly dropping limit to the black humour that many of us can take.

I do believe that what we do is potentially important. Just not for the reasons that seem to matter to most of us. Not all of us, thankfully, as we do have a handful of colleagues who are taking the time to make a real impact, though they are a tiny minority. Humanities scholars working on the Islamic world at UK institutions, including myself, are like teenagers. We need to be woken up and told to get out of the comfort of our messy rooms and face the real world. Our existence is comfortable because very few people care about us, even though we do moan about this very fact all the time, and some of the people who do care are quite rich and powerful. This leaves us with minimum disturbance in the cosy atmosphere of a dimmed lecture room in the basement of a research centre sponsored in all likelihood by one or the other murky collector or Middle Eastern dictatorial regime, where we go on and on about the questions above and many others (all equally important) with a handful of smart and hardworking students. Why on earth would anybody want to leave that?

No, of course we do not want to grow up and leave that dim room, but we have to, because as academics we have a responsibility to a society that consists predominantly of people who do not even come near that room (among other reasons, because we do not allow them to). I know I am being boring by just saying that, so allow me to get a bit nastier if only to be more precise: We need to get over our contempt for the guidelines concerning ‘impact’ that are published by research funding bodies, and give some serious thought to how we can indeed make the maximum impact, instead of putting into our funding applications half-hearted promises we know we will never keep unless we absolutely have to just to set the records straight. More importantly, we must make this effort regardless of any promise of funding. This poor planet of ours is now reaching such a point of explosive conflict that as humanities researchers on the Islamic world, the urgency of our responsibility may soon become comparable to that of climate researchers.

Let us wake up and change the world, little by little, and not go back to our rooms and sulk when we realise that we can’t change it overnight.

 

 

Ankara, Beirut, Paris: Why do European lives matter more?

Gloomy day. Late at night in unusually windy Oxford as if to add eeriness to the gloom on purpose, way too late for my tired brain, which however is too busy to let me go to sleep, I am trying to make sense of the news. As if any sense can be made of over a hundred people killed while enjoying a Friday night out in Paris in retaliation for bombs thrown into the distant land called Syria.

So distant is that part of the world to the average European, and unfortunately to many who were blessed with an education well above the average, that when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in Ankara last month, leaving over another hundred people dead and their compatriots like myself devastated and sleepless for many nights, hardly anything seems to have moved in English, French or German souls. Of all my colleagues in Oxford, I am grateful to two for asking whether my husband, who every one of them knows is in Ankara, was fine. Not a word of sympathy from any of the others. Most of them earn their living through historical research and teaching on the Islamic world at an institution that prides itself on being the country’s best in this field. I wondered, at the time, whether it was because the history we teach is full of bloodshed that they acted as if nothing significant had happened on 10 October? I even wondered further with vague pity whether they had become so immersed in their work that they had turned into research and teaching machines incapable of feelings for things beyond their personal lives.  Now I realise in bitter relief as, for all the wrong reasons, the French get the attention that we and the Lebanese have been denied recently, that this was not because my colleagues do not have heart and soul. The problem must be that the heart and soul they have is biased and conditioned by media channels that decide what is important and what is not. The unbalanced approach of British media – and I’m sure much of the rest of European media – to the recent atrocities in Ankara, Beirut and Paris is a reflection of deeply ingrained assumptions that European lives matter more. This is a horrible thing that I believe every educated European should contemplate and try to remedy. That is, if humanity is to have a relatively peaceful future.

I write this as a naturalised European as much as a born Middle Easterner – a citizen of a country so divided that even officers highest up in the government ranks failed to express solidarity with the victims of the Ankara attack and social media users went as far as to suggest that the victims, attacked during a peace rally organised in protest after the government reignited war with the Kurds, found what they deserved. So strong is the hatred that divides our society in that distant land. If anything good will ever come out of all this mayhem, it will be the acknowledgement that all lives matter the same, and it looks like we can only count on Europe for making this happen.