Fiction Beyond Secularism

Introduction

Introduction Ka, the protagonist of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow, is an Istanbul-born intellectual who “couldn’t see how [he] could reconcile . . . becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves,” and so, dismissively, “kept religion” and its “bearded provincial reactionaries” out of his life (96). In this way, Ka typifies the ideological secularism commonly associated with transnational elites in the late twentieth century, though the particular cluster of beliefs, practices, texts, and communities he has in mind when he thinks of religion are specific to his cultural frame. The suffix –ism, attached here to modify Ka’s relation to the “secular,” signals the doctrinaire, identitarian quality of his unbelief, which borrows its sense of progress and its westward, Europhilic gaze from the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The distinctive tenor and vocabulary of Ka’s secularism , parsed carefully throughout by Maureen Freely in her English translation, index the novel quite specifically to the period between the 1979 Iranian Revolution, during which the figure of the bearded reactionary gained global circulation as a mass-mediated symbol of political Islamism, and September 11, 2001, after which not even the most blithely atheistic metropolitan intellectuals would be so confident they could keep “religion” out of their lives. In the early twentieth century, hoping to cause or accelerate modernization , Atatürk operationalized what nineteenth- and early twentieth -century social theorists like Max Weber and Émile Durkheim 4 ❘ Introduction took to be an effect or symptom of modernization: the “secularization thesis.” This argument, that modernization entails the privatization and inexorable decline of religion, became a theory integral to the selfunderstanding of Anglo-European modernity for over a century. Nonbelievers of previous generations or those rooted in different cultural frames might interpret their rupture with normative religious traditions in heroic or tragic modes: as the triumph of reason over superstition on the one hand, or as the painful and devastating loss of meaning or of the sacred on the other. Ka’s relatively late arrival in this particular intergenerational trajectory, however, means that he experiences his own unbelief as neither an achievement nor a cause for crisis. His secularism is an uncritical, inherited condition, one peopled with clichéd “reactionaries” projected as its others and structured according to a socially dominant secularist ideology. This ideological secularism fails him, however, when he returns to Turkey and travels to the provincial eastern Anatolian city of Kars, where he experiences new spiritual and creative intensities after a dozen years in Germany as a poet in exile. Through the eyes of a narrator named “Orhan,” the narrative of this double Künstlerroman follows Ka to Kars, on a visit screened by a commission to write an article for the secularist Istanbul Republican on the local mayoral elections, in which an Islamist candidate is a heavy favorite. Ka is also tasked with investigating a surge of suicides among a group of female Islamic students known as “the head-scarf girls,” whose deaths are paradoxically interpreted both as a threat to Islam, which strictly forbids suicide, and as an Islamist assault on the secular state. In this “poorest, most overlooked corner of Turkey”—a city as seemingly peripheral to Istanbul’s metropolitan center as the novel’s Turks fear they are to an imagined “West”—Ka encounters a Kurdish sheikh, the Islamist mayoral candidate, young men who identify as Islamist radicals and terrorists, and the leader of the head-scarf girls herself, who turns out to be Kadife, the younger sister of Ka’s love interest, Ipek (18). When an Islamist murders an education minister for supporting the head-scarf ban in public universities, shooting him in the very pastry shop where Ka and Ipek are conducting the first rendezvous of their whirlwind courtship, it seems clear that the observant Muslims Ka meets will confirm his worst expectations about the role of religion in the public sphere. The ideological commitments of what Pamuk calls his “political” novel are, readers suspect, sure to lie on the side of the secularists.1 Instead, in the course of his visit to Kars, Ka gains Introduction ❘ 5 a new faith in God and recovers his literary gifts, composing a book of inspired poetry that he and various characters in the novel align with Sufi mysticism. “I can’t be sure,” Ka says to a young Islamist in a confessional moment, thinking of the poems he has...