Istanbul’s Multiculturalism Reimagined in Contemporary British Fiction

Abstract

Any discussion of multiculturalism needs to take into account the fact that the word simultaneously means two related concepts of different register: as Kenan Malik points out, “the lived experience of diversity” and “manag[ing] diversity” (Malik, 2012). More and more, multiculturalism rears its head in public discourse as the management of different cultures living together, a political process which has been declared dead many times over in Europe. The proponents of multiculturalism, those who consider it more as ‘the lived experience’ and don’t want to let go of it simply because the political processes have failed, look further afield, to see in what kind of spaces a functioning multiculturalism was/is made possible. The need to discover ‘multiculturalism elsewhere’ is reflected in the popularity of both non-European books that deal with cultural diversity, and European writers’ own efforts to imagine multiculturalisms that are lived outside and/or on the margins of Europe. This explains the popularity of writers such as Alaa al Aswany in Cairo, Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, as they write about the multicultural past and present of these cities. In this study I will look at two British efforts at trying to (re)locate multiculturalism in Istanbul, in Jason Goodwin’s The Janissary Tree (2007) and Barbara Nadel’s Passion for Killing (2007). I will start by situating Turkey historically within multiculturalism debates and then examine how in fiction Istanbul is re-imagined as an ersatz setting where one can observe how cultural diversity operates in different historical and geographical contexts. This instrumentalization of Istanbul, I argue, is a means of rapprochement between Europe and Turkey in Turkey’s bid to be a part of the European community. Construction of a future together requires a reconstruction of the past, and I suggest that this is what these books set in Istanbul are working towards. These British novels that re-imagine the Ottoman past also reveal Britain’s and by extension Europe’s strained relationship with the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. Politicians and writers make much of Istanbul’s heritage of cultural diversity and claim, emboldened by theorists of multiculturalism such as Chandra Kukathas and Will Kymlicka, that the Ottoman past can provide lessons in multiculturalism that Europe can learn from today. In contemporary political discussions, multiculturalism as a problem engendered and contained by the nation-state is discussed with reference to the millet system, which is perceived as the Ottoman state tool developed to organize the multicultural society of the Ottoman Empire. 1 Notwithstanding the detractors of the idea that the millet system was a full fledged apparatus with an easily identifiable structure (Braude, 1982), from Kukathas’ description of ‘imperial state that does not seek integration of the diverse peoples’ to Kymlicka’s ‘non-liberal religious tolerance’ (1995, p. 155), Ottoman multiculturalism is referred to as a functioning method, indeed a management method, of keeping diverse cultures together living together in peace in the same commonwealth. The efforts for