From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan

Journalist Hansen (Notes on a Foreign Country) explores how ordinary people cope with “mind-blowing... systemic transformation” stemming from global trends in this illuminating close-up view of one Istanbul neighborhood. In recent years, the narrow streets of the old, poor district of Karagumruk have become home to a swelling number of Syrian refugees. Their arrival has brought cultural and linguistic transformation to an area whose constancy the native Turks have taken for granted since the end of the Ottoman Empire. While profiling colorful local characters who serve as a window into what dramatic global change does to individual lives and perspectives, Hansen cleverly considers whether countries like Turkey, located in an unraveling Middle East, have already borne witness to a “dissolution of nations and borders and people and seemingly civilization itself” that the West is now grappling with decades later. Hansen weaves into this thesis an explanation of the appeal of President Recep Erdogan, a man “formed by an ideology that grew out of the humiliating loss of a great Islamic Empire,” who “alchemized his humiliation into proud liberal stewardship of the old nation until he began his angry fabrication of a new one.” The result is a captivating consideration of Turkey as a truly “post-Western” nation charting its own course in a globalized world. (Apr.)