Global Dialogues

“Faith is the only word that can at once accommodate all those concepts that seem to be in pieces: self-esteem, confidence, trust,” she writes. Yet Temelkuran is careful to distance herself from the blind faith demanded by certain religious and political leaders.

“I will leave God in the realm of poetry and theology and, instead, provide something closer to the annoying shake we give someone falling asleep in the snow of cynicism and depression that feels so warm.”

But then courage is something Temelkuran has never lacked. She was born in 1973 and raised in Izmir on the western coast of Turkey by a social-democrat father and Maoist mother, the latter who was jailed and tortured by the army during the 1980 coup as part of a crackdown intended to destroy the country’s vibrant leftist movements.

For a writer shaped in the crucible of left-wing ideas and activism, where all forms of non-materialist thinking are held in suspicion, it takes courage to speak about matters like faith.

“Such a generation we shall raise that they will not remember you,” as General Kenan Evren infamously told his adversaries.

In a way, he was proven right. The military Junta that came to power enforced a program of hardline neoliberalism—welfare cuts, privatization of state firms, opening up of capital markets—which led to growing economic and social inequality in the country. In the absence of a truly progressive opposition, a strong Islamist movement arose, offering voters a cocktail of hardline piety and aggressive ethnic nationalism as a simple solution to their problems. Emerging from this movement, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP) won power in 2002.

Coming of age in the 1990s, Temelkuran closely charted the AKP’s rise as a journalist. From the start she drew attention to how his Islamist policies, which tend to grab the attention of Western journalists, went hand-in-hand with aggressive pro-business measures, creating fantastic wealth for a tiny minority while pushing the majority into impoverishment.

“The present process in Turkey is not one of Islamisation but of Dubaisation,” she writes in Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy (Zed Books, 2015), a genre-bending national study that combines reportage, historical analysis, and cultural criticism. 

At the same time, Temelkuran has explored the plight of various minority communities—Armenians, Ottoman Greeks, Kurds—who were on the receiving end of Turkish nationalist violence in the modern era and whose history the AKP has striven to erase through a new “new-Ottoman” ideology that glorifies rather than atones for the country’s imperial past. In 2010, she published a pathbreaking travelog of her visit to Armenia titled Deep Mountain.

An indefatigable critic of Erdoğan often attacked by the government, Temelkuran eventually lost her job at the newspaper Habertürk in 2012. Her crime was publishing a satirical article about the president’s reaction to an airstrike that killed nineteen children in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast.

Since then, Temelkuran has maintained a bilingual literary practice, filing journalistic articles in English that appear in the Western press while writing novels and poetry in Turkish.

Addressing a global readership, she has widened the scope of her political investigations, drawing attention to how right-wing strongmen have gaining traction across the world in developing as well as Western countries—a phenomenon analyzed in her best-selling book How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship (Fourth Estate, 2019).

 “The striking similarities between what Turkey went through and what the Western world began to experience a short while later are too many to dismiss,” she writes. “There is something resembling a pattern to the political insanity that we choose to name ‘rising populism,’ and that we are all experiencing to some extent.”

While giving talks about How to Lose a Country across the world, Temelkuran was often confronted with a question: “So where, then, is hope?” In response, she wrote Together, which explores how a secular faith grounded in shared, emotional commitments to the common good help give rise to alternative political visions.

“Even in today’s garbage-like times it is our inherent disposition to create beauty that has sustained our kind each time a system ended up in the dustbin of history,” she writes. “And during each collapse, despite those who believed that this was the end of it all, this essence of our kind has been the reason to renew our faith in humanity.”

Temelkuran’s concern with the emotional basis of a healthy democracy have grown more urgent in the wake of the horrific earthquake that struck Turkey in February 2023 and the disastrous government response, which resulted in the loss of over fifty thousand lives. Only two months later, Erdogan limped to victory in federal elections with 52% of the vote—evidence of despair and a lack of belief in positive alternatives to an unequal and oppressive reality.

“All status quos have the magical ability of deceiving the masses into believing that when the system collapses everything else will collapse with it,” Temelkuran writes.

In more established democracies, too, authoritarian leaders are making electoral gains, even as they lack the ideas or capacity to govern, offering voters little more than ethnonationalist fantasies.

Temelkuran convincingly argues that progressive movements will have to return to the terrain of faith, which has for too long been ceded to the right, in order to convince ourselves and others that it’s worth fighting for the “beautiful, the humane and the true.”

By Ratik Asokan, February 21, 2024