Kasaba R. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 4, Turkey in the Modern World

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from life, career and family in society. Irony and sarcasm about ideological

projects on both left and right began to make their way into ﬁction, and

various depictions of alienation became prominent. The plot of Dispossessed

revolves around Turgut

Ozben, a character who begins to research the death of

his friend Selim Is¸ık, a suicide. During the period of his research into his friend’s

life, Turgut is able to reconstruct hidden aspects of his life. He also learns that

Selim had been compiling an ‘Encyclopaedia of the Dispossessed’, in which

he had included himself. Turgut’s investigations help him realise things about

his own self. He begins to distance himself from his customary routine and

associations, and slowly withdraws from all that is familiar, accepting that he

himself is one of the dispossessed. The signiﬁcance of the novel rests in its

individuality, style and structure. For the ﬁrst time, a social or national cause

does not drive the plot in some fashion, but rather, the plot is constituted by

marginalised voices that weave an indictment of the collectivity.

Adalet A

gao

glu’s

Olmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die, 1973) is another novel

that marks this period, this time with a female protagonist, Aysel, a professor

who withdraws to a hotel room to commit suicide. This focus on the plight

of one woman is set against a reckoning of Turkish history between 1938

(Atat

urk’s death) and the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 in Europe. Aysel

has had an affair with one of her students, Engin, and believes she might be

pregnant. The moral and ethical implications of this act disrupt everything

she has known about bourgeois life in Turkey until then. Her guilt at having

betrayed her husband and the Republic push her in one direction while her

affair allows her to feel for the ﬁrst time that she is ‘both a person and a

woman’. The re-emergence of sexuality is an important theme here, and the

novel represents the stirrings of second-wave feminism out of ﬁrst (or ‘state

feminism’) in the Turkish context. The fact that Aysel withstands this ‘dark

night of the soul’ is a statement about emerging feminist agency.

These novels, part of a category referred to as ‘March 12’ novels (in reference

to the date of the 1971 coup), reveal, among other things, a renewed focus on

the individual, the crisis of the intellectual, feminism and a desire to experi-

ment with novelistic form in new and innovative ways. The period after the

coup saw the emergence of the individual out of the national-social collective.

This was the ﬁrst period of committed feminist literature, prison memoirs,

coup novels, existentialist texts and absurdist narratives, most of which were in

their own ways indictments of the ideologies of the patriarchal military state

and/or socialist opposition. The emerging individualism, or ‘individual real-

ism’, did not completely abandon committed socialist literature; however, a

new aesthetic between the psychological and the national-social found its way

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The novel in Turkish

into ﬁction. This often led to a narration of the crises in Turkish society and

politics since the founding of the Republic that resulted in a pattern of military

coups. Collective critiques based on national identity or class gave way to more

subjective accounts from the perspective of victims of the state whose voices

had been suppressed.

The 1971 coup ushered in an era of renewed state control and authoritarian

rule. The closed world of prisons, torture, police stations, martial law and of

‘counter-guerrilla’ interrogation centres funded by the US became accessible

to the reading public through novels based on real-life individual experiences.

The ideals of a nationalist or socialist utopia faded in the face of the new

confessional voices and personal histories. The re-emergence of an authorita-

tive military state in the context of the Cold War led to the further splitting

of society into leftist and rightist camps, wherein university students became

increasingly polarised and clashed in bloody skirmishes. Revolutionary youths

full of purpose and anger were helpless against a multifaceted state appara-

tus. In turn, the social engagement of yesterday became the existential angst

of the present. Strong women emerged into prominence to make social cri-

tiques of earlier eras as exempliﬁed in the narratives of Adalet A

gao

glu, Leyla

Erbil, Sevgi Soysal and F

uruzan. Others retreated into isolation and alienation

as revealed in the works of O

guz Atay and Yusuf Atılgan. Themes involving

Islam and lived traditions began to appear with greater frequency, perhaps

ﬁlling ‘spaces’ vacated by large-scale socialist movements which had failed to

gain political power and transform society. The ‘Islamic novel’ grew through

the efforts of authors such as S¸ule Y

uksel S¸enler, Ahmet G

unbay Yıldız and

Mustafa Miyaso

glu. The oppression suffered by the left after the 1980 coup

opened more opportunity spaces for the Islamic movement which criticised

the secular nature of the ﬁrst generation of Republican writers and the Marxist

ideological slavishness of the second. From this perspective, both movements

tended to exploit Anatolian people and their traditions for political aims rather

than provide a true reﬂection of their lives and culture.

These were texts that revealed a realist texture akin to memoir and confes-

sional accounts of witness. They were, in a sense, oral histories whose content

took precedence over their form as they explored and excavated changing

relationships and identities in the context of the triangulation between state,

society and individual. The 1980 coup was a more severe operation meant to

quash the leftist politics and culture that had taken hold since 1960 and replace

them with new social values and aims. This sent authors looking for new nar-

rative spaces beyond the national and the social into experiments with history,

fantasy and meta-ﬁction.

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Post-Kemalism and neo-Ottomanism (1981–99):

meta-ﬁctions

Latife Tekin and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk helped deﬁne this generation of

writers through works that were challenging in terms of form and content but,

more importantly, that questioned established narratives of Turkish identity

and history. In this period, writers began to transcend the limits of national

traditions and to strive for international audiences. Pamuk’s ever-changing

narrative style reached the ﬁrst of many peaks with his third novel, The White

Castle (1985), a concise historical meta-ﬁction that subtly criticised authoritar-

ian nationalism while reintroducing the Ottomans to a sophisticated, literary

readership. Furthermore, the novel made a philosophical challenge by subvert-

ing the self–other binary through a display of narrative ﬁnesse that marked

7 Principal authors and representative works:

Ahmet Altan (b. 1950), D

ort Mevsim Sonbahar (Autumn, Four Seasons Worth), 1982

Feyyaz Kayacan (b. 1993), C¸ ocuktaki Bahc¸e (The Garden in the Child), 1982

Latife Tekin (b. 1957), Dear Shameless Death (Sevgili Arsız

um), 1983

Va ha p A kb as¸(b.1954), Alevler ve G

uller (Flames and Roses), 1984

M. Talat Uzunyaylalı (b. 1955), Senat

un Kızı (The Senator’s Daughter), 1986

Duygu Asena (b. 1946), Kadının Adı Yok (WomenHaveNoName), 1987

Nurullah Genc¸(b.1960), Tutkular Keder Oldu (Passion Became Sorrow), 1987

Nazlı Eray (b. 1945), Yoldan Gec¸en

Oyk

uler (Stories Passing on the Street), 1987, short

stories

Pınar K

ur (b. 1943), Bir Cinayet Romanı (A Crime Novel), 1989

Metin Kac¸an (b. 1961), A

gır Roman (A Serious Novel), 1990

Yılmaz Karakoyunlu (b. 1936), Salkım Hanım’ın Taneleri (Pieces of Salkım Hanım), 1990

Inci Aral (b. 1944),

u Erkek Kus¸lar (Dead Male Birds), 1991

us’at O. Bener (b. 1922), Bay Muannit Sahtegi’nin Notları (The Notes of Mr. Muannit

Sahtegi), 1991

Tahsin Y

ucel (b. 1933), Peygamberin Son Bes¸G

u (The Prophet’s Last Five Days), 1992

Mehmet Uyar (b. 1960), Efsane Sır (Legendary Mystery), 1993

Mehmet Efe (?), Mızraksız

Ilmihal (Catechism Without a Lance), 1994

Ihsan Oktay Anar (b. 1960), Puslu Kıtalar Atlası (The Atlas of Misty Continents), 1995

Erendiz Atas

u(b.1947), Da

gın

Oteki Y

u (The Other Face of the Mountain), 1995

Nedim G

ursel (b. 1951), Bo

gazkesen: Fatih’in Romanı (Bosporous Fortress: Mehmet the

Conqueror), 1995

Mahir

Oztas¸(b.1951), So

guma (The Cooling), 1995

ulf

u Livaneli (b. 1946), Engere

gin G

undeki Kamas¸ma (The Twitch in the Eye of the

Viper), 1997

Halime Toros (b. 1960), Halkaların Ezgisi (The Dirge of Chains), 1997

Aslı Erdo

gan (b. 1967), Kırmızı Pelerinli Kent (The Crimson Caped City), 1998

Cemil Kavukc¸u (b. 1951), D

us¸ (Return), 1998

Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952), My Name is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı), 1998

MurathanMungan(b.1955),

Uc¸ Aynalı Kırk Oda (Forty Rooms with Three Mirrors), 1999,

stories

Hasan Ali Toptas¸(b.1958), Bin H

unl

uHaz(The Pleasure of a Thousand Sorrows),

1999

Hıfzı Topuz (b. 1923), Paris’te Son Osmanlılar (The Last Ottomans in Paris), 1999

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The novel in Turkish

him as a postmodern writer. In the novel, a Venetian and an Ottoman reveal

their worlds to each other until they begin to overlap. The Ottoman theme

in his work was picked up again with My Name is Red (1998), a complex and

fragmented work that redeﬁned the ﬂat two-dimensionality of the Ottoman

miniature painting as a living, vital, aesthetic model pertinent to the present

day. The novel, combing a number of genres, is a historical murder mystery

focusing on the imperial miniaturists’ guild and a mysterious book that the

sultan has commissioned. The novel furthermore exhibits visual expressions

of sixteenth-century Ottoman history, autobiographical self-reﬂexivity, frag-

mented points of view, the use of a miniaturist’s aesthetic as a model of form,

scholarly and philosophical treatises, intertextual use of ‘Eastern’ forms of

the Qur’anic parable, mystic romance, and fable, the revelation of the plot

through detective-work, the focus on the everyday, and frequent allegorical

references to self and nation. In its multiplicity of narrators and its aesthetic

self-consciousness, the novel becomes Pamuk’s ‘large canvas’.

Latife Tekin’s novels reveal a harsh world outside the reach of modernising

projects, standardised education and secularism. At times labelled ‘magical

realism’, Tekin’s novels such as Dear Shameless Death (1983) and Berji Kristin:

Tales of the Garbage Hills (1984) create a new world through a storm of inno-

vative and unusual language, bringing to life the settings of gecekondus, or

shantytowns peopled by rural migrants to the city. Dear Shameless Death is an

account of a young girl, Dirmit, and her traumatic move from a rural village

to Istanbul. Dirmit copes with the difﬁculties of her life through the power of

her imagination, which verges on delusion. Over time she begins to express

herself through writing. Berji Kristin recounts the development of a shanty-

town community around an urban rubbish dump along with a subtext of the

growth of socialist ideology among some members of the community. In her

work, the voyage of the privileged Istanbulite taken by Feride of Autobiography

of a Turkish Girl, makes its astonishing return journey with Dirmit of Dear

Shameless Death. Were these two heroines to meet, they would hardly know

how to react to each other. Both Pamuk and Tekin are somewhat shocking to

the secular establishment because there is nothing standardised or predictable

about their use of Turkish or their subject matter. They are signiﬁcant not

least because they are two writers who transcended the limits of the dominant

discourses of collective understandings of Turkish nationalism and socialism

that had held sway into the 1980s.

The 1980 coup was directed against civil unrest and political extremism

on both right and left, but truly targeted the left by purging universities

and the press. The intelligentsia referred to this coup as the beginning of

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‘depoliticisation’, a ﬁrst step in reorienting society towards neo-liberalism.

In literature, this led to drastic changes as writers responded to the political

transformations by moving away from social issues and realism in a manner

that questioned the grand narratives of nationalism/Kemalism and social-

ism through aesthetic experimentation with content and form. Though these

trends could be more generally labelled part of ‘postmodernism’, their man-

ifestation in the Turkish context can be further speciﬁed as expressions of

post-Kemalism post-socialism, and neo-Ottomanism.

A strong Marxist tradition led to a delay and resistance to the representation

of ‘postmodernism’, a literary category that was suspect to the practitioners of

engaged literature and the literature of witness of the ‘Second Republic’ (1960–

80). Ironically, Islamic literati were more welcoming of this change, because

it reintroduced repressed themes back into public debates. Postmodernism

and its related genres proceeded from the assumption that language did not

objectively reﬂect reality, but created it. Thus, realism didn’t reﬂect an exter-

nal reality, but created realism itself. Some postmodern techniques included

allegory, magical realism, fantasy and an escape into Ottoman history (literary

neo-Ottomanism), including a resurgence of the ‘suﬁ theme’.

As stated above, this survey considers postmodernism to be part of, rather

than a replacement or denunciation of, modernism. When introducing post-

modernism, the speciﬁc political, cultural and social contexts and contingen-

cies of Turkey need to be made clear. In the Turkish case, the preﬁx ‘post-’

should be read as code for a movement away from long-held socialist ide-

als, patriarchy, Anatolianism and meta-narratives, and an ironic return to

Ottoman/Islamic history, individualism, existentialism and the city. Further-

more, it aimed to refute the truth-claims of earlier generations guided by

Kemalism, which included a strong belief in Ottoman-Islamic backwardness,

classlessness, universal ideals and populism. The Turkish postmodern condi-

tion emphasised a plurality of perspectives as opposed to the ﬁxed singularity

of the early twentieth-century modernist vision that was restricted, ironically,

because it was universal and so didn’t take the on-the-ground realities into

consideration. Thus, postmodernism in Turkish literature was a movement

of rewriting and excavating the model forms of the previous ﬁfty years. In other

words, it forecast the shortcomings, failures and idealism of various projects

of modernisation. It did not, as is sometimes expressed, indicate a dismissal or

failure of modernism, but rather introduced multiplicity to a rigid, universal,

Eurocentric hierarchy of progress and development.

In a similar vein, neo-Ottomanism implied a reassessment and reappro-

priation of disregarded cultural history and identity before the First World

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The novel in Turkish

War, including manifestations of Islam. Understandings of style and aesthetics

changed in this era as authors experimented with form while being drawn to

the multi-ethnic, multi-religious settings and characters from various Ottoman

walks of life and classes. The limits of nationalism were transcended, historical

and cultural borders were crossed. At times re-connecting with the trends of

nineteenth-century Ottoman modernist Islam, this movement has also been

considered part of a more recent ‘liberal Islam’. Thus, in the wake of the 1980

coup, along with non-realist and fantastic genres, both the Ottoman historical

novel and the Islamic novel gained currency and legitimacy under this label.

Ottoman history and its postmodern manifestation as ‘historiographic

meta-ﬁction’ became a favourite theme of writers such as Orhan Pamuk

and

Ihsan Oktay Anar. Novelistic variations on political and liberal Islam

also became increasingly prevalent. ‘Islamic feminists’ such as Cihan Aktas¸

addressed the predicaments of women who wanted to express themselves

through faith and individuality.

‘Post-Kemalism’ referred to another trend involving the rewriting or reartic-

ulation of values of the cultural revolution, the diminution of the signiﬁcance

of the state in daily life and the qualiﬁcation of secular identity through alter-

natives that valorise tradition such as the Turkish–Islamic synthesis.

Transnationalism and transgression (2000–present):

writing beyond the nation

The novels of the youngest generation of Turkish writers, represented by

Murat Uyurkulak, S¸ebnem

Is¸ig

uzel and Elif S¸afak, are emotionally charged,

cynical, violent, and even ‘slapstick’. Uyurkulak’s Tol (Revenge, 2002)isa

reassessment, an unofﬁcial history, of the last ﬁfty years of Turkey’s history

told by poets, revolutionaries and madmen from various generations. The

8 Principal authors and representative works:

Cem Akas¸(b.1968), Balı

gın Esir D

us¸t

uYer(Where Fish Get Trapped), trilogy, 2000–1

Ahmet Kekec¸(b.1961), Ya

gmurdan Sonra (After the Rain), 2000

Rıza Kırac¸(b.1970), Cin Treni (Jinn Train), 2000

Cihan Aktas¸(b.1960), Bana Uzun Mektuplar Yaz (Write me Long Letters), 2002

Nazan Bekiro

glu (b. 1957),

Isimle Ates¸ Arasında (Between Name and Fire), 2002

Perihan Ma

gden (b. 1960),

Iki Genc¸ Kızın Romanı (A Novel of Two Young Girls), 2002

Murat Uyurkulak (b. 1972), Tol (Revenge), 2002

S¸ebnem

Is¸ig

uzel (b. 1973), Sarmas¸ık (Intertwined), 2002

Enis Batur (b. 1952), Kravat (Necktie), 2003

Yekta Kopan (b. 1968),

Ic¸imde Kim Var? (Who is Within Me?), 2004

Mario Levi (b. 1967), Lunapark Kapandı (The Amusement Park Closed), 2005

Elif S¸afak Bilgin (b. 1971), The Bastard of Istanbul (Baba ve Pic¸), 2006

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fragmented plot revolves around an alcoholic poet (‘Poet’) and a proofreader,

Yusuf, who has lost his will to live. The two are on a train journey from

Istanbul to Diyarbakır – two cities representing the opposing poles of modern

Turkish schizophrenia: modernity and oppression/dispossession. With a ﬁrst

line that begins ‘Revolution, at one time, was a possibility, and it was very

good’, Tol conveys the perspective of frustrated leftist idealism that exacts its

revenge against the state through alternative narratives and ways of being. This

is something of an underground novel that takes the reader into the world

of distraught revolutionaries, their alternative histories and their fantasies of

revenge against a system of war, inhumanity and capitalism.

With a sense of violence and sexuality so excessive that it verges on par-

ody, S¸ebnem

Is¸ig

uzel’s books explore everyday life from extreme, exaggerated

perspectives through themes of incest, homelessness and rape. In the novel

Sarmas¸ık (Intertwined, 2002), she examines stories of sexual abuse and rape in

the context of relationships of love and power. The main story revolves around

Ali Ferah, who is the son of a woman who married the man who raped her.

The novel is woven out of accounts of sexual violation and the everyday, of

the sinister and the mundane, including Hayal’s sexual abuse in a school run

by nuns and her subsequent mental illness; Ludmilla, who is sexually abused

by Boris, a ‘friend’ of her family, and who later becomes a prostitute; her sister

Nadya, who lives (and dies) as the mistress of the ﬁrst Turkish writer to be

awarded the Nobel prize, Salim Abidin; and Sedef and her objectiﬁcation in

an unhappy marriage. The novel might be thematised under the umbrella of

victimhood, but unlike Uyurkulak,

Is¸ig

uzel’s characters do not conceive of

vengeance as a real or imagined possibility.

This is the generation of EU accession politics and the rise of the Justice and

Development Party representing the position of ‘Islamic Democrats’. Mostly

born in the 1960s and 1970s, and raised in a world of seeming contradictions, the

writers of the newest generation don’t ascribe to any particular movement in

the traditional sense. The idiosyncrasies of these young writers, experimental

in terms of form and content, make them difﬁcult to categorise. They are,

however, uniﬁed in one important respect: their work represents a mixing

or crossing of traditional novelistic genres. The boundaries that they cross

in their ﬁction explode the limits of the nation and national tradition as it is

traditionally understood through chronological/historical, thematic, gender

and genre transgressions. They have learned to live with contradiction rather

than trying to resolve it. Theyrepresent no particular political position, yetthey

are not apolitical. They have no conviction in the ‘author-intellectual’ ﬁgure

that has been dominant in Turkish letters since the founding of the Republic,

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but are content to be authors concerned with craft, style and aesthetics. In the

wake of the collapse of grand narratives and in an increasingly consumerist

culture, they explore new avenues of cynical narration that might include

detective stories, underground ﬁction, youth subcultures and fantasy.

The ﬁrst generation to grow up within the neo-liberal system that was

established after the 1980 coup, these writers are tacticians of resistance on

an individual rather than social or historical scale. These authors have little

conviction in monolithic ideologies, but they do have an inkling of the market

of identities and a multitude of sites of power inﬂuencing one’s choices. In

short, there is a new relationality in these works, a new way of seeing the

regional and international world of which Turkey has become a part. These

young authors are redeﬁning what it means to be a ‘Turk’ beyond national

identity.

Conclusion: politics and aesthetics

These seven periods spanning the ‘long’ twentieth century correspond to seven

main world views. Each period is informed by a particular telos, or goal, that

is expressed textually as follows: (1) the reform of traditional Ottoman society

and the synthesis of modernity and Islam; (2) the establishment of ethno-

religious Turkism as the cultural engine of Ottoman social transformation;

(3) the creation of a new, future-oriented, ethno-cultural, national and secu-

lar society divorced from the Ottoman-Islamic past; (4) the transformation of

Anatolian rural life through socialist revolution or the Anatolian reworking

of the Turkist cultural revolution; (5) the critique or indictment of national

and socialist modernity from the perspective of its victims: women, alienated

intellectuals, Islamists and other marginalised populations; (6) the acknowl-

edgement of the collapse of meta-narratives of socio-national progress through

the multiplication of perspectives, the ironic revisiting of Ottoman history, for-

mal experimentation and the subversion of realism through fantasy or magical

realism; and (7) the violent, extreme or ironic presentation of new perspec-

tives of transnationalism, transgression and border crossing that proliferate

and further relativise sites of identiﬁcation in contemporary Turkish society.

Some authors represent more than one category, and a shift is visible in their

work, marking a change in ideological focus. A clear politics of representation

is at play during each period. This is not to say that aesthetic concerns are not

also a factor. The general trajectory both in each period and over the twen-

tieth century as a whole, however, could be described as a movement away

from imposed identities (national, social, familial, gender, etc.) and towards

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the recognition of contradictory subjectivities whereby collective or individ-

ual agency enables the crossing of discursive or ideological boundaries in a

non-prescriptive manner.

In short, a canon of the Turkish novel implies many paradoxical things at

once. By outlining the forces that have given form to the novel in the twenti-

eth century, this survey has only sketched the beginnings of a critical analysis

of the relationships between ideology, history and literary production. The

narrative space of the novel is a historicised public arena of contested ideolo-

gies and identities. Each generation produces its dominant literary content

in concordance with or in opposition to a particular world view. As a record

of representations, the novel in Turkish demonstrates the suffering of the

dispossessed and the anxiety of identiﬁcation in a social context where power

relations are constantly changing. After cataloguing the work of over a century

of writing in Turkish, one question presents itself and remains to be answered:

is there a perspective outside ideology – a point of triangulation perhaps – that

is not compromised by the passing of time or shifting power relations? The

canon outlined in the notes here provides a possible answer, one bound in the

power of aesthetics and politics.

One author who valorises aesthetics and style while also engaging history

and identity is none other than Orhan Pamuk. The awarding of the Nobel

prize to Pamuk was historic for a number of reasons. It was the ﬁrst prize

for a Turkish author and only the second Nobel to be awarded to an author

from a Muslim country. It acknowledged the power of Pamuk’s complex and

lyrical narratives, which intertwine European and Muslim literary traditions.

Furthermore, the award was also an indirect vote in favour of Turkey’s EU

accession. The Nobel committee, in championing the cultural situation of

a country that has long been portrayed in the West as ‘poor, populous and

Muslim’ (all code words for Turkey’s exclusion from Europe) has helped free

Turkey from tired, age-old clich

es.

In fact, Pamuk and the award will encourage a ‘re-reading’ of Turkey’s

past, present and future. In his seven novels and other writings, Pamuk advo-

cates understanding between what at ﬁrst appear to be contrary, opposing

cultural logics. Each of his novels (the eighth, the Museum of Innocence,is

forthcoming) contains a representation of unstable identity within a speciﬁc

Ottoman or Turkish historical context. His oeuvre is a catalogue of genres,

moving from the realist Jevdet Bey and Sons to the modernist Silent House;

from the postmodern allegory of The White Castle to the ‘Eastern’ and ‘West-

ern’ intertext of The Black Book; from the suﬁc metaﬁction of The New Life

to the historiographic postmodernism of My Name is Red and to the violent

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The novel in Turkish

ideological conversions of Snow. Within this framework, his ﬁction reveals

characters, like the author himself, who are both orientalised and nation-

alised subjects with an inclination to question their (often imposed) identi-

ties. Such questioning and interrogation leads his protagonists to attempt to

manifest (by writing or painting, for example) other narrative sites of identi-

ﬁcation. These attempts fail within the conﬁnes of the novel’s plot itself, but

are redeemed by the author’s act of narrative ‘suture’, or perhaps redemp-

tion. Every Pamuk book is doubled: a major story of lament and failure

is balanced by the quiet birth of a narrative of hybrid or multi-perspectival

authority.

Through his work, Pamuk reveals how ‘self’ and ‘other’ are dependent,

symbiotic, even ﬂuid. His ﬁction questions the very notion of a national iden-

tity based on a single ethnic, religious or cultural characteristic. Aesthetics and

politics are implicitly conjoined in his work. His novels reveal a narrative pro-

cess that reﬂects transformation and change in Turkish identity. Both Pamuk’s

ﬁction and Turkey’s delicate EU membership talks are vital for the humanising

and accepting of a ‘Muslim other’, for demonstrating political alternatives to

war and violence as a way to ‘democratise’, and for cross-cultural dialogue

that results in mutual political change.

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