Place as Character

Last night I attended an event at Daunt’s bookshop in Marylebone High Street, at which the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany was interviewed by the General Secretary of English PEN, Jonathan Heawood. It was a sell-out affair, reflecting the huge popularity of Al Aswany’s book, The Yacoubian Building, a film of which has been made and is showing at the ICA in London tonight. It was the top-selling novel in Arabic in 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, only being displaced this year by Al Aswany’s latest book, Chicago, and it has been translated into 19 languages.

The Yacoubian Building has a fictitious cast of characters, but the building itself exists; it was where Al Aswany’s father had his office, and indeed where he himself ran his dental practice for a while. For as well as writing fiction, he remains a practising dentist, having studied his craft in Chicago. Hence the location of the new book, which is a tale of Egyptian expatriates in America. As he explained, he belongs to the school of fiction in which the place is the main character, rather as in Charles Dickens or Honoré de Balzac. ‘Every place has a human history,’ he said. ‘One can see the social history through the place.’

Al Aswany also writes an often hard-hitting monthly column which dissects some of the shortcomings of Egypt today. And he was one of the founders of a recent liberal political movement in Egypt called Kifaya. He holds a regular salon in Cairo which I hope to attend when I go there briefly on an assignment next month.

  

The Challenge for Turkey’s New President

Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, has been elected President of the Republic by a comfortable majority, in a third round of voting in the country’s parliament. In recent months, there have been massive street demonstrations against his candidature for the post, because of his Islamic roots, and the fact that his wife always wears a headscarf — not a burka or a niqab, mind you, but merely a headscarf — in public. That might seem pretty inoffensive to most Britons, but for some Turks it is a red rag to a bull, as they see it as a challenge to the secular nature of the state, established by the father of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Mr Gul has pledged that he has absolutely no intention of doing anything to undermine the secular nature of the country, and the record of the AKP government led by his colleague, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has in the main been consistent with that principle. Moreover, the government won a resounding victory in recent parliamentary elections, increasing its number of MPs significantly. Yet the army, which sees itself custodian of secular ‘Kemalism’ has been making ominous noises off-stage about ‘dark forces’ trying to turn Turkey into an Islamic state.

Four times in recent history the army has intervened to overthrow a civilian government in Turkey. This must not happen again, if Turkey is to move slowly but surely towards EU membership, as the Erdogan government wants. Turkey still has a long way to go until it meets all the so-called Copenhagen criteria for EU accession, but the British government should continue with the position it has held so far, of encouraging Ankara to make further reforms with the prize of a warm welcome into the European family when the time comes.