Ten days in Turkey - Part 10

Time to go home

Time to say goodbye to this lovely city. We spent the morning having a lazy breakfast, soaking the last views of Sultanahmet Camii from our hotel’s terrace.

As I reflect back on this trip, it could not have turned out any better. We had cherished this trip for a long time. Over almost two decades my interaction with Turkish students who trained with me in Delhi has been a pleasant one. We have become friends for life. Their warmth is genuine and that comes from the warmth you feel everywhere in this beautiful country. Our hosts, their extended families (the network of cousins), the staff at Ararat Hotel, the masseurs at the hamam, the shopkeepers at the Bazaar, the Turkish professor and his students at the conference, were all warm and interesting in many ways. The sights notwithstanding, it is they who made this trip memorable.

The writer Elif Shafak, whose novel The Bastard of Istanbul is both widely read and despised for insulting Turkishness, writes – “Like a pendulum, Istanbul swings obstinately between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, memory and amnesia — between a weighty past we can never fully shed, much as we like to try, and a hopeful future we can only run after but never quite grab hold of. Istanbul is the stepchild of the modern, secular Turkish Republic. But it still embodies remnants of a multicultural imperial legacy that don't quite match the founding myths of a supposedly homogeneous nation-state”.

There is so much common between Turks and Indians in their approach to life, their hospitality and the huzun they feel by not being in control of things. The muslims of India have historical attachments to Turkey with the Khilafat movement and its leaders being an integral part of our own struggle for independence. It was especially memorable for me as a muslim to see important religious relics at the Topkapi Palace, which one only has only read about. Being a muslim capital for over 700 years and never to have been conquered by the army of a different faith, the Islamic monuments and treasures are especially well preserved here. This is unlike Delhi, which was probably richer than Istanbul at the peak of the Mughal Empire, but was subsequently plundered by the British rulers.

Turkey, I hope you stay that way, even when you are part of the European Community. You aspire to be European, but you are more Asian in your approach to life, your values, your hospitality and your huzun.

Thank you Turkey. Thank you Bursa, Konya, Istanbul and all the lovely people we met in the last ten days. I hope to be back another day. Inshallah.