Excuse me for beginning this blog by giving myself a pat on the back: today I read a column in a Turkish newspaper, didn’t give up halfway, didn’t have to look up too many words in the dictionary and understood it completely. My Turkish is getting somewhere!
The column I was reading was by Elif Şafak, one of Turkey’s best known and most important writers. What stunned me was finding out that this first column of hers that I had tried to read without any help actually turned out to be her last for Zaman. She has been writing for the newspaper for quite some time, and endured quite a lot of criticism. Not so much for what she wrote, but for the fact that she wrote for Zaman at all. It’s considered a very religious newspaper, published by ‘Fethullahci’s’, followers of much disputed Muslim preacher Fethullah Gülen. In her last columns she writes she has always found these criticisms very prejudiced, and I can only agree with that. In Turkey people have a very strong tendency to always stay in their own ‘camp’ and be very narrow-minded about it. Elif Şafak is anything but narrow-minded, so in a way it suited her to just go beyond the prejudice and write for Zaman. But now, she says, she needs a different audience for her columns. She needs it as a writer, to ‘sail to far away waters’. I wonder what newspaper she will pop up in. If she really wants to sail far away from Zaman, I recommend Cumhuriyet. Would she consider that? Maybe she would. But: would Cumhuriyet be brave enough to hire her?