In Europe

Still, Atatürk was himself the product of that very same empire, an empire that was in reality less feeble than was often supposed. Like France, for example, Turkey had started a programme of modernisation as early as the mid-nineteenth century. All manner of reforms later ascribed to Atatürk actually began under the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II: the reform of the educational system, the modernisation of the army, the reorganisation of the legislative system and government finances, the pushing back of the influence of the Muslim elite, the westernisation of clothing, the building of roads and railways.
    It was under Abdülhamid that a direct overland connection was established with Western Europe: the first Orient Express steamed into the city on 12 August, 1888. The Pera Palas became the outpost for the Western elite. During those same years, eighteen new technical schools were established, as well as a university and a school of medicine. Atatürk's own youth is a shining example of the possibilities offered by modernised Ottoman education around 1900.
    Atatürk's separation of church and state – Islam was to be practised only as a private faith, without legal or political influence – was also, in fact, an enactment of existing opinion. In the nineteenth century in particular, many Islamic thinkers became inspired by the modernisation of the West. They arrived at standpoints, based on the Koran, that were in many ways comparable to modern Western thought. They entertained a great many ideas about intellectual freedom, about the role of the individual and about the separation of church and state.
    Alongside all this there is also Atatürk the despot, and he too, more than sixty years after his death, exerts at least equal influence on Turkish society. The country's secular character, so hated by the religious and the fundamentalist, was jealously guarded by the army. In 1961 the military did not bat an eyelid when it hanged the democratically elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, for ‘corruption’ and for ‘conspiring with the Islamic parties’. During a military coup in 1980, thousands of opponents were detained without due process. As late as 1998, the generals, acting‘in the name of Atatürk’, brusquely shoved aside the first democratically elected Islamic government. The Turks even have their own jargon for this: the ‘deep state’ as opposed to the ‘official-but-superficial state’, a ‘soft coup’, ‘pasha coups’ or ‘media coups’.
    It is 7 p.m. on Friday, rush hour for the ferries. People come pouring up the gangplanks carrying bags, toolboxes, baskets full of chickens, fishing gear, bicycles, even tables and chairs. Vendors of roasted ears of corn, sunflower seeds, peeled cucumbers and fresh fish jostle each other on the quayside. There are people hawking dancing puppets, breathtakingly pink children's petticoats, light-blue plastic birds with purple feathers. A blind man plays the violin, his friend sings a sorrowful song into a badly distorting microphone.
    The toy vendors have two new dolls: an electric blonde doll that rocks a baby, and a green commando that crawls along with his rifle, producing regular flashes of light and deadly sounds. A little further along a man is sitting beside old bathroom scales: for five cents you can weigh yourself. The little fishing boats moored along the quay bob on the waves, the crew are roasting fish on grills set up in the middle of the deck, hopping like acrobats with every wave that washes in. The beggars are out in full force. Within a minute I am accosted by an old man, a woman with one leg and a pitiful young girl with a baby. The fishmongers shout, the electronic dolls quack and rattle, the ships’ horns blast, the blind man sings through it all: this is the quay by the bridge across the Golden Horn at 7 p.m. on a Friday.
    The ferry to Büyükada, one of the islands in the Sea of Marmara, is a rusty tub full of people excited to be escaping the city, even if only for a bit. I start talking to a young student. She tells me the same stories about newcomers that one hears often in Amsterdam, only these immigrants are from her own country. She is frightened by the advancing countryside, she sees tens of thousands of young people moving to the city each year, full of illusions, only to become hopelessly bogged down after a time, without work, without a family. Fundamentalist groups are popping up all over. ‘Istanbul is losing