This is the third and final instalment of my blog posts about Orhan Pamuk’s 2021 novel, The Nights of Plague. Part I is here, and Part II is here.
Non-Fiction
Orhan Pamuk is an excellent non-fiction writer. He does his homework, writes in a light hearted way, sprinkling his prose with fun gossip and pushes the buttons of the reader to get her agitated.
In Nights of Plague he discusses the last days of the empire with some focus on the events that made Sultan Abdulhamid the paranoid man he is, how the princes lived in the palace (in their golden cages), the last harem, stories of progressive princes and sultans that created the foundations of the secular republic, the story of the Dodecanese islands, and the exile of the house of Osman.
The first and the last 100 pages of the book teaches the non-Turkish reader Turkish history from 1890 to 1920. But I also think part of his audience is the Turkish reader who is a victim of the our ever evolving education system. As we say in Turkish, Pamuk loves to stick a pole into the revolving wheel.
We also get a good dose of Pamuk’s favourite issue of Ottoman reforms. The reforms are initiated with demands from the intelligentsia and are later supported by the Europeans mostly to protect and foster their trade interests or interests of those they thought they were protectors of. According to Pamuk, the Sultan saw that his reforms are helping the non-Muslim minorities and not the Turks. So as progress gets stifled and life gets tough, the minorities begin to emigrate to the West, which is a solution since governing them is pain with all the external pressure. It’s like the famous joke by Emrullah Efendi the minister of education of the time who said being the minister would’ve been so much easier if the schools did not exist.
The happiness over the emigration of the minorities in Minger Island reminds me of the current situation in Turkey. Since 2011, we are seeing the biggest exodus of the educated and liberal classes – because they can. The politicians do not seem to mind this wallet and brain drain. It makes governing the remainders so much easier.
Political Islam
Pamuk shows us how Sultan Abdulhamid II invents political islam as a reaction to nationalism of his mosaic of subjects: how he has no choice but to promote religion even though he still has his tipple of cognac every evening and how he has no other chance but to oppress his people to keep his country intact.
Similarly the Governor Sami Pasha of Minger Island thinks the islamists have a fear of God which makes them more honest, obedient and law abiding. Pamuk also shows the shockingly nice side of one of the sheiks on the island. Shiekh Hamdullah gets support from the Governor because his influence increases the percentage of Muslims on the island.
There is an excellent Tolstoyan chapter of a sermon given by the Shiekh after a Friday prayer. He’s supposed to persuade the Muslims that the lockdowns are necessary, but as he speaks, he changes his mind and ends up talking about the orientalist idea of submission to God and fate. But Pamuk is emollient, he claims these religious leaders constantly get into trouble with the authorities because they are proud and they want to appear strong, not because they are a nuisance. “They have no faults except their faith.”
Conclusion
Pamuk being Pamuk, he also has more worldly issues. He talks about lockdowns and how they make people feel guilty either way. One feels guilty to leave his friends and get out of the island, but one also feels guilty for staying put and being isolated from the rest of the world waiting for death hands tied.
In his interviews about his research he mentions Camus (The Plague), Daniel Defoe (Journal of the Plague Year) and Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed). He’s more interested in Dafoe and Manzoni because they write about the political implications of a plague, things like forced quarantines and the people making these decisions, Camus on the other hand cares about how the plague is an allegory to the Nazis.
In Nights of Plague, there are references to Hobbes’ Leviathan too, both on the front cover (the castle that looks like the one in the frontispiece of the 1651 print of Leviathan) and the jailed Greek nationalist journalist who reads it in the dungeon.
Perhaps Pamuk also read this article in the New Statesman which talks about Hobbes and how he is vindicated by some whenever there’s a crisis in the world. People need a strongman to tell them what to do – in order to avoid a civil war. But past experience has shown time and again that a totalitarian leader (or Facebook) cause polarisation and politics becomes destructive.
Pamuk’s little island uses nationalism to bring the people together, coercing those who refuse to believe the BS perpetuated by those in power and ends up being a jail – which is exactly what the inhabitants abhor during the nights of plague. After the Island gets over the plague and opens the borders, the islanders get perpetual isolation from the modern world, which again looks like an allegory to modern day Turkey.
