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The Bastard of Istanbul, Ms. Shafaks novel, was published in Turkish and has sold 60,000 copies, a best seller
in Turkey. It is to be published in English in January. Its plot centers on two families with a common past: Turkish
Muslims living in Istanbul and Armenian-Americans in San Francisco.
Among the excerpts opposed by the lawyers group is a passage in which a man of Armenian descent worries
about which version of history his niece will accept as she is raised by her Turkish stepfather. He wonders aloud if
she will state, I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives to the hands of the Turkish
butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk
named Mustapha!
Turkey says that the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians were not the result of genocide, but rather of a
war in which many Turks also were killed as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.
As a writer, Ms. Shafak has shown a penchant for provocative topics.
Her previous novels have touched on suicide, the intersection of Islamic and Jewish mysticism, and even love
between a Sufi dervish hermaphrodite and a Greek man. She has angered critics in the past by, in their view,
eschewing Turkishness by writing in English and by using what Turks today call old words from the Ottoman
vocabulary that preceded the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the Turkish republic in 1923.
Ms. Shafak also took part in a controversial conference in Istanbul last year on the Armenian question (the first
such conference in Turkey, and one that Mr. Kerincsiz and his group, the Unity of Jurists, tried to prevent).
So while Europe struggles to define the idea of Europe and who is European, Turkey is in the midst of its own
debate about what defines Turkishness and whether Turks even want to be considered European. There is a
clash of opinion in Turkey, Ms. Shafak said. On the one hand are the people who are very much pro-E.U.,
sometimes for economic reasons, sometimes for political reasons. On the other hand, she said, are factions,
including nationalists, who fear that Turkish autonomy will be weakened by membership in the union.
Fear is a powerful element, Ms. Shafak said. We were taught ever since we were little kids that Turkey is a
country surrounded by water on three sides and enemies on all sides and that you can never trust outsiders.
The charges of insulting Turkishness seem particularly galling to Ms. Shafak, whose mother was a Turkish
diplomat and whose husband, Eyup Can, is the editor of Referans, a respected Turkish daily business newspaper.
I was thinking of going back to the States to give birth, but because of the trial I will stay here, Ms. Shafak said.
And I am happy to be giving birth in Istanbul. This city is very dear to me, even though it suffers from a sort of
collective amnesia.