Turkish Playwright, Vakit, and AKP Mayor Get Press in Middle America

PHOTO from The Plain Dealer

Controversal Turkish playwright Ozen Yula is the subject of an article this week in The Cleveland Plain Dealer by Tony Brown, which documents harsh criticism Yula and his colleagues received from the Islamic conservative newspaper Vakit. Yula is the writer of "Yala Ama Yutma" ("Lick, But Don't Swallow"), a play that has dawn scorn from some conservatives alleging it to be pornographic.

Criticisms from the Islamist newspaper Vakit have proved the most worrisome for Yula, which according to The Plain Dealer, accused the play of "smearing dirt on human angels." I cannot find the article on Vakit's website, and so am assuming the article in question was removed from the site as a result of the kinds of violent responses it elicited. Radikal features a few of the violent comments (in Turkish), including open-ended questions as to what kind of punishment should be wielded, where it should take place, and who should be assigned to do it. Additionally, the AKP mayor of Beyoglu, Ahmet Misbah Demircan, shut down the play, though the mayor's office has since allowed to open the production; however, as a result of the Vakit criticism, the play has been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. Demircan cited safety concerns, including the theatre's did not have a fire escape. As The Plain Dealer points out, this might well have been a reference to the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, where reactionaries burned alive 37 people, mostly Alevis. From The Plain Dealer:

Ozen Yula, a leading Turkish playwright who is spending most of 2010 working and teaching in Cleveland, got an unwelcome invitation earlier this month.

It was an invitation to join a list of people who wound up dead, hunted or silenced after being condemned in Vakit, Istanbul's most widely followed Islamic-fundamentalist newspaper.

Yula earned that distinction as the author of a comedy that was scheduled to open Monday at the Kumbaraci50 theater in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, one of the world's largest cities.

In the play, an angel gets sent back to Earth to do good works in the body of a pornographic movie actress.

Or maybe the play is about a porn star who dreams she's an angel. Like many serious comedies, it's ambiguous.

But ambiguity is not something Islamic fundamentalists tend to appreciate. Which makes life in Turkey -- already complicated -- even more so. Founded in 1923, Turkey is struggling to find its identity as a secular, Western-style democracy with a centuries-long history as part of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

On Feb. 2, Vakit (Turkish for "Time") condemned Yula and his play -- provocatively titled "Lick but Don't Swallow" -- for "smearing human dirt on angels," according to one translation of the newspaper's online Turkish text.

That kind of accusation of blasphemy can get a person killed, or at least hunted, as a similar condemnation did in 1989 for Indian novelist Salman Rushdie.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a "fatwa" -- or Islamic ruling -- calling for Rushdie's death after the publication of "The Satanic Verses," in which a film star becomes the archangel Gabriel, who then describes Islam's founder Muhammad as balding, bespectacled and suffering from dandruff.

After years of running and hiding, Rushdie still receives what he has been quoted as calling a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on Feb. 14 to remind him his life is still in danger, though Rushdie now dismisses the threat.

Dutch movie director Theodoor van Gogh was not so lucky; he was assassinated by a fundamentalist for his portrayal of the treatment of women in Islam in the film "Submission."

Likewise, the attack on Yula's play is being seen by secularists as a deliberate attempt to whip up militant furor over the play and anybody connected with it. That includes actress Ayca Damgaci, famous for writing and performing in the autobiographical film "My Marlon and Brando," about her dangerous romance with a Kurd, a member of a minority ethnic group in eastern Turkey.

Deliberate or not, the Vakit story has touched off a sensation.

The mayor of Beyoglu, a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party -- which favors restoring some Islamic practices but claims not to be fundamentalist -- shut down the venue where the play was supposed to premiere Monday.

The mayor, Ahmet Misbah Demircan, has allowed the theater to reopen, but a threat of violence lingers, and members of the creative team are so rattled that the play is not likely to be seen in Istanbul until March, if at all.

Surely this is not the kind of comparison that the government of Turkey is keen to see printed in a newspaper from Middle America, and it certainly goes against the grain of the carefully crafted image of "moderate Islam" the AKP has promoted in the West. The paper goes onto question Prime Minister Erdogan's contention that the AKP is "is not a political party with a religious axis." Here, it is important to note that the AKP and Vakit are two very different forces in Turkish society, and that the latter is much harder-edged and associated with Islamist movements and parties far to the right o the AKP. Yet, Demircan's decision and reference to Madimak brings the AKP into The Plain Dealer's story. Ozen is living in Cleveland for the year.