What Happened to Us?
Published by Tel Aviv Review of Books
n the fall of 2017, I moved to the United States to start a PhD in History and Middle Eastern studies. I loved my department and had many friends, but my closest friendship was with a Turkish student. My bond with Eylul (let’s call her that) was based on our common allegiance to the traditions of the socialist left in our region. I had grown up in Iran and she in Turkey; the former the most stringent theocracy in the world, the latter the most constitutionally secularist regime in the region. Despite this obvious divergence, the histories of our respective nations were intertwined. Iran’s 1979 revolution had led to an oppressive Islamist regime that murderously suppressed the left and curtailed liberties. The 1980 coup in Turkey was a strong blow to the left and helped cement the rise of the unholy alliance that has come to rule Turkey ever since: the pact between Islamist conservatism and free-market capitalism best represented by Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.