Next month my first book (now approaching the 21st anniversary of its original appearance in English) finally sees its publication in the land that is its subject. A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat (London, Picador) becomes, simply, Fes (Istanbul, Koton Yayincilik). Which, given the situation in Turkey right now, could make for an interesting landing.
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The book (the boy on the cover, incidentally, is my Turkish editor’s grandfather) is a callow and sometimes flippant, but sincerely affectionate, attempt to make sense of my impressions of a country in the course of journeys made there back in 1993. It is a narrative framed, as its name suggests, in the curious history of the national headgear, and tells how a radical regime sought some 70 years before my journeyings to reengineer attitudes by replacing the tenacious turban and the commonplace fez (Ottoman, establishment, even reactionary and Islamic) with the various western hats – homburg, flat cap, panama, fedora, even top hat – which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his ruling clique regarded as progressive and secular. Hats would do their bit, then, to ease Turkey’s transition from Ottoman theocracy into a liberal, western-style democracy.
Or would they.
I am drawn to Turkey for any number of reasons, but decidedly because here was a country which dared to dream up something called the Hat Laws (still on the statute books but rarely enforced) which it passed in November 1925. One delightful consequence was a surreal rush to acquire the new hats, along with an attendant rash of newspaper articles on how best to wear them, and the ceremonial disposal of old fezes into the Bosphorus or their conversion into felt slippers for the destitute. For thıs same reason I love Turkey’s ubiquitous Atatürk statues, a relic manifestation of this historical episode, and I especially admire the top hats in which the great leader is often presented.
But there was another consequence of the Hat Laws; a wave of civil disobedience in which outraged social conservatives took to wearing clandestine fezes beneath infidel impositions (which they especially reviled for rims which interfered in the act of Islamic abasement). Officials who caught such reactionaries in the act obliged them to remove their hidden fezes and stamp them into the dust. I am simultaneously appalled that the consequences of persisting in wearing a fez could have extended to sometimes severe persecution. I have to remind myself that 1925 marked a period of extreme revolutionary change in Turkey, and that in a society set on fast forward, severe sanction for choosing the wrong hat might somehow have seemed rational.
I mention all this because I am interested, even apprehensive, to know what Turks will make of the book in their own language. For it’s a book whose subject would appear to cast me as a critic of the secularist tradition – at a time when the authoritarian and undemocratic behaviour of the socially conservative AK Party brings a deserved storm of criticism and protest down on its head. I will say only this; just as they should have let citizens choose their own hats in 1925, so they should let journalists and writers choose their own words, within the clearly articulated laws of libel, in 2016.
Enough. And mutlu okuma…