Teşvikiye

"My first trip to a mosque (...)
At Teşvikiye Mosque we found a crowd of twenty or thirty people - mostly owners of the small shops in the back streets or maids, cooks and janitors who worked for the rich families of Nişantaşı; as they gathered on the carpets, they looked less like a congregation of worshippers than a group of friends who had gathered to exchange notes. As they waited for the prayer time, they gossiped with each other in whispers. As I wandered amongst them during prayers, running off to the far corners of the mosque to play my games, none of them stopped to scold me; instead they smiled at me in the same sweet way most adults smiled at me when I was a young child. Religion may have been the province of the poor, but now I saw that - contrary to the caricatures in newspapers and my republican household - religious people were harmless.

Nevertheless I was givem to understand by the high-handed ridicule directed at them in the Pamuk Apartments that their good-hearted purity carried a price: it was making the dreams of a modern, prosperous, Westernised Turkey more difficult to achieve. As Westernised, positivist property-owners, we had the right to govern over these semi-illiterates, and we had an interest in preventing their getting too attached to their superstitions - not just because it suited us privately but because our country's future depended on it.

(...)

If Istanbul's Westernised bourgeoisie gave support to the military interventions of the past forty years, never strenuosly objecting to military interference in politics, it was not because ir feared a leftist uprising (the Turkish left in this country has never been strong enough to achieve such a feat); rather, the elite's tolerance of the military was rooted in the fear that, one day, the lower classes would combine forces with the new rich pouring in from the provinces to abolish the Westernised bourgeois way of life under the banner of religion."

(...)

I find the essence of religion to be guilt."
Pamuk em Istanbul.

neste caso, eu também, precisamente. em relação ao poder, um interessante jogo que jogam todas as sociedades entre os ricos - a religião - o poder - (os militares). e também como a esquerda, o inimigo público da guerra fria, foi substituído com naturalidade pelo islão. os inimigos públicos são tão reaiscomo artificiais.