12:57 am, Istanbul time

It's been so hot and sticky in Istanbul lately that I've taken to spending the entire day indoors, chilling in front of my brand-new 3-speed Cendix fan. In the evenings, however, I go out, walking all over the city and working up a ferocious, stinky sweat. Sometimes I walk up the Bosphorus, toward Emirgan and beyond, and other times into Taksim. Last night I walked to my old neighborhood, Muradiye—the little mahalle that could, situated over a couple of sidestreets stretching down between Tesvikiye and Besiktas.

I usually try to hit my old neighborhood at least once during the course of a visit to Istanbul. I spent six of the seven years I lived here in the 90s living in three apartments located within a few blocks of one another, spending four years by myself in the last of these places. That was the first apartment I'd ever lived in completely on my own, from 1994 up until I returned to the US in 1999.

It's weird standing outside that place, looking up at the fourth-floor balcony that I used to step out onto from my living room and bedroom—I used to think it was so cool that I could pass from one room to the other this way. I remember how young and stupid I was, then realize that some things haven't necessarily changed all that much. Chasing ghosts from the 90s on the streets of Muradiye, I realize that, while I'm a bit of a zombie myself, it's still good to have made it out of that 'hood.

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Anyway, here's the N & P:


Was it something I leaked? Former Pakistani army chief of staff disses Hillary, calls her "emotionally disturbed"....

Meanwhile, July was the deadliest month ever for US forces in Afghanistan.

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Bulgarian Muslims rally for the right to elect their own mufti. This was apparently a right they enjoyed until earlier this year.

Does anybody know, by the way, if Muftis in Bulgaria hold any sort of administrative power? I'm asking because the issue of electing Muftis, rather than having them appointed by the government, was a continuous bone of contention among Muslims in the Volga-Ural region of the Russian empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But the position of the ulema was not simply religious in Russia, but also administrative, relating to issues such as Muslim education in the region. 

Anyway, if anyone has any info on this topic, please drop me a line.

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Wedge issue, 2010: NY Times article on (mainly) Republican opposition to proposals to construct a large mosque (including other facilities as well, like a gym and a swimming pool) in NYC. The reason? Too close to 9/11 site.

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To each his own: 148 parties —and counting—registered for Kyrgyz elections due to take place in October.

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When genocide means never having to say you're sorry: initiative launched in Serbia for Milosevic memorial park.

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There's a little bit of chatter in the Eurasia-related press regarding potential fallout stemming from the recent ruling by the international court of justice, the highest court of the United Nations, that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was legal. RFE has a rather silly piece on how the (moribund) Tatar nationalist movement has been 'encouraged' by the ruling. A somewhat more serious article appears courtesy of the Jamestown spooks regarding hopes for recognition by leaders in Nagorno-Karabakh. 

This ruling, and the independence of Kosovo (so far recognized by only 69 countries worldwide) could end up having serious repercussions in a number of places. Indeed, as I reported when I was in Russia during the 2008 S. Ossetia crisis, talking heads appearing on government-run TV in Russia routinely described Russia's recognition of S. Ossetian and Abkhaz independence in reference to American and European recognition of Kosovo earlier in the year.

Clearly, a number of countries are uncomfortable with the way in which Kosovo became independent. In 2008, Serbia proposed a resolution in the UN declaring that Kosovo's declaration was against international law—the only six countries to vote against this were Albania, the US, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau.

While the Russian government had always opposed the efforts of republics in the former Yugoslavia to be recognized as independent, the Russian government's embrace of this sort of unilateral independence logic with regard to Abkhazia and S. Ossetia is interesting, since Russia itself is composed of 83 federal units, including 21 republics.

Seems like a dangerous path to go down.

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Enbridge Energy, the company responsible for the recent spill of over one million gallons of oil into rivers in W. Michigan, was warned repeatedly by the Obama administration to take care of problems relating to corroding pipelines.

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"They never care whether we are Afghans or animals." Afghans protest vehicular homicides of civilians by mercenary contractors operating on behalf of US government.

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Not anymore: Yigal Schleifer outs Istanbul's best-kept culinary secrets.

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Friday, July 30, 2010

There are conflicting accounts re the big oil spill in West Michigan. The company responsible for the leak, Enbridge Energy Bastards, claims that the flow of oil has been stopped at a dam that has been constructed at the mouth of Morrow Lake.

This claim, however, is contradicted by:

a) Reports by local residents living on Morrow Lake.

b) Reporters from the Detroit Free Press, who witnessed oil on top of Morrow Lake.

c) Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and State Police Captain Thomas Sands, who did a fly-over in a helicopter above the lake and reported seeing a sheen of oil on top of it.

It would be nice to believe Enbridge, but the problem is that the Enbridge Energy Bastards don't have a lot of credibility at this point. This is because:

a) The company has been found guilty of dozens of regulatory violations in the past decade, including a warning sent this past January which stated that the company may have violated safety codes regarding the way it monitored corrosion in pipelines of the sort that sprang a leak earlier this week.

b) Enbridge did not report the spill until Monday, even though numerous local residents, smelling gas fumes, contacted local fire authorities on Sunday evening. Firefighters went out to the source of the smell on Sunday night and found an Enbridge employee, who told them that the smell was probably coming from a nearby oil facility. Patrick Daniel, the CEO of Enbridge, then claimed the company had reported the leak Monday morning, when in fact records showed that they waited until Monday afternoon to do so.

c) Enbridge has reported that "only" 800,000 gallons had leaked into Michigan's waterways, when in fact the actual number appears to be above one million. Either way, it's the largest oil spill in the history of the midwest.

Map of the spill site lifted from the Detroit Free Press. Click here for larger version.

Morrow Lake is just to the east of Kalamazoo. Not the names of various paper plants written in green on this map. This is because the site of the spill is already an EPA superfund cleanup location.

On the other hand, the EPA has supported Enbridge's claims that no sheen has appeared on Morrow Lake, which US Representative Fred Upton, a Republican from St. Joseph, has cited in arguing that there's "no truth" to reports that oil had reached the lake.

“They seem to be getting everything,” Upton said. “The system seems to be working at the moment.”

Oh Great! I guess we all must have been overreacting, then. Back to sleep! 

Oil containment booms placed on Morrow Lake in hopes that the oil spill doesn't continue to travel westwards into Lake Michigan. More photos from the spill can be found here.

It good to hear the EPA is optimistic, but can we trust their judgment? After Katrina, after FEMA, after the bridge collapse in Minnesota, after the economic crisis and the SEC, after Deepwater Horizon,  it's become so clear that not only is the infrastructure (physical, economic, energy, you name it) of the United States in pathetic shape, but also that the agencies responsible for monitoring this infrastructure have been totally gutted to the point of not being able to do their jobs properly. Who knows what kind of manpower, let alone competence, is left within them?

I, for one, am glad that Jennifer Granholm is keeping the heat on the EPA and Enbridge, complaining time and time again that their clean-up efforts are "wholly inadequate" and "anemic."

“I’m very angered,” Granholm said in a teleconference with reporters. “We need for the responsible party (Enbridge Inc.) and the EPA to step up. The situation is very serious.”

Good for her, and shame on those who criticize her for being "hysterical" in her efforts to keep pressure on those who are responsible cleaning up this disaster. 

Right now, complacency from public officials, Enbridge Bastards, and EPA folks is the absolute last thing Michigan needs, especially when they still aren't even sure that the leak has been stopped. Here's an excerpt from a story posted just a few hours ago in the Detroit Free Press.

Yet although Enbridge officials say a temporary dike has stopped oil from flowing into streams, a flight over the spill area by Free Press reporters shows continued problems, including an oily sheen flowing in colorful ribbons down much of the Kalamazoo River through Battle Creek and beyond. Many of the marshy shoreline areas were marked by oily tar deposits easily visible from 1,000 feet up.

Workers could be seen maneuvering booms and absorbent materials in the river, but the oil appeared to continue almost unabated in many areas. Tanker trucks parked on bridges continued to suck out oil with hoses. In other spots, crews in airboats worked booms in the river and marshes.

At the apparent leak source, a crew used earth-moving equipment to excavate a hole in the ground surrounded by orange fencing. Nearby, oil pooled in large quantities.

While cleanup crews worked the river, some oily stretches, hundreds of yards long, were left untended. In one, oily water flowed over an apparently saturated piece of absorbent material.

West of Battle Creek, the oil sheen became less visible Thursday as the river reached Morrow Lake. Crews with booms could be seen on both the approach into the lake and at the west end of the lake, where booms were positioned in a pyramid formation.

No other cleanup activities or oil were visible west of the dam.

It's ridiculous to say that Granholm went "overboard" in her response while acknowledging that tarballs could end up on Lake Michigan beaches. Even if Granholm is wrong and we end up being too vigilant in our response to this mess, is that really such a big problem? Is that really what our main concern should be right now? 

I mean really, we sure wouldn't want to spend a penny more than absolutely necessary on this fight. After all, as broadcaster-turned-pundit Frank "hysterical" Beckmann points out, Enbridge has "more than 200" people working on the cleanup! I suppose Beckmann thinks we should be grateful to Enbridge for this herculean effort. Maybe Enbridge could cut costs even further by using prison labor for the clean-up, like BP did. 

Overboard? Really? Hysterical? Good grief! When did we earn the right to be so complacent? What kind of arrogance could lead people to believe that, right on the heels of the catastrophe in the Gulf, let alone a series of other self-made disasters both domestic and international, that erring on the side of caution could not be the wisest, most sober-minded approach to follow? What right do we have to assume that, when it comes to limiting an oil corporation's damage to an already long-suffering state, that going overboard is not the very least we should be doing? Since when did the absolute minimum become our maximum?

I know, I know—this is the sort of story that normally doesn't get talked about on this blog, and to be honest I wouldn't be writing so much if it weren't for the fact that my roots are in West Michigan. But for crying out loud, criticism of Granholm's energetic response to this problem reflects precisely the sort of smug stupidity that has been getting Americans into trouble for years.

And that, I'm afraid, is a problem whose consequences are definitely not limited to West Michigan.

2:49 pm, Istanbul time

Soul-crushing: oil spill in Kalamazoo River perhaps even higher than the 800,000 gallons  reported by Enbridge Energy Bastards. Enbridge Energy Bastards reportedly were notified twice this year of potential problems relating to old pipe corrosion and inadequate systems for monitoring these problems. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm says there's a real risk of the oil flowing into Lake Michigan.

What's it going to take, people? How long are we going to allow ourselves to be treated this way?


Bastards...
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A court in the far east of Russia has banned YouTube, joining the ranks of Iran and...Turkey.

I've written elsewhere on how the Erdogan government seems to be taking Russia as a model with respect to its dealings with hostile press attention, so I guess it's only appropriate that courts in Russia would begin to follow a Turkish example.

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Four children between the ages of 6 and 12 arrested, taken into custody for throwing rocks at soldiers in SE Turkey.

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Smooth: Georgian president and McCain protege Saakashvili sez:  "Are we negroes or what? Why are we acting like savages?"

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Agreement on new pipeline between Iran and Turkey. I guess this is another example of "neo-Ottomanism," or...wait, Iran wasn't in the Ottoman Empire, so this must be part of Turkey's "turning towards the east"....or something. 

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New journal on Turkey and Eurasia on my blogroll. Like some of the links that are already on the blogroll (such as Zaman and World Bulletin), the Washington Review of Turkish and Eurasian Affairs appears to be connected somehow with the Gulen crowd (just a guess, judging from the content and the background of the people involved). But frankly, there's a lot of stuff on the blogroll (like the Jamestown spooks) that is well-funded and very pointed, but still worth following, so up it goes. Just keep this stuff in mind, dear reader. 

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Russia is selling $300 million worth of missiles to Azerbaijan. The game between Russia, the US, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Turkey continues, with special guest appearances by Georgia.

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Political window dressing: Continued funding for Afghanistan quagmire passes overwhelmingly in US house, though with less support from Democrats than before. Yippee.

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1:18 pm, Istanbul time
[updated, 7/31]

I got back to Istanbul a couple of days ago after a great week in Spain. Last Monday I had left Istanbul for Barcelona to attend the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, where I gave a talk on Yusuf Akcura and Ahmet Agaoglu, two icons of "pan-Turkism" from the early twentieth century whom I talked about less in the context of intellectual history (where they're normally placed) and more in the context of the larger community of Muslims traveling between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The talk was based in part on an article I published a few years back.  

After I gave my talk last Thursday afternoon, I headed down to Andalusia, a region of southern Spain that was once home to a large Islamic civilization, first as part of the Ummayad caliphate from the eighth century onwards, then in the form of a series of local rulers until 1492. By the late sixteenth century, almost all of the Muslims in the region had been expelled from Spain.

 
Andalusia is red hot

For four days I traveled in Granada and Cordoba, two of the most important cities in Islamic Andalusia, and one thing that struck me was the very little sense of self-criticism or even reflection surrounding the presentation of the region's Islamic history. The mosques and palaces (such as Alhambra) that were built by the region's former Muslim populations constitute the main tourist attractions of Andalusia, but—with the exception of a local center of Islamic culture—there was very little discussion anywhere which related to the ultimate fate of Islamic civilization in the region.

At the "Cathedral of Cordoba," the site of a cathedral that was built on the grounds of what was an enormous mosque, the English-language pamphlet that is distributed to tourists says the following:

Beneath every cathedral is always a bed of hidden cathedrals. In the case of Cordoba, tradition traces back to its Visigoth origins. This fact is confirmed by archeological excavations, whose remains can be found at the Museum of San Vincente and in the pits where the remains of mosaics from the ancient Christian temple can be observed on site. It is a historical fact that the basilica of San Vicente was expropriated and destroyed in order to build what would later be the Mosque, a reality that questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Cordoba of the moment. [emphasis added]

Without question, the use of archaeology as a weapon in political battles (we were here first!) is nothing new, and hardly limited to Spain. But what interested me most was the reference to Islamic "tolerance," an issue that comes up a lot in the study of the Ottoman Empire.

For decades, the study of Ottoman history was dominated by nationalist historiography which emphasized the "Turkish yoke" which, it was alleged, was unrelentingly hostile to the ambitions of "national" communities such as the Balkan populations, Arabs, and other non-Turks of the empire. Indeed, even in the official historiography of the Republic of Turkey there was often considerable hostility to the Ottoman Empire, which was portrayed as likewise stifling the "emergence" of a modern Turkish identity and state. 

More recently, however, simplistic narratives focusing only on conflict have been replaced by many more nuanced approaches which look instead at how people of differing ethnic and religious groups got along for generations. It is often argued—convincingly, in my opinion—that the Ottoman Empire could not possibly have lasted as long as it did ruling simply through force and oppression. Countless studies have been produced which look at the various ways in which the Ottoman state sought to accommodate difference, with important distinctions drawn between pre-modern approaches to managing ethnic and religious difference and the modern, yet often even bloodier, approaches employed in nation-states.

But at the same time, it seems to me that in our eagerness to explore the connecting threads of community, conflict can often get written out of the historiography. In Turkey today, this view of the Ottoman Empire as a "tolerant empire" has, in some cases, turned into a rather hackneyed idealization of Ottoman rule. 

In the historiography of other empires, too, the idea that an empire's longevity must somehow be linked to the idea of tolerance is also gaining ground. This is something that I found particularly noticeable in Robert Crews' recent book For Prophet and Tsar (which I reviewed here), where not only is the theme of conflict left largely to the margins, but also it is argued that Muslims in Russia viewed the state as a sort of protector of Islamic institutions.

I think it's important to look beyond conflict, and especially to pay attention to what went right in the history of inter-community relations, rather than always focusing on what went wrong. But ignoring conflict can also be intellectually corrupting. During an era in which the US government launched an imperial campaign to save Muslims from themselves, why is it that arguably the most influential study of Muslim administration in Russia to appear in the last decade was one which emphasized the theme of Muslims happily embracing Russian rule? Is this nothing more than a coincidence, or is there a market, a pre-sentiment for this type of argument that books like Prophet and Tsar help to reinforce?

The problem with being critical of the tolerance narrative is that, more often than not, you win unwanted allies like the authors of the Cordoba manual or bigoted ignoramuses like Newt Gingrich, whose despicable and incoherent anti-Islamic screed was published in the Washington Post the other day. Gingrinch was arguing against the building, near the site of the World Trade Center, of a Muslim religious complex called Cordoba House (see their website here), which would include a mosque as well as other facilities (such as a library and a swimming pool).

"Tolerance" is being transformed into an increasingly loaded term. In the Turkish context, the term "tolerance" often appears (especially in the writings of Fethullah Gulen and his supporters) as a codeword for a certain (idealized) conception of Islamic administration. In the historical context, this conception of Islamic administration often dovetails with the idealized view of the Ottoman Empire that some historians in Turkey are pushing. And this view of the Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, is being articulated in the context of a rehabilitation of empires—both Islamic and otherwise—that has been taking place in the historical literature more generally, often in reaction to an earlier generation of scholarship emphasizing (indeed, celebrating) "national awakening" in opposition to imperial rule.

In many ways, pre-modern systems of managing ethnic and religious difference—in both Islamic and non-Islamic empires—can provide examples that we can learn from today. But conflict occurred in all of the empires—not constantly, not without cooperation and, indeed, not without something that we could call 'tolerance'—but conflict nevertheless occurred. I think that both in our discussions of empire and our discussions of Islam, what's most important with respect to the issue of 'tolerance' is to get beyond idealizations or eye-catching revisionism and instead look more closely at both the push and the pull of managing difference, a process that generally involved both conflict and compromise.