By PHK
Hugh Pope’s Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World (Overlook, 2005/2006 paperback) is the one book I’ve read that covers the Turkic speaking world comprehensively seeking to explain its complexities as well as its strengths and weaknesses by a rendition of history, contemporary politics and culture as told through the author’s personal experiences.
Pope is a Turkish-speaking British journalist who has lived in Istanbul since 1987 and traveled extensively throughout a region that now extends into Western Europe and the U.S. and ends in China’s westernmost Xinjiang Province – although the chapters are not ordered geographically. They are also not structured chronologically. Instead, each chapter could almost stand alone.
Here is how Pope describes the less-than-at-first-glance-obvious organizational structure of his book. He writes that he divided Sons of the Conquerors into six sections based on his impressions of the “collective qualities of the Turkic peoples: their military vocation, their strong, quarrelling leaders; their shared history and neighbors; their pragmatic experience of the Muslim religion; their love-hate relationship with the West over issues like oil, corruption and human rights; and their conviction that the coming decades must bring better fortunes than the devastating experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries.”
And he states that his central premise is that the “Turkic peoples can no longer be treated as marginal players . . . (but that) they are becoming noteworthy peoples and prosperous states in their own right, and they are developing numerous new connections between each other.”
Sons of the Conquerors covers a wide expanse of territory that few westerners will ever experience in its entirety. This includes a visit to a pristine Turkish mosque in the Netherlands in which Pope portrays the intermingling of the Turkish and Dutch cultures as well as his hair-raising taxi ride across the Turkmenistan desert that ended with a just as hair-raising experience on a Caspian Sea ferry crossing to Azerbaijan.
Competing visions of Islam
In his section “Islam Allaturca,” I think Pope is at his most perceptive. This rings particularly true in his observations of the interrelationships between Islam and politics in the Turkic world.
“Turks,” he tells us, “have always had many competing visions of Islam” and today they range from those rooted in pre-Islamic beliefs including shamanism to westernized Islam and those “tinged with superstition and intolerance.” He even introduces us to a real live female red-fur-hatted shaman from Altay on page 268.
With respect to Muslims and politics in contemporary Turkey, Pope points out that “most Turkish Islamists rarely stray far from a national consensus that no longer wants Sharia Law” – and that the closer they are to that position – the better they do in elections. This includes current Tayyip Erdogan whom Pope interviewed shortly before Erdogan’s own election as prime minister of Turkey.
Pope also points out that during the early 2000s, “Turkey’s religious establishment quietly tried to lay the foundations of a broad-minded Turkish interpretation of Islam that could be distinguished from orthodox Sunni Arab and Shia Persian models.” There’s far more – but this is a short review and the entire section is well worth reading.
The life of a foreign correspondent
Often Pope’s position as a journalist gained him access to meetings, reporting trips and people. One such example was his inclusion in a bizarre visit to Turkmenistan with a group of Turkish journalists shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union. This included a stranger-than-life meeting with Turkmenbashy, its stranger-than-life leader, and others in the then "great leader’s" court. On Pope’s trip to Xinjiang, in contrast, he traveled alone and under cover as a motor-bike riding tourist for part of the journey. In Azerbaijan, we find him on a train riding from the collapsing front back to Baku during fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh just before the break-up of the Soviet Union.
In the end, what makes this book far more than a chronologically disjointed but fascinating travelogue to under-explored places is Pope’s intimate and largely sympathetic knowledge of his subjects – over 140 million people mostly Muslim in 20 different states - and his ability to help acquaint westerners with their diversity, history and different perspectives on life.
There is no question that Pope, a former Reuters correspondent and now Wall Street Journal bureau chief, is one of the English-speaking world’s foremost experts on Turkey. We need more like him – foreign correspondents who speak the language and spend years based in a single country covering a single people or region and who can, therefore, readily and accurately envelope their reports of events, happenings and crises in a context we even thousands of miles away can understand.
Hugh Pope, Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, New York: Overlook Press (paper back 2006; hardback 2005). See also Nicole and Hugh Pope's Turkey Unveiled: a History of Modern Turkey, New York: Overlook Press, 1998.