Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Before I could ask, my translator said, "'We support Iraq resistance.'"

It was an amazing display, even daunting: flags, bunting, denunciatory posters, angry images, and now that I understood the Turkish words for "USA—Go Back Home!" I saw the demand all over—it followed me down the hallway to the university auditorium.

"Not a single person in this university believes the U.S. is right in the war," one of the teachers told me. "Not one."

Four hundred people were already in their seats. They were literature students. I told them that I was the same age as our bellicose vice president, but that was where our resemblance ended. After Dick Cheney graduated from college, he went to Washington to seek political power, and he never left. I joined the Peace Corps, to teach school in Africa. I distrusted politicians, and I avoided making friends with politically powerful people, because (I said) the nearer you are to such people, the more morally blind you become.

Then I talked about literature. "People will tell you, 'What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?' They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized."

Afterwards I told them that I had been in Turkey thirty-three years ago, when the phones didn't work, and Turks in the hinterland had asked me to sell them my watch and my blue jeans. I could see from where I was standing that everyone had watches and wore blue jeans.

I asked how many of them had cell phones. They all did. And to my other questions: all used the Internet, all used e-mail.

"How many are going to the demonstration on Saturday?"

All.

***

"MUHAMMAD WAS ILLITERATE. He had twelve wives and, let us say, a vivid sexual history," another forthright Turkish professor was saying to me. I was in another part of Ankara, another campus, Bilkent University.

Muhammad the indefatigable womanizer: that is the way the Prophet is depicted by Neguib Mahfouz in his celebrated (but banned in every Arab country) novel Children of the Alley. So I wasn't shocked. But I said, "Do you say these things out loud in Turkey?"

"Everyone knows my views," he said and shrugged. "But these are facts. Ninety percent of what I say would be disputed by orthodox Muslims." He smiled. "Or would be considered heretical."

He was Professor Talât Halman. As a former minister of culture in the Turkish government, and a scholar, writer, and director of the Department of Turkish Literature at Bilkent, he had considerable authority. He had also taught a course at New York University on the history of Islam. He was in his late seventies, he was shrewd and funny, with the ironic and knowing manner of a confident scholar. Over lunch he told me much that I didn't know and had never, until now, inquired about.

"What do we know about Mecca at the time of Muhammad?" I asked.

"Mecca was mainly a pagan city, but with rabbis and priests here and there. The rabbis were suspicious of this new cult of Islam. They repressed it, or at least they tried to. That's why the Koran is full of battles—between Muslims and Jews."

"Are there any historical documents that describe this early friction between Muslims and Jews?"

Professor Halman shook his head. "Not many documents. That's the trouble."

"Why were the rabbis suspicious?"

"They were alarmed by the new ideas and the way they were mingled with the traditional stories." We were having big bowls of fragrant soup, but Professor Halman put his spoon down to explain. "There is always tension present at the origin of a new faith. This has been true through out history. There was lots of friction in Mecca at the time of Muhammad."

"What is the significance of the Kaaba?" I asked, because the huge black cube of shining stone had always seemed to me an enigmatic symbol.

"The Kaaba in Mecca—it's a meteorite, of course."

I hadn't known that, and said so.

"It is obviously a miraculous force of nature," Professor Halman said. "The Jews hadn't claimed it. No one had claimed it—so Muhammad did."

I said, "I'm interested in Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons, which is an American religion. Columbus and the American Revolution were foretold in The Book of Mormon, translated from golden plates by Smith in 1827, so he claimed. When he was alive there were apparently lots of other American prophets like him, preaching and professing that God was directing them. Jesus had predecessors too. So how did Muhammad arise as a prophet?"