Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"There were no proto-Muhammads, as with Jesus and Joseph Smith," the professor said. "From the age of forty, Muhammad had these new ideas. He spoke. People wrote down his words. There's lots of apocrypha, too, especially the Hadith—wise sayings of the Prophet. About a million of them exist, but"—the professor smiled—"who can establish their veracity? This number has been winnowed down to five thousand."

"Can you quote a Hadith?"

He did so, promptly, with an irresistible one: "The ink of a scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr."

I said, "Jews don't proselytize, but Muslims do, and they make a lot of converts. What's the attraction?"

"At the time of Muhammad the converts were oppressed peoples. Islam gave them something to fight for—a great sense of victory."

"But I'm thinking of now."

"Even now, the traumatic experiences of colonialism and occupation, the memory of the humiliation of the Crusades. To a great extent, Islam was shaped by conquerors and colonialism."

"So Americans fighting in Iraq will only make Islam stronger?"

"Yes, and bring about more suicide bombers," Professor Halman said. "Martyrdom is important in Islam. There are lots of mentions of martyrdom in the Hadith. There is quite a lot of militarism in the Koran."

"But martyrdom is important in Christianity," I said. "That's one way of becoming a saint."

"Yes. But unlike in Christianity, in Islam it is also good to aid and abet martyrdom," he said. "And giving away money is also a form of martyrdom."

"What I don't understand," I said, "is why Muslims leave Islamic communities and emigrate to places like Germany and Britain, basically Christian countries. To live among Christians and Jews. And Muslims get fractious when they're told not to wear headscarves and so forth. Why bother to emigrate if it makes them so unhappy?"

"They emigrate because their countries are backward," the professor said with superb good sense. "Better to emigrate than to starve to death."

"Muslim boys were burning cars in Paris a few months ago."

He said, "A North African has limited choices. He can only go to a Francophone country. He ends up in France and sees it is secular, and he objects. But you see Muslims are also reacting against political oppression."

"Tell me how this applies to Iraq now."

"American experts are the problem," Professor Halman said. "They were wrong about the Soviet Union and wrong about Iraq. They are academics and bureaucrats with vested interests."

"Sinister forces?"

"Not sinister but obtuse. The ones who said the Soviet Union was strong were politically motivated, perhaps. They didn't know how weak the Soviets were."

"So the U.S. government gets the wrong advice?"

"Yes, and mainly from scholars. Scholars need to validate the status quo, or they will lose their funding."

"The last time I took this trip," I said, "the shah was in power. Everyone said he was strong and progressive, though it was clear to me that the countryside was reactionary and orthodox Muslim."

"That's a point. Advice-givers don't travel enough," he said. "Where are you going next?"

"Up to Trabzon, then Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and—" I stopped; it seemed unlucky to mention more countries.

"That's good," he said. "Ankara is a dreary place."

"But I've had an interesting time here."

"It's a wasteland," he said. "And Turks are a melancholy people." He pressed his fingers to his temples as though to accelerate his memory. "I think there's been trouble in Trabzon. I can't remember what."

So I headed out of Ankara intending to leave Turkey. Long ago, Turkey had seemed a distant and exotic country of frowning men and enigmatic women, with unreliable telephones and simple roads and a dramatic, confrontational culture. Now it had everything, it was part of the visitable world, but it was no longer the way to Iran and Afghanistan, so I headed north.

NIGHT TRAIN TO TBILISI

THE TROUBLE IN TRABZON, on the Black Sea, where I found filthy weather, ugly rumors, and ill tidings, was the incident that had slipped Professor Halman's mind: the murder a month before of an unbeliever in a fit of sentimental fury. This singular outrage—singular because such things seldom happened in Turkey—was the shooting of an Italian priest, Father Andrea Santoro, by an overexcited Islamist named Oguz intending to avenge the honor of Muhammad in a controversy over mocking cartoons of the Prophet that had appeared in various European newspapers. Oguz, who was sixteen, was caught the day after the murder, and Father Santoro's corpse was given a solemn sendoff, attended by the highest Muslim clergy in Turkey, the muftis.