Turkish playwright Ozen Yula's comedy incites anger in Istanbul, but he's in Cleveland

Ozen Yula, a leading Turkish playwright who is spending most of 2010 working and teaching in Cleveland, got an unwelcome invitation earlier this month.

It was an invitation to join a list of people who wound up dead, hunted or silenced after being condemned in Vakit, Istanbul's most widely followed Islamic-fundamentalist newspaper.

Yula earned that distinction as the author of a comedy that was scheduled to open Monday at the Kumbaraci50 theater in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, one of the world's largest cities.

In the play, an angel gets sent back to Earth to do good works in the body of a pornographic movie actress.

Or maybe the play is about a porn star who dreams she's an angel. Like many serious comedies, it's ambiguous.

But ambiguity is not something Islamic fundamentalists tend to appreciate. Which makes life in Turkey -- already complicated -- even more so. Founded in 1923, Turkey is struggling to find its identity as a secular, Western-style democracy with a centuries-long history as part of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

On Feb. 2, Vakit (Turkish for "Time") condemned Yula and his play -- provocatively titled "Lick but Don't Swallow" -- for "smearing human dirt on angels," according to one translation of the newspaper's online Turkish text.

That kind of accusation of blasphemy can get a person killed, or at least hunted, as a similar condemnation did in 1989 for Indian novelist Salman Rushdie.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a "fatwa" -- or Islamic ruling -- calling for Rushdie's death after the publication of "The Satanic Verses," in which a film star becomes the archangel Gabriel, who then describes Islam's founder Muhammad as balding, bespectacled and suffering from dandruff.

After years of running and hiding, Rushdie still receives what he has been quoted as calling a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on Feb. 14 to remind him his life is still in danger, though Rushdie now dismisses the threat.

Dutch movie director Theodoor van Gogh was not so lucky; he was assassinated by a fundamentalist for his portrayal of the treatment of women in Islam in the film "Submission."

Likewise, the attack on Yula's play is being seen by secularists as a deliberate attempt to whip up militant furor over the play and anybody connected with it. That includes actress Ayca Damgaci, famous for writing and performing in the autobiographical film "My Marlon and Brando," about her dangerous romance with a Kurd, a member of a minority ethnic group in eastern Turkey.

The mayor of Beyoglu, a member of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party -- which favors restoring some Islamic practices but claims not to be fundamentalist -- shut down the venue where the play was supposed to premiere Monday.

Yula, 45, whose works have been translated into 11 languages and produced around the world, says he's most frightened by the Internet commentary the Vakit story has engendered.

All but two of about two dozen comments left by online readers of the Vakit story have been wiped off the newspaper's Web site by the editors. But Yula said some of them threatened violence against those involved with the play.

"I'm not so afraid for myself, because I am here, but I am afraid for my friends who are still there," said Yula, who arrived in Cleveland in late January just before the Vakit story broke. Yula said he is not yet considering seeking permanent asylum in the United States.

While here, Yula is working on two new plays to be produced in Cleveland, one at Cleveland State University April 22-May 2, and another next fall at Cleveland Public Theatre.

The CSU play, tentatively titled "Codename Exile," also treads on what Yula called "controversial" ground: tracing the history of exiles from Adam and Eve forward.

The story of Yula, a writer in residence at Cleveland Public Theatre and CSU thanks to a $112,000 grant in a new international cultural program at the Cleveland Foundation, is the story of a 21st-century Turkey in upheaval, writ small.

The Justice and Development Party, in power with a slim and eroding plurality of popular support, "is not a political party with a religious axis," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said. But there is a young and growing segment of the party that is more fundamentally Islamic.

Members of the older, secularist parties, out of power because of economic hardships, lack of a charismatic leader and splits within the ranks over the Kurds, believe the Justice and Development Party would like to make Turkey an Islamic state like Iran.

And they accuse the United States, at least under the Bush administration, of promoting the Islamic state proponents to make Turkey a moderate Islamic ally instead of remaining a secular state and joining the European Union.

"If you want to see a heart attack, just say 'religion' to a Turkish secularist," said Ramez Islambouli, a half-Turkish native of Lebanon who teaches Islamic studies at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, and an imam serving as the lay president of Uqbah Mosque Foundation.

"Or you can just say 'secular' to a Muslim reformer. Either way. I support a middle way, a little bit Islamic, a little bit secular. The problem is many secularists don't want even a little bit of religion, and many Muslims want more than a little bit of Turkey. They want the whole thing."

One such secularist is Suat Aricanli, a member of the Turkish American Society of Northeast Ohio. Aricanli says about 1,000 Turkish Americans live in Greater Cleveland, and they are divided about 50-50 on secularist-Islamic reformer lines.

Aricanli also said he believes Islamic reformers would like to "drag our country back to the days of the Ottoman Empire, when we were more Arabic than Turkish."

It's a hot and ongoing debate, and Turkish writers and thinkers such as Yula and 2006 Nobel Prize-winning Orhan Pamuk have put themselves into the middle of it with works intended to get Turks thinking about the myriad issues involved.

But they and others are often met with threats in newspapers like Vakit, some of whose targets for criticism were later attacked physically.

In a 2007 instance, the newspaper condemned a decision by a judge upholding a law barring female teachers from wearing Muslim head scarves in public schools. A gunman entered the courthouse and -- shouting "God is great" -- shot five judges, one of whom died.

After Yula phoned in to a popular Turkish television show earlier this week, the mayor who closed down the Kumbaraci50 theater said he did so because the theater did not have a proper fire escape. Whether intentional or not, the reference to fire must have reminded some Turks of the 1993 Sivas Massacre.

In that incident, 33 intellectuals in the moderate Islamic sect that preaches tolerance of all religions and gender equality died after a mob of radical Muslims set a Turkish hotel ablaze.

Tolerance and egalitarianism are the point of "Lick but Don't Swallow," Yula said.

The angel in the play is being tested, which is why she is made to perform good works in the body of a porn actress. During the making of the film, she talks incessantly about ecological, political and social issues, but nobody involved with the film appears to take any interest.

Toward the end of the play, however, the cameraman approaches her and says he has heard what she said, and he has decided, based on her words, never again to beat his wife.

"But then, the porno director is heard saying, 'Wake up! Wake up! It is time to start shooting again,' " Yula said. "And we are left to wonder if it isn't all a dream."

Brave of him, Turkey has always struck me with what appears to be an identity crisis, partially in Europe and the Middle East, the “glorious past” is always there as is the better nature of it’s European side that is modern and tolerant.

I’d think 5 Turks could see the same play and each one could come out with 3 different opinions for themselves.

"If you want to see a heart attack, just say 'religion' to a Turkish secularist," said Ramez Islambouli, a half-Turkish native of Lebanon who teaches Islamic studies at Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, and an imam serving as the lay president of Uqbah Mosque Foundation. "Or you can just say 'secular' to a Muslim reformer. Either way. I support a middle way, a little bit Islamic, a little bit secular. The problem is many secularists don't want even a little bit of religion, and many Muslims want more than a little bit of Turkey. They want the whole thing."

This reminds me of Churchill's note, passed to Stalin without FDR's knowledge, proposing various percentages -- ratios of Soviet / British influence -- in various eastern European countries after the war. Stalin humiliated Churchill by revealing its contents and mocking him in front of FDR; can't recall if it was Stalin, or some other critic of this wacky idea comparing it to a woman's being "half pregnant".

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