We would like to think a little about Turkey and Europe’s common roots.1 This is an important topic both for Turkey and Europe, and, in a wider sense, for the West and the Near East. The term ‘Near East’ is of course Eurocentric, meaning the region near to, but East of, Europe. Turkey is somehow situated between these two regions and cannot be said to entirely belong to one or the other.2 The question of whether Turkey belongs to Europe or not is frequently asked but never satisfactorily answered.

One obvious characteristic of world affairs today is rapid – possibly accelerating-- change. When I wrote about ‘Turkey and the EU’ for the Academia Europaea meeting in Vienna October 2012, my subtitle was ‘A Changed Context’. In 2012 the EU was still in the grip of the crisis over the euro, which had teetered on the brink of collapse and was only just beginning to look a little more secure. In contrast, Turkey had experienced an amazing economic boom and appeared to have successfully transitioned from an era of secular military rule to a relatively stable elected government (despite some human rights concerns) led by the moderately Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party and its broadly popular Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and President Abdullah Gul. The Middle East was in the throes of the ‘Arab Spring’. The developed world was still largely focused on the task of recovery from the 2008–2009 financial crisis and pondering how to respond to the looming failure of Doha trade talks at the global level. Now, only two years later, the context has changed yet again. The EU, Turkey, the Middle East, and even global trends – all are substantially different. Therefore an ‘Update’ now follows my original text.

We approach Turkish mobility using a culture of migration perspective with reference to conflict. Conflicts are defined broadly into an array of situations including minor disputes, tensions or latent conflicts on the one hand and major violent events on the other. These situations, defined along a security continuum shape individual perceptions. Increasing perceptions of human insecurity are positively correlated to a rise in migration propensity. Applied to Turkey’s international migration history we note that major conflicts have determined inflows and outflows of populations and created a Turkish culture of migration, which reinforces continuous population flows between countries of destination and origin. Migration flows between Germany and Turkey are exemplary in this regard.

A brief summary of sociological theories concerning the development of identity states that it emerges through the interactions between individuals and society, implying that the individual is unable to attain an identity in an autonomous manner. An identity is therefore constructed and formed through contact with other individuals, groups and cultures in one’s socio-cultural environment. The concept of symbolic interactionism plays a fundamental role here. Societies establish and form social roles by means of linked expectations. In turn, an individual is introduced to these and is exposed to them throughout their socialisation. They are internalised and emerge as critical elements of identity. Explained another way, there are numerous identities in a society that are already fixed and established. The individual is confronted by those identities and must adapt to them. Individuals are seen as active participants in this process, capable of reflecting on it even constructing it and forming their own identity independently. A tension therefore exists between established social identities and the capacity of individuals to construct their own identities. This is a dynamic process that goes on throughout various life stages and differs according to social milieu. With this is mind; identity may be defined as one’s personal awareness of being a distinctive individual, with a unique life-story and being in constant confrontation with the environment in order to attain a balance between individual claims and the expectations of this environment.1

To investigate the identity attributes of Turkish people living in France it is necessary to consider ‘Turkish identity’, determine the stage of their identity building, and understand the role religion plays in this quest for identity. Considering the complex structure of Ottoman society and the multiple and dynamic properties of loyalty criteria, it is difficult to ascertain the definition of ‘Turkishness’ even in Turkey. It is probably not necessary to explain that this is even more difficult for Turks who are in the minority.

This article pursues a comparative approach to honour, a choice determined not only by the fact that anthropology, with regard to other disciplines, has striven to build its specificity on comparative analysis ever since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. A further reason is to steer clear of methodological nationalism,1 i.e. to sidestep forms of Orientalism.2 The point, therefore, is to avoid the pitfall by which issues of honour and its more violent forms, such as honour killings or blood feuds, are downscaled to a ‘Turkish’ or ‘Albanian problem’ or to a phenomenon specific solely to Middle Eastern societies.

Every society produces its own concept of otherness. It is a universal fact, necessary for the social cohesion of the majority group. In recent decades, along with the development of a European consciousness and citizenship, the concept of ‘other’ relating to immigration is largely imposed on Muslims in Western Europe. There are historical reasons for this social enmity that trace their roots back to the Middle Ages and to nineteenth century colonialism. However, other contemporary reasons have reinforced these mind-sets; some of which are international events (e.g. the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iranian revolution, the wars in Iraq and Syria, international terror of Islamic inspiration, and so on). These facts have – at least since 11 September 2001 – made the expression of Islamophobic opinions politically and morally more acceptable in Europe.

A Turkish girl in Germany emancipated herself from her family in a long, bitter, almost deadly struggle. She fought for her education and gained it. Indignation at the disregard of personal freedom in her migrant community turned her into a writer and her success was amazing. However, it earned her the suspicion of all those who prefer the integrity of the group to the dignity of the individual. Told in this reduced manner, the story of Necla Kelek resembles one of Scheherazade’s tales. I will therefore try to tell it again in a more specific way.

The literatures that have emerged from post-war Turkish migration to Europe have become a topic of discussion since the 1980s. However, studies comparing the emergence of these literatures in different European contexts are rare. This article compares Sweden and West Germany, two contexts where migration from Turkey has a similar history, but where the resulting literatures differ massively due to different political and literary conditions. Multicultural, and in particular multilingual, public policies in Sweden have facilitated the emergence of a Kurdish diaspora literature; this then became a major impetus for the emergence of a Kurdish literature in Turkey when it was finally possible to write and publish in Kurdish there in the 1990s. The emergence of the New Left in West Germany, reflected in a re-awakened workers’ literature and new left-wing publishing houses in the German literary field, has provided publishing opportunities for Turkish migrant writers influenced by a socialist internationalist tradition in the 1970s. These works laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has since come to be regarded as having changed the understanding of what it means to be German.

The aim of this paper is to determine how and to what extent Fazıl Say, whose inspiration, according to his own words, is the bridge between Europe and Asia, has become an ambassador between Europe and Turkey.2 A further aim is to determine whether Fazıl Say may be referred to as ‘hybrid’ concerning both his person and his works. This will be done first by describing his background and then the conditions which led not only to his European, but also his global success. Assuming that not only his family, social environment and education were decisive in this process, the social changes that took place in Turkey following the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 are detailed, with special consideration of the reforms directly affecting art and music. To offer more insight into this context, the mutual influences on music between the Ottoman Empire and Europe are outlined.

Using water for body treatments has an especially long tradition in many cultures and, is deeply intertwined with Roman and Ottoman culture. However, it is clear that today it is not possible to attribute bathing – not even a specific type of bathing, such as the hammam steam bath – to one particular culture (ignoring the obvious problems associated with trying to delineate clearly between such blurred constructs as a specific culture or as a discrete entity). Thus, the ‘Turkish bath’ is a widely used term introduced to Europe in the eighteenth century or applied to various different manifestations. The term reflects the European perception of Turkish bathing culture, primarily connected with bathing within a hammam complex or – as the Turkish term goes – a hammami. Bathing in the hammam-style is rather a Roman cultural practice, an element adapted and integrated in Ottoman culture and readapted thereafter into modern Western culture. It is often believed that these practices are rooted in the cultural history of the present state of Turkey (although ancient ‘Turkish bath’ architecture famously exists in Greece or Albania, too1). Furthermore, the geographical or architectural nexus between mosques and hammams and, also, the temporal order of Islamic culture (in which visiting a hammam before various ritual occasions is required) have often suggested seeing the Turkish bath as a religious custom.

Juxtaposing Europeanness and Turkishness has always been a recurring theme in Turkish literature and media. In this study, an analysis of a Turkish sitcom entitled Avrupa Avrupa that was broadcast on Turkey’s only state-run TV channel is provided, focusing on how Turkishness and Europeanness are portrayed. It is found that the sitcom portrays Europeans and Turks through traditionally well-known, coarse stereotypes. It is inferred from the sitcom’s latent ideological messages that the EU may accept Turkey, although it is by no means a European country.