Byline

By M.J. Akbar

Byline anthologises M.J. Akbar's finest writings over the last decade, bringing together essays that reflect the author's versatility and range. The book is divided into five seamless sections, each with its own identity, woven together by M.J. Akbar's delectably informal prose.
'Travel' is the first section in which the author shares his passion for history and the occasional fable, the obscure detail, the glorious and the ludicrous. This is followed by 'Politics and History' in which the reader is provided a view of some events and people in the recent past with all the quirks and whims that characterise the great as well as the mundane. The reader then moves on to 'Sidelines' (those delightfully off-centre pieces). M.J. Akbar says in an essay in this section: "The train of thought has moved. But that is the way with trains. They must travel."
'Memories' is the most personal and autobiographical part of the entire selection, mixing regret, nostalgia and deeply felt sorrow for the friends and times gone forever.
Byline ends with a short section entitled 'On a Personal Note' in which James Bond must live to die another day, The Telegraph has to learn to live beyond the age of twenty and Dev Anand remains young forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Dec 31, 2004
• ISBN: 9789351940470

M.J. Akbar

M. J. Akbar?is the editorial director of India Today and editor of the Sunday Guardian. His many books include India: The Siege Within, Nehru: The Making of India, Riot After Riot, Kashmir: Behind the Vale, and The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity. He lives in Delhi.

Book preview

Travel

9/11

Can an Indian with a Muslim name reading a British magazine at an American airport be a hijacker? These ‘Bylines’, written over three separate visits to the post-9/11 United States, capture the trauma, the spirit and the colours of America as autumn melts into winter, and Allah gets a taste of money-laundering.

The HowAllah Conspiracy

Nothing has changed at Heathrow airport except the scowl of a security guard with a beard from Hollywood’s central casting, eyes borrowed from a B-grade movie, and an attitude from honest, genuine, home-grown, indigenous stupidity. So far all the checkpoints of one of the world’s busiest airports, manned by government, have been cool, professional and cheered up by a little smile at the end. After the breeze the barrier. This man is not government; he is airline security, outsourced, standing at the boarding gate of the Virgin flight from London to Boston (Boston!). He looks at my Muslim name on the passport and shuffles his shoulders in what Bertie Wooster would have called a marked manner. He clearly believes that his moment in history has arrived. Open your bag, he orders.

Decision time. Glare back? I put my bag in front of him and turn my back to chat pleasantly with the slightly-embarrassed Virgin (or not) ground stewardess who has welcomed me pleasantly enough. Keeping my role model in such circumstances, Bertie Wooster, firmly in focus, I babble about why I was the last person to board: didn’t ummm hear the announcement, was trying internet in the lounge which did not work, confused Gate 34 with Gate 4 before being rescued, all of it partially true. Defeated by my chatty indifference, the Guardian of the West returned my passport with limp hand and limp eyes, unable to understand why a Muslim travelling to Boston should not want to blow himself up. In all fairness I should add that I had taken the precaution of disguise. I was wearing an elegant silk tie. When has anyone wearing an elegant silk tie, with a Windsor knot, ever hijacked anything? I challenge you to find a single instance.

My preassigned seat on flight VS011 is occupied. Two Asians presumably wanting to travel together, and perhaps attracted by the extra legspace in the front row, have trespassed on one of the seats. The upper class is full and they try to postpone the inevitable with bluster. There is nothing like having the law on your side to get your way. In a few minutes a friendly voice informs us through the intercom that anyone in the economy section of the aircraft who wants to stretch out and sleep by lifting the armrests dividing seats is welcome to do so. There are enough empty seats. This is the second law of travel in the post 11 September era. The ladies and gentlemen on company expense with laptops are edgy in the crowded front, as they have to go where they have to go. Those who travel for pleasure are taking their pleasures at home.

From the sky America looks serene, beautiful, rich, imperturbable. New England is as rich and serene as America gets. Boats skim past rocky outcrops that guard the north Atlantic coast of God’s preferred continent, confirming the Brahmin status of Boston. The serenity is infectious. A mild flutter interrupts the mood as we land from over the sea. Please keep your passport in your hands for inspection at the exit. This is obviously a new security procedure. No problem. A large policeman with an Irish twinkle glances at my three-tier passport and asks what I do. Sir.

Journalist. He beams. This is unusual. Journalists are not always considered good news. About ten feet away, a large lady at immigration is not so sanguine about either journalists or Muslims. She takes only a few seconds to make up her mind after tapping my name on her computer. ‘We may have to ask you a few more questions. Sir.’ They never forget the Sir. Decision time again. The options juggle through my mind. How should one respond? Grovel? Rage? Try the sniffy is-this-the-America-I-once-knew tactic?

I finally do what comes automatically. I shrug and say sure. A fleeting vision of interrogation cells appears in the imagination but reality is better. We stop at a vacant stand-up counter. Nothing so dramatic as a padded cell. When you are reconciled calm prevails. I take a seat on the bench and open a copy of Spectator. Soon, a thin-faced policeman fills the space at the counter and examines my passport which has been put into a plastic bag with gingerly fingers. I stick to the Spectator. From behind me my friendly Irishman suddenly reappears to tell thinface with a big grin: ‘He’s all right. He’s reading the Spectator.’

Thinface replies with a smile of his own, and all is right with the world again. I ask my personal Irish saviour how he reads the Spectator in Boston. On the internet, he explains grandly.

So now you know what to do on your next flight to Boston. Wear a silk tie with a Windsor knot at Heathrow and read the Spectator in Boston. If the first doesn’t save you, the second will.

Winter, said the television weatherwoman on Thursday morning, was due in three hours. They can get very specific on American television in their constant search for the truth. Such experts are encouraged of course by the fact that in three hours everyone will either forget, forgive or simply not care.

If this was the end, summer was saying goodbye like a diva at the top of her form, dressed in the plumes of Paradise. The sun was softened and melted over the streets, complementing the cool breezes of impending change. The local citizens were out enjoying the sun in the afternoon, unhurried and gossipy. Boston has the intimacy of a small town and the confidence of a large city. The placid Charles river bisects the city, nursing the world’s most famous educational institutions on one side and commerce on the other.

When I leave Boston to travel north towards Dartmouth and New Hampshire, the world along the way has become a dance. How many colours are there in brown? In red? In russet? In yellow? In green? In orange and lilac and peach? The trees along the road and across the hillside are an endless feast as they burst into colour before the monotone of winter, a riot, a whirl, an impossible orchestra conducted by nature in some frenzy of joy. If one has to die then this is the way to go. This is the last burst of colour even as the leaves begin to fall and branches turn bare to take the weight of snow on their thin limbs; soon, all will be white on the frozen ground and dark grey against the freezing sky.

But summer has not lost out yet, no matter what the television says. In the forests that stretch beyond the magnificent campus of Dartmouth College, you may not be able to hear a leaf fall in the silence, but you can hear the leaves shiver as they comfort one another on the glade that is their graveyard.

I am a guest of Dartmouth College and put up at the campus hotel, Hanover Inn. A Halloween pumpkin sits on the reception; America brings in winter with a great, eerie, fun, foreboding festival. There is a fire in the lounge, and impressive books wait for readers with time. Charm and hospitality are all around you. My mobile has stopped roaming, unable to pick up a local host, which adds significantly to the peace. At the lecture I deliver in the afternoon, the students are less generous than the sprinkling of faculty and guests interested in a particular understanding of the history of Islam and South Asia. This is as it should be. The report in The Dartmouth (America’s Oldest College Newspaper. Founded 1799) about this talk is remarkable for its accuracy and concise perception. Sadly none of these brilliant young men and women will become journalists. They want to conquer Wall Street instead.

The train taking me south starts from a track-level platform at White River Junction, in Vermont, across the water that forms the border with New Hampshire. It stops at similar sidewalks to pick up Real America from its small towns, and take it to New York, a city that belongs as much to the rest of the world as it does to America. They say that New York has become a kinder, gentler place since 11 September, when the contestants of its permanent rat race sat back to consider what exactly they were racing for. Three thousand divorce applications were withdrawn within twenty-four hours of 11 September. New York has taken another look at the mirror and found, at least for a while, the family.

The first important bulletin I get from the local war zone—and in this city, it means the economic battlefield—is that the United States has begun pursuit and assault against the economic routes of terrorism. Trace the money and get your man. Sounds sensible. The talk shows are full of this second conflict now that the bombing of Afghanistan has slipped into a repetitive mode with not much forward action. How many times can you say that America launched its heaviest raids on Kandahar today? Television also needs visuals. Between the Pentagon and the Taliban, there isn’t much footage available.

A government type in suit and tie appears on the screen to discuss the money supply lines of the enemy. He seems particularly interested in a transaction called ‘HowAllah’. I wonder what God has to do with money-laundering. The expert notes that ‘HowAllah’ is an established Indian practice; this is the way Indians transfer their money illegally and, amazingly, they put nothing down on paper. He looks both bemused and perplexed.

It was then that the rupee dropped.

‘HowAllah’ was not a nefarious Islamic fund-transfer ritual practised between conspiring mullahs. He was talking about havala, that old and familiar method by which loaded Indians fund their needs and pleasures abroad despite the fact that you cannot officially convert the rupee into dollar for such purposes. Now, this is a great story. The United States is going to solve a problem that the government of India has tried to solve for decades and quietly given up on. The FBI is going to pulverise those networks. I can hear the sound of chattering teeth from Kolkata to Mumbai via Delhi. We could see the emergence of a new Indian economy, thanks to the FBI, which already has offices in India, incidentally.

I always knew it would take nothing less than a world war to tackle the moneybags of India.

28 October 2001

All the Views that’s Fit to Print

Little streaks of white jet-smoke in the sky over Washington speak of the new security mood in the United States. The air force has intensified its vigil over skies that once were immune from the problems that beset ordinary mortals in the rest of the world. But it would take more than one air force, even America’s, to provide any sense of aerial comfort to New York, whose skies are a mass of red commercial dots as craft of every kind descends on the airports that thrive with the world’s attention. This is the city that the world visits every day and every night.

September 11 is too traumatic to disappear from the consciousness so quickly; maybe it never will. But there is evidence that the depression is lifting. The vigour is back in the neon, and chatter is back on the sudden intimacy-wavelength that connects strangers on the streets.

Reminiscence dominates the content of print media, even as television descends to boredom with its repetitive formula of green squiggles purporting to be still life from Afghanistan and analysis that now shrieks in order to be heard above the drone. Print has become once again the most powerful means of communication, employing as it does the brain above the camera. Magazines like the venerable New Yorker and the newborn Talk are at their best. Talk is edited by Tina Brown; Hillary Clinton helped make the first issue about two years ago a bestseller by discussing her husband’s infidelities. The latest issue has a piece by Chelsea Clinton, who, like her father, is now studying at Oxford. She was in Manhattan on 11 September, staying with a friend. She called her mother the moment the sky exploded and the earth trembled. An assistant to her mother picked up the phone, and then the line went dead. Like the rest of the world Chelsea was hypnotised by the television screen. Then she heard the deafening rumble of the first tower and the only image she could think of was Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall . . . Humpty Dumpty had a big fall . . . She went out. People were flying through the avenues like debris through a storm, shouting ‘Fire!’ and ‘Bomb!’ She writes: ‘We were all crying. We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us . . . For a brief moment I truly thought I was going to die. Once we stopped running, I started praying. I prayed for my country and my city . . .’

The Clintons are tough. Bill Clinton has chosen this week to remind America that Americans too once used terror to serve their interests. Against Red Indians, who they wiped out; and against the Blacks, who they enslaved. The right wing is predictably outraged by Clinton’s ‘insensitivity’. But Clinton has the attention of an America in an introspective mood. The search for something, anything, even perhaps an answer, is on and the bookshops are flooded with Islam, Afghanistan and conflict. For the conservatives so far, war is the only response. The right wing leadership, which is in charge, knows that this is hopelessly inadequate but will not admit it readily. It is in disarray.

Perhaps the finest magazine cover I have seen is that of the New Yorker of 24 September. It is black, but not stark black. Not until you stare at the black does the silhouette of the twin towers begin to emerge, black against black. It is stark, simple, and has the beauty of a definitive statement. Inside, John Updike is in fine fettle; his writing is descriptive, his art devoid of the need for artifice. ‘Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our smallness. From the viewpoint of a tenth floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception.’ For some reason I imagine Updike hammering these words out on a battered Olympia typewriter, perhaps because I first read him in the late sixties. In 2001 he saw history outside the duplicate image as well. ‘And then, within an hour, as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air.’

Life is obstinate.

‘The next morning, I went back to the open vantage from which we had watched the tower so dreadfully slip from sight. The fresh sun shone on the eastward facades, a few boats tentatively moved in the river, the ruins were still sending out smoke, but New York looked glorious.’

The most revealing stories from Afghanistan are those that describe the war for survival, conducted each day by a hungry, condemned people in a world where electricity is a dream. The most evocative that I have come across is the account of a French reporter, Michel Peyrard, who works for Paris Match. He slipped across the Pakistan border and went to Jalalabad wearing a tent-top, head-to-toe burqa as disguise. The thought of hardboiled journalists searching for stories in a burqa is faintly ludicrous, but a journalist is never too far away from the thin line that divides his demands from desperation.

The Taliban in charge of the jail where Peyrard was kept for twenty-five days was 24 years old. Peyrard calls him a megalomaniac, but all jailers are like that, aren’t they? You’ve seen the movies too, haven’t you? When one prisoner escaped, the jailer picked up his three nephews, aged 10, 13 and 19. He tortured the eldest, including with mock execution: a bullet went past his head hitting the wall behind. Nothing very new there. Peyrard’s arrest was more illuminating. He was paraded through the marketplace as a spy. A few people threw desultory stones at him, but most ignored him. That begins to tell a tale.

Peyrard made friends with his jailers, and they once took him out for a spin through the town on the excuse that he needed to go to a hospital. In return he had offered them lunch. More information here. The relationship was relaxed. The jailers were also hungry for a good meal. And they had not stolen their prisoner’s money, otherwise our journalist could not have made the offer. This excursion came to an abrupt end when they saw a group of militants on the street. Rather than risk being stopped and questioned they went back to jail. The government therefore is a mix of the ideologically committed and the salaried. The most revealing quote comes from one of the guards, who is young and who is sick of the Taliban regime. Why? He wants to hear music, he says. He has not heard music ever since the Taliban have taken over. But when Peyrard shows him an American propaganda leaflet dropped from safe skies (the skies, as one sceptical journalist in Washington said, have been saved from mullahs on magic carpets) the young Afghan explodes. What are the Americans doing here? he asks. What do they know about our customs? B52s have this terrible tendency of arousing nationalism.

When embassies negotiate interviews on behalf of their prime ministers they should probably haggle over display as well. The Washington Post did interview Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, but the interview was done by a reporter, Alan Sipress, rather than the editor, as had been promised. The interview appeared on page 26. A story on the social impact of the economic plunge in Argentina got double column space on page 1, but the leader of the world’s sixth nuclear power was shoved off inside on a day that, frankly, was not bursting with news. Beside the Vajpayee interview, and given more space than the interview itself, was a story from the Post bureau in Delhi on POTO, the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance. I suppose they could have held over the POTO story, but they had probably declared 8 November India Day at the Washington Post. Since there is so much competition in these matters, the Pakistanis have gone to the New York Times.

The New York Times published the interview with President Pervez Musharraf on Saturday morning, on page 1.

The American media is cool with all leaders, including George Bush. The President of the United States gave an address to the nation on Thursday evening. NBC passed the televised address to its news subsidiaries, MSNBC and CNBC. CBS simply passed up the honour, as did public television. Fox wanted to put it on prime time, using what it called Level 1 intervention to break into money-making serials. But they saw an advance copy of the text and decided that the President wasn’t making news. They junked the story. ABC was the only channel that carried the telecast, because it did not have a moneyspinner slotted at that hour.

Story of the month: The CIA wants to hire someone who knows Arabic. And Pushtu. A bit late, but nevertheless . . . On the other hand, why don’t they just subcontract spying on the Arab and Asian world to the British? They would do it better, and at discount rates.

11 November 2001

A 9/11 Diary

The only sign of hysteria in New York on 9/11, a year after either the world changed or America changed (the two might be indistinguishable) was the prose in the newspapers. Some of it was so breathless it died in front of your eyes, suicide by syntax.

As a fellow practitioner of the world’s second oldest profession, my heart went out to the hacks who had hacked themselves to death in the service of national hype. Images floated through my professional conscience. I could see so many of the hacks polishing their phrases for weeks, disturbing the serenity of countless vodka-bitters, the life-sustaining medicine of innumerable Scotch-and-sodas, all in anticipation of the dramatic piece that they would have to produce for the 9/11 edition, a report that would etch their place in the history of journalism.

My heart was particularly moved by the sportswriters searching for insidious ways and sinuous means to fit a national cause into a football game. But the good thing about sports journalists is their in-your-face honesty. They served their nation in bold type. Leave it to Op-Ed columnists and political commentators to communicate in normal-sized Times Europa. The sports editor of USA Today chose a 14-point type for his body copy, and placed it in the centre of the page, just in case there were any myopic readers who could not read from right to left. I assume he was the sports editor, because no one less than that could have got away with the conceit.

Even the New York Times, always most excellent in its fact-of-the-matter approach to headlines (including the use of full stops, sometimes, to tell you that it had paused mid-headline), slipped towards phrases like ‘Doves on the Wing’. That was the mood of the moment. Life had become larger than life.

And so when nothing happened it came as a bit of an anti-climax. Perhaps the authorities felt the need to manufacture some excitement. And so in Miami (where else, are you asking? Anywhere else, in the West on 9/11) the police did a movie-style car chase to catch three medical students because a woman thought they were speaking in Arabic in a restaurant and reported them to the guardians of law and order. It turned out that they were only speaking American, but one of them wore a Muslim skull cap. Dangerous thing to do. Stories are floating around about two brown airline passengers who terrorised a plane because they went to the loo together. I am not going to indulge in racial profiling by describing their ethnicity. Suffice to add that the pilot force-landed the plane when one of them wanted to return to the loo, and insisted on going to the same one.

Capitalism, I am happy to report, survived 9/11 with flying colours. The brand name industry made sure that when history was written it would not be found wanting in the Emotional Outpouring Stakes. Chanel, Tourneau (New York’s most famous watch shop), Mikimoto (Japanese pearls), Chopard (Swiss watch), Colettan (my knowledge base stops short of this word), Tiffany (famous for breakfast, diamonds and Audrey Hepburn), Saks Fifth Avenue (famous for thirty per cent discount after hundred per cent mark-up), Burberry (British checks), Steuben (glass), Hugo Boss (ordinary clothes at extraordinary prices), Bloomingdales (always happy to offer you your first job as salesgirl at slave wages) and Macy’s made sure that when the heartstrings were being plucked they had first rights to a twang. They took out ads in the New York Times remembering the day when their markets crashed.

Traffic was light and the air heavy. In New York, air means air waves. Radio and television were inundated with church bells and thanksgiving services. New Yorkers celebrate by going out. They commemorate by staying in. Most companies offered a holiday option to their employees, and the sensible took the option. Never was sense more popular than on 9/11.

On a normal morning a taxi ride to the airport can give you serious blood pressure, even when the taxi driver has decided to co-operate. On the morning of 9/11 the city’s avenues became freeways. The scene at the airport at noon was stunning. There was no one at the airline counter. Airline staff and security at John F. Kennedy airport outnumbered passengers by twenty to one. Since no one had much to do they chatted and laughed. Practice from morning had taken any nervous edge off the laughter. When I asked the attendant which seat he had assigned to me, he said ‘Window’. Then his face succumbed to a series of grimaces as he tried to communicate what he had been clearly told to keep his mouth shut about. Since he was human, he could not keep it to himself. ‘Sit anywhere anywhere anywhere . . . There’s no one aboard . . .’ he muttered, but he did avert his face as he said those hateful words.

I am about to make a claim. I must have been the only Muslim on a long-haul, or even a short-haul, flight in America on 9/11. If that constituted an invitation to tough security, the invitation was accepted. A large black man whose neck was twice the size of my head, took off my shoes, belt, wallet, pens, studied my attitude for danger signals, and informed me that if I felt a sharp prod between my thighs I should not consider it personal. It was duty, not affection.

Just to ensure that I did not become a racist, the procedure was repeated just before I boarded Flight 017 to San Francisco; this time it was a white man with a neck half the size of my head who was in charge of the physical. The size of the baton that examined the space between my legs was the same. I might add that I cannot recall having seen the soles of my shoes since I bought these boots. Now within half an hour I had seen them twice. They do not need repair.

San Francisco was deserted, but not on edge. There was a softer, less brittle mood; San Francisco remembered the day with flowers in its hair. There was an almost conscious effort not to indulge in the sin of racial profiling; to avoid seeming hostile. Why else would so many people passing by on the streets smile at me? It could not be for my looks, but it could be because of my colour.

But the questions, hundreds of them, shot at me during the Ron Owens radio show where I was the morning’s guest on 12 September were sharp, angry and almost unanimously suspicious if not accusatory about Islam. One listener did me the favour of suggesting that I seemed warm, friendly and reasonable, adding that I did not sound like a Muslim. I was on the radio show to promote the American edition of The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity, and you can imagine that the title itself was a red rag to lots of bulls out there. I can report that jihad has now become a part of the English language, like bazaar or kebab became part of the Anglo-Saxon dictionary in earlier times. You don’t have to explain the word any more. But when it comes to shades of meaning it becomes a different story. I wonder how many listeners believed me when I told them that according to the specified, and written, instructions of the first Caliph after the Prophet, Hazrat Abu Bakr, you could not kill innocent non-participants, particularly women and children, in a jihad, nor even destroy crops or a palm tree. It will take a long time before the distance between conception and misconception is narrowed in America. Right now, Americans cannot tell the difference between Islam and Osama bin Laden.

And George Bush, of course, cannot understand the difference between Osama and Saddam Hussein. In his speech to the United Nations, President Bush included in his list of reasons for the invasion of Iraq the charge that he killed children in front of their parents. A slightly different explanation is offered by the marketplace for President Bush’s obsession with Saddam. One of course is the son’s Freudian desire to show daddy that he can do better. The second is that if you cannot locate Osama and Mullah Omar one year after conquering a country to find them, the second best thing to do is to change the subject. The fact that the CIA has been trying for months, without any success, to link Mohammed Atta (of 9/11 fame) with an Iraqi spy is no deterrent. A 21-page fact sheet that the White House released along with the Bush speech did not once connect 9/11 with Saddam Hussein. But when Bush comes to shove, all he wants is regime change in Baghdad, preferably by war.

I have very little sympathy for Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, or with any dictatorship for that matter, but I must point out a significant achievement of Saddam Hussein. Iraq is the only issue on which India and Pakistan agreed on in the United Nations. Anyone who can make India and Pakistan agree on anything these days deserves some kind of medal.

Stray facts about 9/11. A figure has been finalised: that terrible day claimed 2801 victims. The bill for that day is over a hundred billion dollars, of which 21 billion went to New York City, eight billion to the airline industry and five billion as compensation to the victims. Dick Cheney, vice president of the United States, disappeared to an unknown location both last year and this year on the fateful date. And the winning number that came up on this year’s New York lottery, drawn on 9/11 was 911. What could have been the odds on that?

15 September 2002

Turkish Delights

If Homer was a Turk, does that make Iliad a Turkish epic? If the first two world wars were fought in Turkey, was the First World War the third world war? In 2002 Turkey had better things to worry about, mainly the fate of its football team in the World Cup. These reports from the banks of the Bosphorus dwell on football, the rise and fall of civilisations, circumcision and intercontinental flies.

A Turkey Diary

Was Noah a Turk? The question has to be asked. When God’s chosen creation, Man, succumbed to Original Sin, Paradise was lost. When Man indulged in not so original sin he was punished by the great flood. When the Holy Lord decided to give mankind, and womankind, a second chance He sent them to Turkey. Noah may have set sail from somewhere near Sodom and Gomorrah (probably near Beirut if you ask me) but his landfall was on the top of Mount Ararat. That is where God showed him a dove and that is where the animals came out two by two (unless of course they had become two by three inside the ark). Mount Ararat is in Turkey. By any logic this makes Noah a naturalised Turkish citizen. The world may have been born in Paradise but it was reborn in Turkey. The Turks are good with rebirth. They can pick up a dying empire and breathe a second life that lasts a thousand years. That is how they served Islam in the second millennium.

You may raise an eyebrow or even two over Noah’s citizenship but there can be no doubt whatsoever about the man who infused a new dynamism into Christianity. Paul was only a saint, not a prophet but he possibly did as much for the new faith as Noah did for the old one. Paul has been made synonymous with Antioch but he was not a Syrian. Since he wrote in Greek, the Greeks have tended to co-opt him into their lineage. But Paul was Turk. He came from Adana in southern Turkey (Austrian Airlines now has a direct flight from Vienna to Adana). Most of Paul’s missionary work was done in western Anatolia and Konya, and those he converted created the base, the foundations at the people’s level, for the greatest Christian empire in history, the Byzantine Empire which started with Constantine, founder of Constantinople, and lasted till the Ottomans conquered the greatest city of the past thousand years in 1453. Those who have read Paul’s letter to the Galatians may know this. Or not.

A Turk was responsible for both the first and the second world war. The first world war took place around 1250 bc when Paris, son of Priam, king of Troy (or Troye) abducted a Greek princess who proved to be worth a thousand ships, ten years of war, two generations of warriors and an epic poem. Paris was a Turk. Helen of Troy was really Helen of Greece. At least the Turk had an excellent reason for starting a world war. The love of a woman is always worth a war. It was a love war not a hate war.

The relationship between Turkey and Greece, the India and Pakistan of history before India and Pakistan were born, has followed a sort of Iliad pattern since the wars described by the blind poet Homer. More or less each time the Greeks got the poetry and the Turks got the woman. Given a choice which would you prefer? Poetry or love? As victories go, poetry is pyrrhic while love is, I suppose, priapic. Both words are of Greek origin, deriving from Pyrrhus and Priapus, but an English dictionary will do for further details. Incidentally, while Homer went on a bit about what everyone else and his uncle had to say about that war of heroes, we do not know too much about Helen’s views on the subject. Maybe as a beautiful woman who had abandoned a boring and possibly foul-mouthed hero-warrior-husband for a charming and invigorated lover, she may have wondered what all the fuss was about. You only lead one life.

The second world war was also the handiwork of Turks. The eleventh century saw the establishment of the first great Turkish-Islamic empire, that of the Seljuks, who picked up, piece by piece, the remains of the extraordinary Arab-Persian sultanate that had ruled the Islamic world since the inception of Islam. It was the Seljuks who nurtured