To pass the time and take my mind off the horrors that
unfold daily in our proto-fascist country, I have been binge-watching on
Netflix a Turkish [!!] TV serial called Resurrection:
Ertugrul. I am currently watching
episode 13, but never fear, it seems there are 72 of them in all. This is apparently an enormously popular
Turkish TV show, watched by an implausibly large percentage of the entire
population of our NATO ally. The show is
about a small nomadic tribe of 13th century folks who make their
living by herding sheep and weaving blankets.
The hero is a handsome, upstanding moderately bearded member of the
tribe named Ertugrul, who is the son of the Bey, or leader, of the tribe. The love interest is an attractive young
woman named Halime who shows up in the tribe’s campgrounds with her father and
young brother and quickly captures Ertugrul’s heart, to the dismay of a local
beauty who has her hopes set on him. The
entire show is in Turkish, but there are English subtitles [and also subtitles
available in a dozen other languages.] The
subtitles are a hoot, since they are filled with the sorts of grammatical
mistakes that a rushed and not entirely fluent English speaking translator
might make.
After watching three or four episodes, I got curious as to
whether these characters were actually based on historical figures. Wikipedia
supplied the answer. Ertugrul and Halime
were the parents of Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Empire [that settled the
question whether the two of them would end up together, robbing the series of
some of its suspense, at least for me.]
This show is clearly a cultural part of Turkey’s current turn toward
Islam and away from NATO and the West.
In Episode 11 or so, one of the villains, a Roman Catholic
churchman and supporter of the Templars, who are contemplating another Crusade,
goes to a bookstore [or so it seems to be] in Aleppo, where he encounters a
distinguished elderly man with a full white beard [all the Muslims have beards
except the very young men, and of course the women]. He asks the shop’s proprietor whether he has
a certain book, and is told “of course.”
When he offers to buy it, the elderly chap gives it to him as a gift,
and says, “I wrote it.” As the villain
is leaving with the book, he turns to his flunkey and says, “That man is Ibn Arabi.”
A tone of awe in the villain’s voice led me to look up Ibn
Arabi. Well, as some of you doubtless
know but I did not, Ibn Arabi is one of the most famous figures of all Islam, a
Sufi mystic who wrote countless works and plays a central role in Muslim
religious and intellectual history. It
is a bit like watching a shlock technicolor historical flick in which Charlton
Heston, playing a Roman centurion, meets an old Jew in Jerusalem who says he is
a follower of Jesus and his name is Peter.
Obviously everyone in Turkey knows all of this and gets a
little thrill from such moments. Great
fun.
3 comments:
Given your deep knowledge of and keen interest in Marx, you might find William Roberts' new book on Capital worth a look. (I don't have any immediate plans to read it myself but thought I'd mention it anyway.)
Link:
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10892.html
Or as hyperlinked here
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