Janissaries Versus the Storm Troopers

“You be the Turk and I’ll be Storm Trooper X-G,” shrieked my friend’s 13-year-old son, Sinan, just as I was bringing in another tray full of food to the room where he and his buddy had been camped out since early morning. “You take the cannonball, I’ll get the Galaxy Gun.”

“I want the Galaxy Gun too,” objected Reinaldo, his skinny friend with the very long reddish hair. “The Turk wants technology too!”

Mesmerized, I froze in the doorway. Sinan saw the look on my face and offered me an explanation, to break the spell.

“You can’t have it both ways,” he said. “You cannot be a Janissary, a Turk, and have a Galaxy Gun at the same time. It’s either this or that. It’s against the rules.”

“What are you playing?” I asked.

“Rise of the Nations,” the boys chorused before explaining the rules of the video game, which offers you the opportunity to “dominate 6,000 years of history from the Ancient Age to the Information Age.” On their own, they had spiced up the game with elements of the “Star Wars” saga.

“Why can’t you be a Turk and have a Galaxy Gun too?” I asked.

“Because the Janissaries were elite corps who served the Ottoman sultan,” Sinan said, rolling his eyes. “The game gives you a certain profile for each nation. Turks can excavate, lay siege, pitch grenades, dig tunnels and shoot cannonballs, but they cannot possibly have laser beams. We are fighting a war of two different civilizations here!”

He evinced no qualms over dooming his own people. Born in Istanbul, Sinan came to Michigan at age 5, his dad Turkish, his mom Irish American. Reinaldo on the other hand was Italian American and, I knew, secretly in love with a Lebanese girl in his class.

On the crimson Turkish carpet in front of them, plastic Janissaries wore tall pointed hats and mustaches as big as their heads. The Storm Troopers were metallic robots, each with a carved number on his chest. As I watched the boys fight a preordained battle, it seemed to me they were playing less a clash of civilizations than a war of never-ending prejudice.

*

On Friday, the European Union will decide whether or not to begin full membership talks with Turkey. The possibility has triggered the unconcealed fear of some Europeans as to how “Western” Turkey is and can be.

Turkey has a lot to gain from EU membership, politically, economically and strategically. Meeting the prerequisites -- EU members must be stable democracies with functioning market economies, the rule of law and protection of minorities -- would strengthen Turkey’s civil society and its standard of living. As the sole Muslim member of the powerful European club, Turkey’s role in the Islamic world would be enhanced. Its armed forces would be backed by Europe’s; its young people would gain easier access to good jobs and education.

But Europe also has much to gain from admitting the world’s preeminent Muslim democracy to its club. The Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which will connect Azerbaijan’s oil fields to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, will help it fill its energy needs. Turkey could be a prime source of labor and natural resources for Europe, and its dynamic, young population a prime market for European goods. Turkey could furnish Europe with multicultural credibility in an increasingly globalized and yet factionalized world.

None of this is enough for many Europeans -- who tell pollsters they want to keep Turkey out. They insist on a “clash of civilizations,” with an (imagined) Turkish Janissary and his cannonball on one side and the (imagined) laser-armed European Storm Trooper X-G on the other. But Turkey is not frozen in time and Europe is not a homogenous high-tech society.

The clash, instead, is between enemies of a different sort -- between those on one side who think they can live a life surrounded by people who are just like them, who think and act and dress and talk and pray just like them, who are each other’s mirror images, and those who are ready to welcome ethnic, religious and national diversity, who are not obsessed with their own mirror image. This clash recognizes no map, cutting across national, geographical and religious boundaries.

In some Turkish villages on the Aegean coast there is an enduring custom regarding the mirrors on the walls. They are either covered with dark velvet or have a heavily ornamented, armored back that faces the wall. Aegean peasants, inheritors of a land where for centuries religious and ethnic groups have both succeeded and failed to coexist, believe that mirrors are gateways to the netherworld, that blocking them is a means of protection. In times like this, they may be right.

No one gains if the debate pits a frozen-in-time Janissary against an homogenized-in-place Storm Trooper. Not least because Europe and Turkey share economic, political and strategic aims. Besides, there is something elusively, existentially dangerous about living in front of mirrors, surrounded only by one’s own image day and night, east and west.