TY - JOUR
AU - Gürel, Perin, E
AB - A riveting narrative depicting the entrapment of an American woman and her daughter in Iran, Not without My Daughter may still be the most well-known depiction of post-revolutionary Iran in the United States. According to the 1987 book memoir and the 1991 movie by the same name, Michigan homemaker Betty Mahmoody agreed to visit Iran in 1984 for a short vacation on the assurances of her doctor husband, a native of Iran whom she had married in the United States. Once in the Islamic Republic, however, her husband forced her and their four-year-old daughter Mahtob to stay in the country. She was allowed to get a divorce and leave; however, Iranian custody laws meant she would have had to leave Mahtob behind. She refused: not without my daughter. After a year and a half of intense surveillance and physical and mental abuse at the hands of Dr. Mahmoody and his close relatives, Betty and Mahtob managed to escape across the mountains into Turkey with the help of smugglers. Finding refuge in the U.S. embassy in Ankara, the two flew back to the United States, where Betty Mahmoody became a household name, giving TV interviews, publishing her best-selling memoir, and offering her expertise to the State Department as a consultant. A first-person narrative about inter-cultural marriage, border-crossings, and linguistic struggles, Not without My Daughter itself transcended national and linguistic boundaries. As a memoir and a Hollywood movie, Not without My Daughter met with both praise and criticism, not just in the United States but also in Europe and Australia, as has been well documented, including by Betty Mahmoody herself in the sequel book, For the Love of a Child.1 Its negative reception in Iran as yet another bit of “Zionist propaganda” appears predictable and was reflected in the 2002 documentary Without My Daughter, which aimed to tell Dr. Mahmoody’s side of the story.2 This essay is the first to investigate the text’s reception in Turkey, the neighboring Muslim-majority country that bridged Betty Mahmoody’s escape from Iran to the United States. Here, the book became an immediate best-seller and the movie, screened repeatedly on TV, became one of the most watched foreign movies of the era. Significantly, the text came to suffuse public debates around women’s rights, the boundaries of state and religion, Iran-Turkey relations, and Turkey’s attempts to join the European Union (EU). The United States played a role in these discussions as the champion of a “dual containment” strategy against Iran and Iraq, the exporter of military technology and intelligence to Turkey, and high-profile advocate for Turkey’s European aspirations.3 Equally important, however, was its discursive role as an agenda-setter in international debates around “women’s rights” and “religious freedom” and as the world’s leading exporter of cultural products, such as Not without My Daughter. The so-called “cultural turn” in foreign relations history has propelled a great deal of research into how popular culture products such as Not without My Daughter can both reflect and challenge U.S. foreign policy dogmas. Regarding the Middle East, this research has coalesced around the political effects of Orientalism as a mode of constructing the Orient as the inferior “Other” to Western civilization and interrogates Orientalist and “post-Orientalist” developments in U.S. approaches to the Middle East before, during, and after the Cold War.4 Recent bilingual scholarship has demonstrated the ways in which Orientalism as a configuration of knowledge and power has been more than a one-way street; peoples depicted under this frame by Western discourses have also anticipated, manipulated, and pushed back against imperial knowledge practices through local cultural production and political strategizing.5 Work on Middle Eastern popular cultures has further foregrounded the hybridity of forms emerging under transnational contact and highlighted the many local uses of “America.”6 Americanist work examining the intersections of representation and politics, however, has so far focused on bilateral relations between the United States and a singular state or region (i.e. “the Middle East” or “the Arab World”) without considering how discourses exported by a hegemonic power such as the United States might affect relations between two less powerful states located in the same region. The gap has left under-examined a key question: do local contestations of dominant U.S. discourses about “the Middle East” stop at nation-state boundaries? Can exported American narratives, even in modification, get mobilized against neighboring countries and percolate U.S. political influence in previously unnoticed ways? The intertextual, political resonances established around Not without My Daughter in Turkey offer a compelling case study for exploring the limits and complications inherent in counterhegemonic responses to Orientalism when the depictions target other, even neighboring, countries. Turkey and Iran, the two non-Arab Muslim-majority countries of West Asia, share a 332-mile border that has moved drastically during history, allowing a great deal of contact and transculturation, or cultural mixing.7 However, in the late nineteenth century, both countries also developed their own strands of localized Orientalism, representing the other peoples of the region based on negative Western narratives and motifs that were modified and refocused strategically to serve local political needs.8 The Turkish embrace of Not without My Daughter built upon a longer tradition of marking the modern Turkish self’s difference from the “degraded Oriental self,” this time under the shadow of U.S. political and cultural hegemony.9 An interdisciplinary, multilingual examination of the discursive triangulations which formed between the United States, Turkey, and Iran around this popular culture text demonstrates Orientalism to be a labile political force with multiple domestic and international edges of mobilization. Using Turkish, Iranian, and U.S.-based sources and a comparative and transnational framework, this essay highlights two central factors influencing Not without My Daughter’s long and dynamic Turkish career. In the first section, I examine the impact of Turkey’s own brush with another U.S.-made narrative of bondage, which had wrecked the country’s image a decade and a half ago: Midnight Express (1978). In the second section, I turn to national political battles over the parameters of Turkish secularism (laiklik or laicism), as influenced by international developments, such as Turkey’s efforts to join the EU and official U.S. support for these efforts. Since the country’s founding by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, the system of Turkish laicism had prioritized state control over religion. Thus, the 1924 abolition of the caliphate and the erasure of Islam as state religion from the Constitution four years later were accompanied by the founding of a Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) to oversee religious worship and education across the country.10 Throughout the twentieth century, Turkey’s ruling cadres promoted a state-approved version of Sunni Islam, while working to suppress populist Islam and signifiers of extra-governmental religious authority, at times through military intervention.11 It is, therefore, significant that Not without My Daughter’s success in Turkey occurred during what Mirgün Cabas has called the last years of “Old Turkey,” that is, the last point at which the country’s laicist elite held the reins of power in the military, judiciary, and the government.12 Shaped by the coups of 1980 and 1997, this era saw the implementation of Turkey’s first nation-wide headscarf ban in spaces associated with the state. The ban was highly controversial: it sparked mass protests, arrests, and counter-protests. This essay argues that laicist arguments upholding the ban as a measure against radical Islamism built on U.S. mass media such as Not without My Daughter, but also adjusted American figurations of “Iran” through a logic of imminent contagion. This formulation helped cast the state’s trampling of the political, educational, and occupational rights of headscarf-wearing women as part of its forward-looking defense of those rights: part of a plan to prevent Turkey from “becoming Iran.” In early May 1999, laicist efforts to police the headscarf climaxed in the so-called “Kavakçı affair,” in which a headscarf-wearing Muslim woman representative named Merve Kavakçı was prevented from taking her oath in parliament. The laicist press accused Kavakçı of being an Iranian asset, even as Kavakçı herself appealed to Europe and the United States for support. Turkish policy makers, however, had been correct in sensing that the West was invested in a limited version of “Muslim women’s rights.” The European Court of Human Rights repeatedly rejected devout Turkish women’s complaints about exclusionary laicist policies. Similarly, Kavakçı’s strong personal ties to the United States as a dual citizen could not earn her the support of the Clinton administration, which continued to revel in this “Belle Époque” in United States-Turkey relations.13 Revisiting these final years of “Old Turkey” in an era of closer Turkish-Iranian cultural, economic, and political ties, and strained United States-Turkey relations exacerbated by the ruling Turkish government’s “neo-Ottomanism,” demonstrates how foreign policy changes in West Asia can coincide with ideological shifts in policy-makers’ attitudes towards “the Orient” within the self. It also nuances previous scholarship highlighting the Clinton administration’s elevation of women’s rights as a key foreign policy plank. Iran’s Midnight Express A young American, mostly due to his or her naiveté, gets stuck in a barbarous country where people look, sound, and even smell different. Their food, their toilet habits, their customs are all strange and revolting. Physical and gendered/sexualized violence plays a significant role in the suffering of the protagonist in this foreign land; she or he is stripped of agency, dehumanized, and humiliated. Finally, the American escapes using his or her superior intelligence and bravery, with a little help from luck. The escape scene involves putting on the clothes of the oppressor and “passing” as the native Other in order to cross the border to safety. The hero then shares the story with compatriots in order to warn others. This is the plot of Midnight Express. It is also the plot of Not without My Daughter. Despite real connections to actual events and their focus on two different countries, the plotlines of these two texts are so similar and familiar, because both texts belong in the same genre of literature: the captivity narrative.14 Most vividly associated with the British colonization of North America, captivity narratives had their origins in fantastic European tales of religious wars and enslavement at the hands of Muslim enemies. As Timothy Marr notes, these “old world patterns of disdaining ‘others’ were imported into new world spaces,” helping settler colonialists make sense of new forms of cultural difference and political violence.15 Twentieth century movies about American captivity in Muslim-majority countries, such as Midnight Express and Not without My Daughter, therefore, represent a sort of return to the scene of original difference, to what Edward Said called some of the “deepest and most recurring images of the other” to be found in European and North American cultural production.16 In addition to the captivity plot, the tropes of rape and costume change connect these texts to the long lineage of Orientalist fantasy in the West and, as if by compulsion, appear in the movies even when they are absent in the source text. Based on the memoirs of Billy Hayes and a screenplay by Oliver Stone, Midnight Express depicted the nightmarish travails of a young college drop-out who got caught attempting to smuggle hashish and was thrown into prison in early 1970s Turkey. Directed by Alan Parker, Midnight Express won two Oscars (one for its screenplay and the other for its music) and boosted the notorious “Turkish prison” trope that still thrives in U.S. popular culture.17 In the movie, Hayes escapes prison in a moment of righteous rage by murdering a prison guard who is attempting to rape him. He puts on the guard’s clothes and simply walks out of prison. Hayes’s memoirs by the same name, on the other hand, contain no instances of rape by the prison authorities and there is no stealing of clothes and identities. The escape scene differs drastically in the source text: instead of committing murder in order to protect his bodily integrity, Hayes is transferred to a lower-security island prison and escapes by stealing a dinghy one stormy night. Not without My Daughter’s Betty Mahmoody does escape by putting on Iranian (and later, Kurdish) clothes in both the book and the movie; however, unlike the memoir, this movie also adds an attempted rape scene before the border-crossing. Midnight Express operates as an immediate predecessor and intertextual key to Not without My Daughter, because, in addition to paralleling each other in plot and repeating key Orientalist tropes, the texts also have another significant connection. The co-writer of Betty Mahmoody’s memoirs, on which Not without My Daughter was based, was none other than William Hoffer, the co-author of Billy Hayes’s memoir Midnight Express (1977). Moreover, this connection between the two texts was no coincidence as Betty Mahmoody highlights in For the Love of a Child: It was time to choose a collaborator for my book. I knew whom I wanted: Bill Hoffer, the co-author of Midnight Express, the dramatic account of an American drug smuggler’s escape from a Turkish prison. While in Tehran, I’d heard about street demonstrations against Midnight Express, though the book and the movie based on it were banned there. I wanted to write with the person who’d had such a profound effect on ordinary people in Iran—the people who’d had such a total control over my own life. “You know,” said my agent, “Bill Hoffer is a pretty big author. Maybe he’ll say no.” But I persisted. If this writer could move the Iranian fundamentalists so strongly in absentia, I thought he must be very effective. Perhaps he would say no, but I had to try. Those protestors in Iran would never know just how much they influenced my decision.18 This section is worth quoting at length, because of how easily Mahmoody conflates Turkey and Iran—the scene of her captivity and the neighboring Muslim-majority country she used to bridge her escape. In response, it is necessary to question her claim that huge protests against Midnight Express occurred in Iran during her stay. Despite research involving the Tehran University, Istanbul University, and Atatürk Kitaplığı newspaper archives, neither I nor my assistant Parisa Akbari could find any evidence of such protests. It is also not clear why any such protest would have happened in 1984–86 when Betty Mahmoody was in Iran instead of the late 1970s when the movie came out. Certainly, Iran was rocked by protests in 1978–79, but they did not pertain to Midnight Express. Similarly, it is unlikely that Iranians would have focused too much on protesting a dated movie about Turkey in the mid-1980s when the country was putting all of its energy and resources into fighting Saddam’s Iraq. Of course, the movie would have been banned in post-revolutionary Iran, but that was true for all U.S. films, not to mention a risqué one like Midnight Express, which resembled “a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin,” in the memorable words of Pauline Kael.19 It is more likely that Iranians did not care all that much about Midnight Express; the film was not significant there, at least not until William Hoffer’s second infamous output, Not without My Daughter, appeared. In the United States, the fact that William Hoffer had a hand in both projects was used to market Not without My Daughter, beginning with the cover of the first edition, which announced: “Not without My Daughter. A True Story. By Betty Mahmoody with William Hoffer. Co-author of Midnight Express.” For Iranian observers, on the other hand, the connection operated as a significant political clue. In the documentary Without My Daughter, which focuses on Dr. Mahmoody’s life after the “abduction” of his daughter Mathob by Betty Mahmoody, we see Dr. Mahmoody lecturing to an audience of university students. In response to a question about the author of the book, he uses the connection between Midnight Express and Not without My Daughter to cut off any connection the text had with the real Iran, referring to Hoffer as a “Zionist writer” who “ha[d] taken mine and Betty’s story and used it to attack Iran and Islam.” Dr. Mahmoody attests that this tactic mirrored Hoffer’s previous work in Midnight Express, a film in which a “smuggler’s story” is used to “attack Turkey.”20 Similarly, Alexis Kuros, the Iranian-Finnish director of Without My Daughter, highlighted the connection between the two films in a 2003 interview to reduce the specificity of the Iranian context: “such things could be written about any nation, just as they have been written about the Turks.”21 William Hoffer, who co-wrote these books with significant help from his spouse Marilyn, has claimed political themes are not central to their work: “First and foremost, we're entertainers. Our intention is to spin a yarn.”22 Their yarns, however, have been dyed in the wool with key cultural aspects of U.S. imperialism, including Orientalism, and use the established tools of mainstream American literature, including the captivity narrative. The popular resonance of neither text is an accident. Each takes place in a country with which the United States was experiencing political difficulties at the time of the book’s publication. In the 1970s, the United States was in conflict with Turkey because of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and disagreements over the opium trade; at this point, the U.S. Congress had even begun enforcing an arms embargo against this NATO ally. By the 1980s, these difficulties with Turkey had been mostly resolved in response to the loss of another key U.S. ally with the 1979 Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. In fact, the United States quietly ended its weapons embargo against Turkey in the immediate build up to the Iranian revolution, which converted Iran into a key “enemy” state in American culture and policy.23 Therefore, it is not that surprising that the first movie takes place in Turkey in the 1970s and the other one in Iran in the 1980s. Of course, each movie was filmed largely outside the country it claimed to depict and neither contains key actors from that country, as the accents reveal. Given the similarities and connections between the two movies, it is not surprising that Iranian critiques have often emphasized the overlap between Midnight Express and Not without My Daughter or examined the movie alongside other anti-Iranian and Islamophobic Hollywood movies in order to reduce the story’s connections to Iran as well as to reality.24 What about Turks? Were they aware of the similarities and serious connections between the two texts as well? The popular print publications of the era demonstrate that the answer to this question is yes, immediately. Not without My Daughter first appeared in Turkey as a book in the summer of 1991, which was months after the movie opened in the United States.25 It quickly became a bestseller; by December 1991, it ranked third on the best-sellers list, following two books by Turkish authors.26 On November 20, 1994, the movie was shown in the subscription-based private channel, CINE 5.27 In early October 1995, a screening on the private TV channel Show TV was cancelled at the request of the Iranian government; however, at the end of the same month, Show TV ended up broadcasting the movie anyway.28 After that point, Show TV repeatedly screened the movie and it became one of the most watched foreign movies of the decade.29 In May 1997, Betty Mahmoody visited Turkey and was a guest on the prestigious talk show Durum.30Not without My Daughter bizarrely saturated the Turkish popular culture of the era. Its title came to operate as a proverbial expression, as mainstream newspapers printed various unrelated stories with headlines in its formula: “Not without my son,” “not without my cat,” “not without high heels,” etc.31 Since 1991, when the film first came out in the United States and the book’s Turkish translation appeared, newspapers and magazines in Turkey introduced this new text with references to Midnight Express. The Cumhuriyet book section, which appeared on August 1, 1991, introduced the movie as “Iran’s Midnight Express.”32 A week later, Turkey’s best-selling magazine Aktüel used the same expression: “The Midnight Express is now in Iran.” Aktüel’s write-up even mentioned William Hoffer, describing him as an excellent choice for a co-author because he had proven his expertise at “telling the tale of ‘a poor Westerner who finds himself in a third world country.’”33Aktüel, a deeply laicist magazine, accepted that the film was one-sided. However, it claimed this one-sidedness was not exaggerated and the image depicted was close to Iran’s own depiction of itself. Of course, not every single Turkish author thought the film’s one-sidedness lacked exaggeration or saw such depictions as harmless. After Not without My Daughter’s initial screening at Show TV was halted, Can Dündar, one of Turkey’s most famous journalists, wrote an op-ed denouncing the film as a “cheap piece of American propaganda and racism up to the neck.” He recalled that he had experienced similar feelings when he saw Midnight Express for the first time in a Paris theater. That film’s “intense, sludgy (vıcık vıcık) racism” had meant he exited the cinema in fear once the lights came on, worrying he might be lynched if his Turkish identity became known. “Now Iranians, too, got a Midnight Express,” he announced, validating Iranian concerns.34 As a left-leaning journalist, Dündar confessed no love for either the Iranian system of government or the Turkish prison system. His visceral description of watching Not without My Daughter about Iran after having seen Midnight Express as a Turk is therefore even more remarkable for its capacious empathy with Iranians in the face of Orientalist vilification. His liberal political stance also manifests in his argument that, despite all this, the film should be screened due to the principle of the freedom of the press, perhaps with some balancing discussion afterwards. “Otherwise,” he claimed, “we would be in the situation of ‘not without permission.’”35 As Dündar also wrote, Midnight Express had truly hurt Turkey. Operating as one of the most immediate links with the name “Turkey” in the American consciousness, the film especially damaged the tourism sector.36 Well-known journalist Haluk Şahin calls this film a “cursed Hollywood passport” and discusses how every Turk who has gone abroad has had to deal with the impressions the film had created on Westerners.37 However, interestingly, the immediate associations with Midnight Express did not prevent Not without My Daughter from becoming popular in Turkey. Dündar’s empathy for the maligned Iran was rarely repeated in other mainstream venues. This largely positive reception was shaped by the privatized, sensational media environment of the 1990s, key differences between the two texts, and the contingencies of local politics. First, as the advertising campaigns demonstrate, the parallels and connections with Midnight Express worked as kind of a commercial for Not without My Daughter in Turkey. For the Turkish population, who were prevented from watching Midnight Express by decree, Not without My Daughter provided an opportunity to see what Hollywood had to say about a similar situation in a neighboring country. Newspapers at the time utilized these censorship threats and various polemics around the movie in order to increase the buzz around the TV screenings. For example, in both Hürriyet and Milliyet, the negative reactions to the movie were used to draw in viewers: “The film based on Betty Mahmudi’s book attempts to come to screens once again”; “This time it will be broadcast!”; “The sensational film is on screen again! In addition to those who have liked and praised the film, others have protested it with hatred. Now it is your turn to decide.”38 In 1993, that is, between the years the Turkish translation of the book appeared and the first TV screening of the movie took place, a private TV channel also broadcast Midnight Express for the first time.39 In other words, in the capitalist media landscape of the turn of the century, the two films worked as ads for each other. A second reason why Turks did not dismiss Not without My Daughter out of hand might be that between the late 1970s and 1990s, Hollywood became smarter about hiding its own racism. In Midnight Express, every single Turkish character is bad, including Billy Hayes’s lawyer. As Aslıhan Onaran has written, the film does not have a single Turk who is not “barbaric, dirty, corrupt, and sexually and emotionally exploitative.”40 Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning screenplay confirms this wholesale condemnation of a people with a speech Hayes gives in court, in which he calls Turks “a nation of pigs.” In Not without My Daughter, Betty Mahmoody calls Iran “a backward, primitive country” unfit for raising a child. The plot, the mise-en-scène, and the behavior of the main characters repeatedly corroborate these observations. However, given the long-standing strain of “romantic exoticism” in U.S. narratives about “Persia,” the movie also taps into the duality of Western Persophilia and Iranophobia, valorizing pre-revolutionary Persian culture with references to its arts, while condemning contemporary Iran by associating it with oppression, filth, and violence.41 Thus the film’s “good” Iranians not only embody Western qualities, such as wearing ties and listening to classical music, but also wax poetic about pre-revolutionary Persian gardens. In other words, Not without My Daughter follows what Evelyn Alsultany has called a strategy of “simplified complex representations” in which negative stereotypes are both promoted and “balanced” through various strategies, such as positive representations of people from the same ethnic group.42 Of course, as Alsultany has demonstrated, the presence of sympathetic characters does not necessarily eliminate the problem of racial stereotyping. Instead, it can strengthen ideas about what “good” and “bad” Muslims are and obscure the ways in which such representations can boost unjust policies.43 However, they do make for an easier defense for the producers. Despite pages and pages of negative generalizations about Iranian clothing, food, and toilet habits—not to mention gender and sexual relations—Betty Mahmoody rejected all accusations of racism by emphasizing the presence of the good Iranians in the source text and the movie. Unlike Billy Hayes, scenarist Oliver Stone, and even director Alan Parker, all of whom eventually expressed some regrets about the excesses of Midnight Express and emphasized the fictional nature of the ultimate story depicted, Mahmoody insisted on the direct link between her account and reality to the end: “My life with my husband and our daughter was exactly as I recount in my book. I stand by my story in every detail.”44 Thus it is likely that the different approaches to racial stereotyping, operating alongside the public statements of the texts’ creators, made Turkish audiences less inclined to dismiss Not without My Daughter as a simplistic work of anti-Iranian propaganda. Perhaps the greatest difference explaining the popularity of Not without My Daughter in Turkey may be the fact that Billy Hayes escaped from Turkey to Greece and Betty Mahmoody from Iran to Turkey to get back to the United States. A closer look at the memoir and the movie muddies the sharp Iran/Turkey distinction the broad plotline of border-crossing initially seems to establish. Even though the snowy mountain crossing constitutes a key climax of the book, in the book, the movie, and Betty Mahmoody’s other accounts, Turkey is not at all a special or nice place.45 Its only key significance is that it shares a border with Iran and hosts a U.S. embassy. In fact, Betty initially decides to escape through the Persian Gulf, but her plans change at the last minute due to unforeseen events. The Turkey scenes of the movie appear abrupt and Ankara is made to look like a small, dilapidated village. Ultimately, the only difference between Ankara and Tehran is the presence of the Latin alphabet and the fact that Betty can now walk around without a headscarf. The buildings in Ankara are just like those in Tehran: old, dirty, and about to crumble. However, on the other side of the street stands the U.S. embassy with its Eden-like garden—a visual reference to the beginning scenes of the movie when the family interacted peacefully in the beautiful, green garden of their riverfront home in Michigan.46 Betty Mahmoody herself stated that the border between Turkey and the U.S. embassy was, in some ways, more important than the border between Iran and Turkey. She noted that she lobbied to have the final scene with the US embassy and the American flag flapping in the wind included in the movie: “I countered that crossing the Iran-Turkish border was not our point of security, that we didn’t feel safe until we could see a symbol of security, our flag.”47 Despite the clear ambivalence of the Iran-Turkey border, the fact that Turkey was, for the first time, depicted as, if not a “good” place, at least as a “better” place in Hollywood made Not without My Daughter much more attractive to Turkish viewers. Advertising materials underplayed the Orientalist conflations of the text, sometimes even stating Betty Mahmoody escaped “to Turkey” from Iran, even though her account made clear that she saw herself as escaping home to the United States (via Turkey) from Iran.48 Even if Turkey’s mild goodness did not deliver, Iran’s severe “badness” in the film definitely had special resonance for a significant portion of the Turkish public in the political context of the 1990s. Turkey’s Iran What makes Easterners look at the West decked out in Eastern costumes and say, “this could be us?” In 1990s Turkey, the answer to this question involved a specific item of clothing: the headscarf. In other words, the final reason Not without My Daughter became so popular in Turkey relates to the domestic political climate of the era, specifically prevailing debates around laicism and the headscarf ban. Since the transition to a multiparty system in the 1940s, Turkey had seen parties seeking to change the terms of the hierarchical relationship between the state and religion gain electoral support. In 1974, the Islamist National Salvation Party under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan gained a position in a government coalition. Its rise was halted momentarily with the September 12, 1980 military coup. Although the coup leaders focused most extensively on punishing the left, scholars have argued the coup was also partially initiated in an effort to contain revolutionary Islamism given the recent revolution in neighboring Iran.49 Associated with the rise of Islamist politics were new practices of urban veiling, which had begun to gain visibility in the country, as elsewhere in the region, throughout the 1970s.50 With the 1980 coup came Turkey’s first ever nation-wide ban on headscarves, as the military junta instituted a ban preventing women with headscarves from attending universities, working at government offices, or serving in the parliament.51 Yet the rise of Islamism continued, energized by the struggle against the ban. In 1995 Erbakan’s Refah (Welfare) party came out of the general elections with the largest percentage of votes. Earlier that year, Turkey had signed a Customs Union Agreement with the EU and the rise of Refah with its anti-Western orientation, signified by its leaders’ opposition to joining the EU as well as their wives’ headscarves, generated a panic among the laicist elite. For those laicists demonstrating against the successes of Refah and hoping to keep the headscarf ban in place, Iran became an important trope and attempts to find links between the Turkish Islamists and the Islamic republic next door escalated. Laicist slogans singled out Iran: “Turkey will not become Iran!”; “mollas go to Iran!”52 Laicist politicians vowed “Refah ile Asla” (Never with the Welfare Party), echoing Not without My Daughter’s Turkish title “Kızım Olmadan Asla” (Never without My Daughter), promising they would not form a coalition with the party.53 The association established between Refah’s electoral successes and women’s forced veiling in Iran had grown so strong that the women politicians in Refah felt the need to publicly promise that they were not trying to “turn Turkey into Iran” and that they would not force veiling onto Turkish women.54 Such promises had little effect on the toxic political atmosphere. After the formation of a coalition government between Refah and the center-right True Path party (DYP), Prime Minister Erbakan made his first overseas trip to Iran, further scaring laicists that Turkey was on the way to becoming “another Iran.” On February 28, 1997, Refah was forced out of government by a military memorandum—referred to as a “soft” or “postmodern” coup—and its leaders were banned from participating in politics. Writing next spring, the editorial team of the Iranian magazine Naqd-i Sīnamā, blamed the fall of Refah squarely on Not without My Daughter. Their editorial argued the movie had been “built simply with the aim of denigrating the people of Iran and their religious beliefs.” As a piece of propaganda, it “was used to prevent the spread of Islamic and revolutionary thoughts among the people of the region.” The mission had been successful, as evidenced, among other regional developments, by the fact that “in Turkey, the Refah Party did not continue after a few months and its leaders were taken to court.”55 Of course, an American movie about Iran did not single-handedly spark a coup in Turkey. Not without My Daughter was only one of many texts establishing connections between the rise of political Islam in Turkey and the neighboring Islamic republic. Internationally, the 1990s were marked by an increased focus on Islamism and Islamist terror across the word, as the end of the Cold War saw a redrawing of global power lines.56 Turkey itself saw a rise in separatist Kurdish terrorism after the first Gulf War as well as Islamist terror; the media increasingly drew ties to Iran for both, with various degrees of accuracy.57 Unresolved assassinations of left-wing and laicist opinion-leaders galvanized public opinion, furthering theories of transnational conspiracy. U.S. and Israeli intelligence reports casting Iran as a key exporter of terrorism only added fuel to the fire. Throughout the 1990s, the rhetoric in state-aligned Turkish and Iranian newspapers sporadically escalated to what scholars have called a “symbolic Cold War” or “press war,” highlighting clashing political systems and iconographies.58 Still, key factions of power in Turkey disagreed on the proper foreign policy to follow with regards to Iran. Elected governments alternated their approach from skeptical to warm along a spectrum of laicism/Islamism, the diplomatic corps pushed for stability and balance, and the military establishment pursued a confrontational approach short of armed conflict.59 With the 1997 “postmodern” coup, the military’s perspective would become dominant, overlap with that of the laicist coalition government that had replaced Refah, and boost the hardline rhetoric emanating from the media cartels. The generals who led the 1997 coup, which had ousted Refah from power, initiated a neo-republican process (called “the February 28th process”) aimed at suppressing populist Islam and began to reinforce the headscarf ban more strictly. In this intense environment, the Fazilet (Virtue) Party, which had emerged as Refah’s successor, began drawing suspicions of pushing for an Iranian-style Islamic republic. In early May 1999, a democratically elected Fazilet representative named Merve Kavakçı was prevented from taking her oath in parliament, because she was wearing a headscarf. Throughout the Kavakçı crisis, from the top levels of the Turkish government down to the people on the street, Iran-baiting became an important tool for supporters of the Turkish headscarf ban. President Süleyman Demirel stated that the path of Kavakçı, the “agent provocateur,” risked turning the country into Iran and Prime Minister Ecevit made a speech arguing Iran’s attempts to export its ideology was behind the chaos unleashed by the headscarf crisis.60 Laicist newspapers began publishing images of Iranian women in black chadors who had gathered in support of Kavakçı (Figure 1). “Here are her friends!” exclaimed a front-page headline in Sabah under one such photo, counting on the black chadors and the photo of the bearded, turbaned Ayatollah Khamenei to make the point that Kavakçı’s behavior had put her beyond the pale of Turkishness.61 Provoked by the nationalist rhetoric, Turkish women and men came out in droves to protest Kavakçı, this time yelling, “Merves go to Iran!” Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide “Support for Merve from Iran,” Hürriyet, May 9, 1999, 28. This photograph of Iranian women in black chadors supporting Merve Kavakçı appeared in multiple laicist newspapers, including Hürriyet, Milliyet, and Sabah, on May 9, 1999. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide “Support for Merve from Iran,” Hürriyet, May 9, 1999, 28. This photograph of Iranian women in black chadors supporting Merve Kavakçı appeared in multiple laicist newspapers, including Hürriyet, Milliyet, and Sabah, on May 9, 1999. Kavakçı was also marginalized by Turkish feminists during this entire process, including the members of KA.DER, a feminist non-profit organization that was founded to support women’s political candidacies.62 After Kavakçı was denied the oath, KA.DER released a statement in favor of regulations in women’s dress at the parliament, asking stipulations requiring “an uncovered head” to be made explicit.63 A year before, the organization had published a book about the electoral rights of women titled Not without Women in allusion to Not without My Daughter.64 The collection did include an interview with another female member of Fazilet, Nazlı Ilıcak, who was not wearing a headscarf, which suggested KA.DER’s stance against Kavakçı was directly focused on the candidate’s appearance as opposed to her party’s platform.65 Thus a Hollywood movie that claimed to advocate for women's rights in Iran was used to justify denying the first elected woman representative with a headscarf her seat in parliament in Turkey. Given the intensity of the rhetoric against Iran activated by the Kavakçı affair, Tehran called the Turkish ambassador in for an explanation.66 On May 11, 1999, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Seyed Kamal Kharazi asked the Turkish government to moderate its rhetoric against Iran: “The events unfolding in Turkey are not related to the Islamic Republic of Iran and we hope the Turkish state will evaluate its domestic problems with a realistic outlook and not attribute them to others.”67 However, the triangulated politics of representation between Iran, Turkey, and the United States did not only flow in one direction. Iran used Turkey as a convenient domestic motif as well. Even though Iranian state-aligned media made sure to emphasize the non-governmental aspect of the protests organized to support Kavakçı, a great deal of the outrage was clearly encouraged by elements within the state.68 Throughout May 1999, every single Iranian newspaper published at least one article, and often more, about the Turkish headscarf crisis every day. Editorials and editorial cartoons published in state-aligned outlets condemned the Turkish regime and glorified Kavakçı in the strongest terms.69 Just as Turkish visions of Iran built on American popular culture exports, Iranians saw imperialist fingers behind Turkish laicism. During this period, the Iranian media highlighted Turkey’s associations with both the United States and Israel, publicizing political ties and military collaborations alongside articles lionizing Kavakçı and maligning the Turkish state.70 Although the United States figured as a negative association in Iranian depictions of Turkey in such news, when groups within the United States criticized Turkey’s headscarf ban, the Iranian media was quick to publicize that as well.71 Thus, the ruling elite in each country critiqued the other’s undemocratic structures in order to justify their own injustices—often using the United States as a reference point. For the laicist Turkish newspapers, the images of Iranian women in chadors supporting Kavakçı was enough to prove that the Iranian hardliners were behind the chaos Kavakçı had unleashed. Indeed, conservative Iranian woman MPs such as Nayereh Akhavan-Bitaraf and Dr. Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi were vocal on the issue, the former making a speech in support of Merve Kavakçı in the name of all women representatives at the Parliament and the latter headlining a protest at Tehran University.72 However, a significant portion of the support for Kavakçı in Iran came from women reformists, including Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani and Dr. Zahra Rahnavard. These women were trailblazers in their own right. At the time, Rahnavard, who is currently under house arrest for her role in the “green movement” of 2009, was the first woman to lead a university in Iran. She made a speech during the pro-Kavakçı protests at El Zahra University and wrote an open letter of support to Kavakçı, stating, “Sister Merve Kavakçı, you are victorious and the nation that has produced you and chosen you will last forever.”73 For such statements, the laicist Turkish press accused her of “insolence” (küstahlık).74 Faezeh Hashemi, daughter of former president Rafsanjani and the founder of the reformist women’s newspaper Zan, which was banned within a year of its founding, was serving in the Iranian parliament as Kavakçı was ejected from the Turkish one. As an editorial by the famous Iranian satirist Siyyid Ibrahīm Nabavī put it, Kavakçı’s outside appearance was a problem for the Turkish parliament, but not her political “contents,” whereas the reverse had been true for Hashemi, whose reformist views exposed her to criticism and, eventually, even arrest and interrogation during the green movement.75 On May 12, 1999, Hashemi also sent a letter of support to Merve Kavakçı, asking her to not think of herself as alone in her struggle.76 Kavakçı rejected such offers of sisterhood and solidarity wholesale, arguing “there's nothing to be gained from support which comes from a state that curbs freedoms.”77 Her unequivocal rejection of these Iranian women reformists was likely strategic given what “Iran” as a whole signified to her Turkish detractors, but it also reflected an unwillingness to see or articulate important divisions among Iranian political actors, despite dealing with similar divisions in a Turkish context. The rejection remains a missed opportunity in the history of transnational Islamic feminist solidarity. In fact, Kavakçı appears to have had little knowledge of the Iranian women’s rights movement, since she did not have significant ties with Iran despite laicist allegations. Instead, she was a dual Turkish and U.S. citizen, who had completed her higher education in the United States and who cited the American civil rights movement as a point of inspiration and comparison in her press release.78 Eventually, this strong connection to the West, not her purported ties to Iran, would lead to her downfall, allowing the courts to strip her of her Turkish citizenship through the selective application of a law governing dual citizenship. Scholars such as Karen Garner and Kelly Shannon have demonstrated that the Clinton administration was “historic” in its willingness to let women’s rights concerns override more traditional policy imperatives, in denying recognition to the new regime in Afghanistan, for example.79 Adopting a human rights framework emphasizing personal choice in her speeches, Kavakçı likely expected a similar show of solidarity from the neoliberal West. In addition to referencing the U.S. civil rights movement as analogy, she declared she welcomed support from the United States in general, in contrast to the Iranian support she received and rejected wholesale. She also insisted denying her seat in parliament was incompatible with Turkey’s attempts to join the EU.80 However, the particular breach of Muslim women’s rights under Turkey’s headscarf ban was not a foreign-policy deal breaker for either the EU or for the United States. The Kavakçı crisis touched upon two ascendant U.S. foreign policy concerns of the 1990s: “women’s rights” and “religious freedom.” Unlike the generally laudatory tone of the scholarship on the elevation of “women’s rights as human rights” in the Clinton era, studies of the institutionalization of “religious freedom” as a foreign policy tool during the same period via the 1998 U.S. International Freedom Act (IRFA) register skepticism about the role of the religious right in directing foreign policy, raise questions about the post-Cold War expansion of U.S. power, and highlight contested definitions of religious/secular.81 Any distinction between the largely liberal-driven push for “women’s rights” and largely conservative-driven instrumentalization of “religious freedom” in U.S. foreign policy, however, disappears when we compare the similar outcomes the two platforms generated in relation to Turkey’s headscarf ban. The response to the headscarf crisis from both the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress and the Democratic president who had just survived impeachment (albeit with improved approval ratings) was muted. Kavakçı’s plight spurred scattered protests from U.S.-based non-governmental groups and earned a word of condemnation from Robert Seiple, the United States’ first ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, during a speech he gave at the Los Angeles Islamic Center.82 The State Department’s Annual Report on International Religious Freedom noted the controversy in one paragraph. However, Turkey was not mentioned even once in the Congressional hearings that followed.83 The 1999 Country Report on Human Rights similarly allocated only a few paragraphs to human rights abuses associated with the Turkish state’s campaign against Islamic “reactionaries,” in contrast to the many pages detailing abuses associated with the fight against Kurdish separatism. Relating Kavakçı’s plight in one paragraph under the “Freedom of Religion” section, the document authors registered something akin to relief that the citizenship issue had nullified the debate over the right to wear the headscarf in the Turkish national assembly. The document described the issue as “the personal controversy over Kavakçı's right to wear a headscarf in Parliament.” It noted the question “became largely moot after Kavakçı was stripped of Turkish citizenship for failing to notify authorities that she had acquired a foreign nationality.”84 Of course, the headscarf ban was hardly a “personal controversy” limited to Kavakçı’s unique circumstances, but a structural injustice impacting countless women and girls. However, given Kavakçı’s personal circumstances, it is significant that neither report acknowledged that the “foreign nationality” Kavakçı had acquired was that of the United States, which would have made this an abuse of human rights experienced by an American citizen—paralleling Betty Mahmoody’s story. President Clinton did not make a public speech about the issue. With an ongoing NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, the administration’s “women’s rights” plank during this period was the use of rape as a weapon of war in Kosovo—a concern the United States shared with its NATO ally, Turkey.85 On November 15, 1999, the president got an opportunity to give his first speech to the same Turkish parliament that had kicked Kavakçı out. The speech did not contain a word on the headscarf crisis and, instead, commended the government on the “momentum” it had established towards “deepening democracy at home.”86 In response, the laicist Turkish press lionized Clinton as one of its own. “Like a Turk” exclaimed a Sabah headline.87 Whatever “Turkishness” Kavakçı had lost through her symbolic association with Iran and her actual ties with the United States, President Clinton seemed to have gained, partially by not mentioning Kavakçı. Similarly, the EU demonstrated Turkey’s ruling elite had been correct to choose laicism in the balance against human rights in order to demonstrate its fitness for EU membership, as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) repeatedly ruled against the right of Turkish women to wear headscarves in state institutions.88 When ECHR did validate one of Kavakçı’s grievances in 2007, it was only with regard to her electors’ right to choose a representative, not her own right to wear a headscarf in the parliament.89 These official Western declarations underplaying or upholding the headscarf ban echoed Hollywood depictions that imagined violations of Muslim women’s rights happened only under Islamic extremism or during times of sectarian violence. They legitimized Turkey’s own practice of denying millions of Turkish women their rights to education and political participation under the guise of protecting the same women from an Iran-like future in which their rights would be trampled. On (Not) Becoming Iran Media such as Not without My Daughter tapped into real, structural injustices associated with the Iranian dress code and unequal divorce and custody laws, as well as widespread concerns regarding international child abduction cases. In fact, as a divorced mother of two, Kavakçı herself had been involved in a story similar to Betty Mahmoody’s: she had secretly spirited her daughters away from Texas to Turkey, and away from her Jordanian-American ex-husband, in 1998.90 However, Turkey’s media cartels, the ruling elite, and feminists of various stripes could have certainly drawn a more nuanced picture of Iran than the one offered by Hollywood. The era between the entry of Not without My Daughter into Turkey and the expulsion of Merve Kavakçı from the parliament overlapped with the eras of “pragmatism” under President Rafsanjani (1989–1997) and reform under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). During this period Iranian women made significant gains in literacy, higher education, and employment levels and their voices were increasingly heard in the press and in the parliament, claiming rights to political and civil careers.91 Contestation and reformation of family laws through pragmatic collaborations and Islamically-grounded reinterpretations followed.92 All this should have confirmed Iran was far from a Hollywood monolith and the Turkish press did acknowledge the significance of Khatami’s election and select reforms. Yet, the years that saw a softening of the hardline ideological orientation of the Islamic republic also witnessed the rise of the neo-republican February 28th process in Turkey, marked by the primacy of ideologically-motivated politics under the shadow of the military. Operating at the intersection of international relations and local politics, turn-of-the-century Turkish Orientalism regularly sacrificed realpolitik with Iran for the maintenance of an unpopular version of laicism and its flagship ban on headscarves. The localized Turkish Orientalism of the 1990s fed upon U.S. media, such as Not without My Daughter, but also differed from U.S. Orientalisms due to its trope of immanent contagion. As Makdisi points out, in Said’s formulation, the Orient represented the antithesis of the Western self; there was not and could not be any genuine overlap between the two.93 However, just as Ottoman Orientalism had attempted to subdue “the Orient” within the self, late twentieth century representations of Iran functioned not as complete antitheses to an imagined Turkish reality, but as comments on a feared, “backwards” Turkish future. Beginning with the first book ads for the Turkish translation, advertising campaigns for Not without My Daughter emphasized the proximity of the events taking place (“neighbor country Iran”) and positioned the tale as a “warning” (ibret) for Turks.94 The common trope of “Will Turkey become like Iran?” demonstrated this deep concern with the risk of metamorphosis through contagion.95 Kavakçı’s ordeal occasioned indirect debates within the Iranian reformist press regarding whether veiling was a divine requirement or a recommendation and whether its reinforcement by worldly authority was justified.96 The story also served as a reference point for Iranian women representatives who would soon begin lobbying for the right to wear headscarves and long coats instead of chadors under the sixth majlis (2000–2004).97 However, newspaper images of Iranian women in chadors supporting Kavakçı confirmed the existence of a slippery slope of veiling operating in the opposite direction to many Turks. After all, Iranian women had “lost rights and freedoms” as the Iranian revolution had coalesced into an Islamic one.98 Similarly, the small, loose headscarf Betty Mahmoody had put on as she disembarked from the plane in Tehran had transformed into an oversized black chador by the end of Not without My Daughter. Unlike the American captive who could put on the clothes of the Easterner without any risk to his or her essential Western identity, the laicist Turkish public feared the clothes of the proximate other would confirm their own essential backwardness/Easternness at a time when they were seeking entry into the EU and enjoying a “golden age” in United States-Turkey relations.99 Despite such fears of “becoming” Iran, most Turks knew little about the neighboring state. The laicist media’s approach remained as superficial as that of the U.S. media, focused on images of women in chadors, bearded Ayatollahs, and the inscrutable script. Newspapers regularly conflated Arab and Iranian support for Kavakçı, one reprinting a pro-Merve Kavakçı headline from an Iranian newspaper and attributing to it to the “Arab” press (Figure 2).100 Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The Turkish newspaper Sabah reporting on the support for Merve Kavakçı from the Middle East reproduced a headline in Farsi and misidentified it as a product of the “Arab” (Arap) press. The original headline, titled “the war of hejab in Turkey has escalated,” appeared on the front page of Iran newspaper on May 10, 1999. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide The Turkish newspaper Sabah reporting on the support for Merve Kavakçı from the Middle East reproduced a headline in Farsi and misidentified it as a product of the “Arab” (Arap) press. The original headline, titled “the war of hejab in Turkey has escalated,” appeared on the front page of Iran newspaper on May 10, 1999. This inability to differentiate between Persian and Arabic was a direct result of Turkey’s alphabet reform of 1928 and the re-alignment of foreign language education towards French and German (and away from Persian and Arabic) under Atatürk in the early twentieth century.101 The “threatening” script in the news about Merve Kavakçı would have been symbolic for the portion of the country that fretted about the illegal Qur’an schools teaching Arabic to young kids, deviating from the state-approved version of Sunni Islam promoted by the Ministry of Education. Even though the newspaper’s name Sabah (Eng: morning) comes from Arabic and is cognate with the Farsi word, the mistake highlighted how far Turkey was from “becoming” Iran, and how little its pundits knew about the neighboring country with which Turkey was so often compared and even conflated. In the final scene of Not without My Daughter, a bus drops off Betty Mahmoody and her daughter in front of a run-down building in Ankara. A sign advertising a photography shop in capital letters features prominently on the building. It reads, “Gözde Color.” The presence of a European-looking umlaut (ö) and an English word spelled in the standardized American format (“color”) on top of the grimy, Middle Eastern-style building barely hides the implied “backwardness” of Turkey, but it does signify the relative safety of the country for Americans. It affirms what the National Geographic called “a less forbidding environment” to the Western eye in its celebratory coverage of Turkey’s alphabet reform.102 Like the Latin alphabet, the ban on headscarves gave Turks something to mark their auxiliary status to Europe on basic visual terms. The laicists were loath to lose this questionable privilege. Of course, the fact that Not without My Daughter became so popular in Turkey does not mean that everyone who watched the movie believed the story was true and liked it. Or that the movie’s fans were all laicists supportive of the headscarf ban. Perhaps many Turks were able to keep in mind the similarities between Midnight Express and its Iranian cousin, watching the film out of interest without a commitment to its politics. Dündar’s essay about watching Not without My Daughter after Midnight Express, like the fact that Turkey resisted sanctions against post-revolutionary Iran after experiencing its own brush with a punitive U.S. embargo in the 1970s, demonstrated the potential for nuance and empathy.103 Yet, Hollywood’s Not without My Daughter was certainly one of the most readily available sources of “information” about Iran in the 1990s, made all the more potent by the intense emotions it could awaken as a captivity narrative. It operated intertextually to help Turks make sense of key political developments, including the electoral rise of Islamism, the headscarf ban, and their shaky prospects for membership in the EU. Hollywood’s Iran became Turkey’s Iran, despite the still-fresh memories of Midnight Express, because this vision served the domestic policy goal of upholding laicism and the (often-overlapping) foreign policy goal of positioning Turkey as “Western,” in contrast to its “Islamic” neighbors.104 It is illuminating to revisit this history in the light of contemporary United States-Turkey-Iran relations. Since 2001, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has established a new (and much criticized) accommodation between state and religion in Turkey and the headscarf ban has been scrapped in a piecemeal fashion.105 Turkey has not “become” Iran, but has certainly developed a new approach to relations with its Eastern neighbor. Under AKP rule, Turkey increased trade with Iran, defied economic sanctions against the state via secret deals, and held meetings with Iranian leaders on various issues, including regional security, all the while remaining a NATO member and an applicant for membership in the EU. Under AKP’s “neo-Ottomanist” foreign policy, Turkey’s cultural impact on the rest of the region, including Iran, has also increased.106 Currently, the most popular banned media exports in Iran may be Turkish TV series, which have, once again, united the Iranian left and the right around a cultural foe, earning condemnation from both government hardliners and superstar scholars.107 Although the United States remains a persistent and powerful presence in Southwest Asia, the contours of its involvement as the hegemonic third actor in intra-regional relations has clearly been modified in the twenty-first century. Of course, it would be naïve to view these developments simply as the establishment of a much-needed anti-racist, anti-imperialist solidarity as opposed to the establishment of a new series of hegemonies and autocratic formations at the local, national, and transnational levels. The renewed regional solidarity between Turkey and Iran certainly seems far from the democratic camaraderie Iranian women reformists sought in the late 1990s as they envisioned pushing against two patriarchal regimes as sisters across nation-state lines. However, it does demonstrate how shifting attitudes towards the “Orient” within the self, reflected in new media practices, can coincide with new approaches to foreign relations. Footnotes 1 Betty De Hart, “Not Without My Daughter: On Parental Abduction, Orientalism and Maternal Melodrama,” European Journal of Women's Studies 8, no.1 (2001): 51–65; Betty Mahmoody with Arnold D. Dunchock, For the Love of a Child (New York, 1992). 2 Kari Tervo and Alexis Kouros, dirs. Without My Daughter (Helsinki, Dream Catcher, 2002), DVD; Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Shi'i Islam in Iranian Cinema: Religion and Spirituality in Film (London, 2011), 1–2. 3 Robert Olson, Turkey-Iran Relations, 1979–2004: Revolution, Ideology, War, Coups and Geopolitics (Costa Mesa, CA, 2004). For “dual containment,” see Sasan Fayazmanesh, The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (London, 1991). 4 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), 284–329; Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945, 1st ed., rev. (Berkeley, CA, 2005); Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (Cambridge, 2006); Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, 2nd ed. (New York, 2009); Matthew F. Jacobs, Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); Kelly J. Shannon, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA, 2018). 5 See, for example, James G. Carrier, ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (New York, 1995); Mohamed Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York, 2001); Meltem Ahıska, “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 351–379; Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2005); Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Ithaca, NY, 2009); Cemil Aydın, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York, 2007); Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014); Brian T. Edwards, After the American Century: The Ends of U.S. Culture in the Middle East (New York, 2016); Salim Yaqub, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Ithaca, NY, 2016); Perin E. Gürel, The Limits of Westernization: A Cultural History of America in Turkey (New York, 2017). For overviews, see Ussama Makdisi, “After Said: The Limits and Possibilities of a Critical Scholarship of U.S.-Arab Relations,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 (2014): 657–684 and Perin E. Gürel, “Contested Encounters: Boundaries of American Studies and the Middle East,” American Literary History 29, no. 3 (2017): 579–591. 6 For example, Walter Armbrust, ed., Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia, PA, 2005); Gayatri Devi and Najat Rahman, ed. Humor in Middle Eastern Cinema (Detroit, MI, 2014); Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman, ed., Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa: A Postcolonial Outlook (New York, 2013). 7 For “transculturation,” see Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (Durham, NC, 1995), 98; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992). 8 Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768–96; Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311–42; Sabri Ateş, “Oryantalism ve Bizim Doğumuz,” doğudan 1, no. 1 (September-October 2007): 38–56; Edhem Eldem, “Ottoman and Turkish Orientalism,” Architectural Design 80, no. 1 (2010): 26–31; Mohammed S.H. Alsulami, Iranian Orientalism: Notions of the Other in Modern Iranian Thought (Leiden, 2014). 9 Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 770. 10 Ümit Cizre Sakallıoğlu, “Parameters and Strategies of Islam-State Interaction in Republican Turkey,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 231–251; Andrew Davison, “Turkey, A Secular State? The Challenge of Description,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 333–350; Kim Shively, “Taming Islam: Studying Religion in Secular Turkey,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 3 (2008): 683–711; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ, 2008), 66–72; Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, “Transformation of the Turkish Diyanet both at Home and Abroad: Three Stages,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 27 (2018): https://doi.org/10.4000/ejts.5944. 11 Murat Akan, The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (New York, 2017), 135. 12 Mirgün Cabas, 2001: Eski Türkiye’nin Son Yılı (Istanbul, 2017). 13 Armağan Emre Çakır, The United States and Turkey's Path to Europe: Hands across the Table (New York, 2016), 147. Italics in original. 14 Hossein Nazari, “Not without My Daughter: Resurrecting the American Captivity Narrative,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 34, no. 1 (2017): 23–48. 15 Marr, Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, 3. 16 Said, Orientalism, 9. 17 Midnight Express, dir. Alan Parker (Casablanca Filmworks, 1978). Kent F. Schull, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh, 2014), 3. 18 Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child, 21. 19 Pauline Kael, “Midnight Express,” The New Yorker, November 27, 1978, 182. 20 Kari Tervo and Alexis Kouros, dirs. Without My Daughter (Helsinki, Dream Catcher, 2002), DVD. 21 Ḥusiyn Qurbān-Zādih, “Chirāgh-quvvih-ī bih samt-i sharq, guft-u-gū bā Alexis Kouros, kārgardān-i fīlm-i bidūn-i dukhtaram hargiz,” Sūrih-yi Andishih, no. 1 (2003): 53. 22 Loraine Page, “Not without Each Other,” Writer's Digest 74, no. 11 (1994): 50. 23 Ömer Faruk Görçün, 1979 İran İslam Devrimi Sonrasi Türkiye-İran İlişkileri (Istanbul, 2008), 127. 24 For example, ʿAli Fallāḥī, “Sīnamā-yi Hālīvūd va ʿamalīyāt-i ravānī alayh-i Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī-yi Irān,” Muṭāliʿāt-i ‘Amalīyāt-i Ravānī, no. 21 (2009): 106–133; Mahsā Māh-Pīshānīyān, “Silāḥ-hā-yi risānih-ī-yi Āmrīcā dar jang-i narm bā Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī-yi Irān,” Muṭāli‘āt-i ‘Amalīyāt-i Ravānī, no. 27 (2010): 173–183; Rūbīnā Rāmijī and Amīr Yazdīyān, “Bāznamāyī-yi musalmānān dar Hālīvūd,” Taṣvīr-Nāmih, no. 3 (2012): 69–91; ‘Abdullāh Bīcharānlū, Bāznamāyī-i Irān va Islām dar Hālīvūd (Tehran, 2012); Siyyid Ḥusiyn Sharafiddīn and Siyyid Mihdī Ganjīyānī, “Hālīvūd va tuṭiʾih-yi Islām-harāsī bā shigird-i nufūz dar nākhudāgāh,” Ma‘rifat-i Farhangī Ijtimā‘ī, no. 16 (2013): 99–124; Sīyāvash Ṣalavātīyān and Siyyid Muḥammad Riżā Siyyidī, “Tadvīn-i rāhburd-hā-yi sāzmān-i ṣidā va sīmā-yi Jumhūrīy-yi Islāmī-yi Irān dar jang-i narm (Muṭāli‘ih-yi muridī-i ḥuzi-yi maḥṣūlāt-i namāyish-i khārijī),” Radio Television, no. 27 (2015): 118–123. 25 Betty Mahmudi, “Kızım olmadan asla,” Book Ad, Cumhuriyet, July 25, 1991, 13. This and all other translations from Turkish and Persian are by the author, unless noted otherwise. 26 “Zirvedekiler,” Milliyet, December 29, 1991, 10. 27 CINE 5, Milliyet, November 20, 1992, 8. 28 “Bu kez yayınlanıyor,” Milliyet, October 30, 1995, 28. 29 “1995’de en çok izlenen yabancı filmlerde yine Star önde,” Ad, Milliyet, January 17, 1996, 14. 30 “Büyük buluşma,” Hürriyet, May 11, 1997, 24. 31 “Oğlum olmadan asla,” Milliyet, April 1, 1994, 28; “Kedim olmadan asla,” Sabah, May 14, 1997, 23; “Yüksek ökçe olmadan asla!” Sabah, November 11, 2006, accessed August 21, 2018, http://arsiv.sabah.com.tr/2006/11/11/cp/gnc103-20061111-101.html. 32 “Batılı bir ana-kız,” Cumhuriyet, August 1, 1991, 5. 33 “İran’da bir Amerikalı,” Aktüel, no. 3 (August 6–14, 1999), 89. 34 Can Dündar, “Kızım olmadan asla” (October 5, 1995), reprinted in Büyülü Fener (Istanbul, 2012), 80. 35 Ibid. 36 Pınar Yanmaz, “Turizm tanıtımında sinemanın rolü,” Gümüşhane Üniversitesi İletişim Fakültesi Elektronik Dergisi no. 2 (2011): 112–139; Dilek Kaya Mutlu, “The Midnight Express (1978) Phenomenon and the Image of Turkey,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25, no. 3 (2005): 475–96. 37 Haluk Şahin, “Midnight Express 20 Years Later: A Turkish Nightmare,” New Perspectives Quarterly 15, no. 5 (1998): 21. 38 “Kızım olmadan asla,” Hürriyet, TV Guide, October 30, 1995, 24; “Bu kez yayınlanıyor,” Milliyet, October 30, 1995, 28; “Kızım olmadan asla,” Milliyet, February 7, 1997, 24. 39 Mutlu, “The Midnight Express (1978) Phenomenon,” 490. 40 Aslıhan Tokgöz Onaran, “Öteki’ne bakış: Batılı ve ‘öteki’ Türk kimlikleri arasındaki ilişkinin Amerikan sinemasında imgelenmesi” in Kimlikler lütfen: Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nde kültürel kimlik arayışı ve temsili, ed. Gönül Pultar (Ankara, 2009), 435. 41 For romantic exoticism, see Marr, Roots of American Islamicism, 13; Hamid Dabashi, Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene (Cambridge, MA, 2015). 42 Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11 (New York, 2012), 21. 43 Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims, 28. 44 Onaran, “Öteki’ne bakış,” 439; Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child, 268. 45 Betty Mahmoody and William Hoffer, Not without My Daughter: The Harrowing True Story of a Mother’s Courage (New York, 1991), 399. 46 Zahrā Āqājānī, “Taḥlīl-i nishānih-shinākhtī-yi fīlm-i bidūn-i dukhtaram hargiz,” Naqd-i Adabī 1, no. 1 (2008): 171; Brian Gilbert, dir., Not without My Daughter (Hollywood, CA, Pathé, 1991), DVD. 47 Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child, 243. See also, Kari Hawkins, “American Flag Was ‘Point of Safety’ For Mother, Daughter Held Prisoner in Iran,” States News Service, March 26, 2010, accessed August 16, 2018, https://www.army.mil/article/36449/american_flag_was_point_of_safety_for_mother_daughter_held_prisoner_in_iran. 48 See, for example, “Kızım olmadan asla,” Hürriyet, October 30, 1995, 24. 49 Süleyman Elik, Iran-Turkey Relations, 1979–2011: Conceptualising the Dynamics of Politics, Religion and Security in Middle-Power States (New York, 2012), 37. 50 Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America (New Haven, CT, 2011), 68–116. 51 For a thorough history of the ban and complications associated with it, see Cihan Aktaş, Türbanın yeniden icadı (Istanbul, 2006). 52 Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, NJ, 2002), 25. 53 Merve Kavakçı Islam, Headscarf Politics in Turkey: A Postcolonial Reading (New York, 2010), 67. 54 Nilüfer Arat, “Refahlı kadınlar: İran olmayacağız,” Milliyet, March 8, 1997, 26. 55 “Dast-hā-yi pusht-i pardih (pīsh-gūyīhā-yi Nūstirādāmūs),” Naqd-i Sīnamā, no. 13 (1998): 182. 56 John Calabrese, “Turkey and Iran: Limits of a Stable Relationship,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 25, no. 1 (1998): 75–94. The rise of “Clash of Civilizations” rhetoric epitomized this turn in the United States, see Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic, September 1990, 47–60; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, accessed October 21, 2019, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/48950/samuel-p-huntington/the -clash-of-civilizations. 57 Betül Özyılmaz, “Türkiye-İran ilişkilerinde belirleyici etmen olarak karşılıklı algılar,” in İran: Değişen iç dinamikler ve Türkiye-İran ilişkileri, ed. Soyalp Tamçelik (Ankara, 2014), 296–8; Bayram Sinkaya, “Türkiye-İran ilişkilerinde çatışma noktaları ve analizi,” in 4. Türkiye-İran ilişkileri sempozyumu (Ankara, 2008), 51; Bülent Keneş, İran: tehdit mi, fırsat mı? (Istanbul, 2012), 125–136. 58 Süha Bölükbaşı, Türkiye ve yakınındaki ortadoğu (Ankara, 1992), 101–106; Keneş, İran, 105–106. 59 Keneş, İran, 142. 60 “Ajan provokatörü bilerek söyledim,” Hürriyet, May 5, 1999, 1; “İran kendi ideolojisini ihraç için çalışıyor,” Hürriyet, May 10, 1999, 24. 61 “İşte dostları,” Sabah, May 9, 1999, front page. 62 Kavakçı Islam, Headscarf Politics in Turkey, 112. 63 Ruhat Mengi, “KA.DER niye sessiz?” Sabah, May 14, 1999, 8. 64 Yağmur Atsız, “Kadınlar olmadan asla,” Milliyet, March 8, 1999. 65 Yeşim Arat and Zeynep Göğüş, eds., Kadınlar olmadan asla (İstanbul, 1998), 194–197. 66 “Safīr-i Turkīyih dar Tehran bih vizārat-i umūr-i khārijih iḥżār shud,” Hamshahrī, May 9, 1999, 2. 67 “Pāsukh-i Duktur Kharrāzī bih izhārāt-i bī-asās-i maqāmāt-i Turkīyih,” Irān, May 9, 1999, 14. 68 Görçün, 1979 İran İslam devrimi, 113. See, for example, “NGOs Support Scarf-Wearing Turkish MP,” Tehran Times, May 11, 1999, accessed October 15, 2018, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/36095/NGOs-Support-Scarf-Wearing-Turkish-MP. 69 See for example, “Kābūs-i lāyīk-hā” (editorial cartoon), Kiyhān, May 9, 1999, last page. 70 Mihdī Guljān, “Lāyīk-hā, ḥijāb va dastān-i Āmrīkā,” Kiyhān, May 5, 1999, 16; “Turkīyih panjāh farvand hilī-kūptir-i nizāmī az Āmrīkā mīkharad,” Hamshahrī, May 18, 1999, 15. 71 “Salb-i tābiʿīyat-i Kāvākchī, lakki-yi nangī dar tārīkh-i sīyasī-i Turkīyih ast,” Kiyhān, May 16, 1999, 16. 72 “Himāyat-i zanān-i Irānī az Marvih Kāvākchī,” Zan-i Ruz, no. 3, May 10, 1999, 7; “Namāyandigān-i zan-i majlis, barkhurd-i dulat-i Turkīyih bā namāyandih-yi muḥajjabih-yi pārlimān-i īn kishvar rā bih shiddat maḥkūm kardand,” Jumhūrī-yi Islāmī, May 6, 1999, 12. 73 “Shakhṣīyat-hā, sāzmān-hā va dafātir-i umūr-i zanān mukhālifat-i dulat-i Turkīyih bā vurūd-i yik namāyandih-yi muḥajjabih rā maḥkūm kardand,” Irān, May 6, 1999, 4. 74 “Çirkin gösteri,” Sabah, May 9, 1999, 26. 75 Siyyid Ibrahīm Nabavī, “Dah tafāvut-i asāsi-yi Marvih Kāvākchī va Fāʾizih Hāshimī,” Nishāṭ, May 15, 1999, 3. 76 “Fa ʿizih Hāshimī dar nāmih-ī khaṭāb bih namāyandih-yi bā-ḥijāb-i turkīyih iʿlām kard: “Mudāfi’ān-i ḥuqūq-i bashar dar barābar-i raftār-i ghiyr-i-insāni-yi lāyīk-hā sukūt kardih-and,” Iran, May 12, 1999, 3. 77 “Turkey's Veiled MP Defends Herself Against Secularist Onslaught,” Mideast Mirror 14, no. 96 (1999). See also, Olson, Turkey-Iran Relations, 50; “Kavakçı İran'ı reddetti,” Milliyet, May 25, 1999, 17; Nayereh Tohidi, “Piyvand-i Jahānī-yi junbish-i zanān-i Irān,” guft-u-gū, no. 38 (2004): 32. 78 Kavakçı Islam, Headscarf Politics, 123. 79 Karen Garner, Gender and Foreign Policy in the Clinton Administration (London, 2013); Shannon, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights, 15. 80 “Turkey's Veiled MP Defends Herself Against Secularist Onslaught,” Mideast Mirror 14, no. 96 (1999). 81 For example, Elizabeth A. Castelli, “Praying for the Persecuted Church: US Christian Activism in the Global Arena,” Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 3 (2005): 321–351; Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 37–65; Anna Su, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (Cambridge, MA, 2016); Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 91–99; Melani McAlister, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (New York, 2018), 159–192; Gregorio Bettiza, Finding Faith in Foreign Policy: Religion and American Diplomacy in a Postsecular World (New York, 2019). Allen D. Hertzke offers a more optimistic account in Freeing God's Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Lanham, MD, 2004). 82 Larry B. Stammer, “An Envoy for All Faiths,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1999, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jun-12-me-45670-story.html. 83 2000 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom: Turkey, Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, September 5, 2000. House Hearing, 106th Congress - State Department Annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 2000, Committee on International Relations, Y 4.IN 8/16, September 7, 2000, Serial No. 106-178. 84 U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “Turkey,” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 1999, February 23, 2000, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/1999/365.html. 85 “Transcript: Clinton Justifies U.S. Involvement in Kosovo,” CNN.com, May 13, 1999, accessed October 21, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcript.html; Garner, Gender and Foreign Policy, 242–4. 86 “Remarks to the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara, November 15, 1999,” Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Washington: USGPO 35, no. 46, November 22, 1999, 2385. 87 Marc Lacey, “In Turkey, Clinton is, for the Moment, the Hero Adored,” New York Times, November 18, 1999. 88 Amélie Barras, “A Rights-Based Discourse to Contest the Boundaries of State Secularism? The Case of the Headscarf Bans in France and Turkey,” Democratization 16, no. 6 (2009): 1237–1260. See also Sahin v. Turkey, App. No. 44774/98 (Eur. Ct. H.R. June, 29 2004), aff'd, App. No. 44774/98 (Eur. Ct. H.R. November 10, 2005). 89 Kavakçı v. Turkey, App. No. 71907/01 (Eur. Ct. H.R. April 5, 2007). 90 For the laicist Turkish media, this incident constituted further evidence of Kavakçı’s “duplicity.” For conservative Iranian media, it suggested a conspiracy with U.S.-based roots. Compare “Amerika’da Aranıyormuş,” Sabah, May 5, 1999, 2 with “Campaign Against Kavakci: Neglect of Women's Rights,” Tehran Times, May 10, 1999, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/35986/Campaign-Against-Kavakci-Neglect-of-Women-s-Rights. 91 Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Feminism in an Islamic Republic: Years of Hardship, Years of Growth,” in Islam, Gender, and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito (Oxford, 1998), 59–84; Nikki Keddie, “Women in Iran since 1979,” Social Research 67, no. 2 (2000): 405–438; Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford, CA, 2007), 76–84; Tara Povey, Social Movements in Egypt and Iran (New York, 2015), 72–96. 92 Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “Stretching the Limits: A Feminist Reading of the Shari'a in Post-Khomeini Iran,” in Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, ed. Mai Yamani (London, 1996), 285–319; “Divorce, Veiling, and Feminism in Post-Khomeini Iran,” in Women and Politics in the Third World, ed. Haleh Afshar (London, 1996), 284–320; Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran (Princeton, NJ, 1999); Haleh Afshar, Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case-Study (New York, 1998); Mirjam Künkler, “In the Language of the Islamic Sacred Texts: The Tripartite Struggle for Advocating Women's Rights in the Iran of the 1990s,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 24, no. 2 (2004): 375–392; Fereshteh Ahmadi, “Islamic Feminism in Iran: Feminism in a New Islamic Context,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 2 (2006): 33–53; Hamideh Sedghi, Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling (New York, 2007), 245–271. 93 Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 770. 94 Ad published in Cumhuriyet Kitap Eki, July 25, 1991, 13. 95 Özyılmaz, “Türkiye-İran ilişkilerinde belirleyici etmen,” 294. 96 For example, Ḥasan Yusifī Eshkivarī, “Difā ʿ az arzesh-hā bā manṭiq-i dimukrāsī,” Nishāṭ, April 23, 1999, 3. See also, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “The Conservative-Reformist Conflict over Women's Rights in Iran,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16, no. 1 (2002): 37–53. 97 “Marżīyih Dabbāgh: Agar namāyandih-yi bidūn-i chādur vārid-i majlis shavad kutak mīkhurad,” Āftāb-i Imrūz, March 7, 2000, 1; Tohidi, “Piyvand-i jahāni-yi junbish-i zanān-i Irān,” 31. 98 Shannon, U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Human Rights, 18. Italics in original. 99 “The United States and Turkey: A Model Partnership,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Europe of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, One Hundred Eleventh Congress, first session, May 14, 2009. 100 “İran tahrik ediyor,” Sabah, May 11, 1999, 20. 101 Geoffrey Lewis, The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford, 1999). 102 Maynard Owen Williams, “Turkey Goes to School,” National Geographic, January 1929, accessed May 15, 2015, http://www.turkishculture.org/literature/language/turkey-goes-to -821.htm?type=1. 103 Süha Bölükbaşı, “Turkey Copes with Revolutionary Iran,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 13, no. 1 (1989): 94–109. 104 National polls exploring Turkish views on the European Union during this period regularly set up an opposition between possible “Islamic” and “European” identifications for the country. See, Ali Çarkoğlu, “Who Wants Full Membership? Characteristics of Turkish Public Support for EU Membership” Turkish Studies 4, no. 1 (2003): 171–194. 105 Turkey’s current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then a rising star in Fazilet Party, remained silent throughout Kavakçı’s ordeal. In 2017, the AKP government assigned Kavakçı to an ambassadorship to Malaysia. 106 Gabriela Özel Volfová, “Turkey’s Middle Eastern Endeavors: Discourses and Practices of Neo-Ottomanism under the AKP,” Die Welt Des Islams 56, no. 3–4 (2016): 489–510. 107 Fardīn ʿAlī̄khāh, “Ḥarīm-i Sulṭān yā ḥarīm-i Irān? Darbārih-yi Turkīyih va siryālhāyash,” Anthropology and Culture, n.d., accessed March 15, 2019, http://anthropology.ir/article/30136. Author notes * The author would like to thank Parisa Akbari, Niloofar Adnani, and Leila Seyedghasem for their help with the research that went into this article. Thanks to Heeva and Elham for additional help with interpreting Persian language sources. I am grateful to Lily Frierson, my colleagues in American Studies, the Cultural Transformations in Modern Europe reading group at Notre Dame, and organizers and attendees at my talk at the Yunus Emre Institute in Tehran for their insightful feedback on various versions of this work. The research for this article was partially supported by a grant from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Not without My Daughter in Turkey: Transnational Politics of Orientalism
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhaa029
DA - 2020-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/not-without-my-daughter-in-turkey-transnational-politics-of-7K8h5dhwtR
SP - 729
EP - 755
VL - 44
IS - 5
DP - DeepDyve
ER -