The Turkish Labyrinth

by James Pettifer

1998 PENGUIN BOOKS SOFTCOVER

288 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 1998

Reviews

[Basileus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a confusing bunch of orientalism inspired nonsense. This book was written in 1997. and as such, has made a lot of predictions regarding the future of Turkey and it's relationship with her it's neighbours. All of them were wrong, by a lot. It's also filled with typical prejudices against the "orientals" specific to orientalist writers of the 19th centruy. One banal example, the poor regions around the border between Greece and Turkey, the Greek side is good, victim of past violences and trying hard to fix things. The Turkish side is of course backward, filled with squalor, rotting in oriental filth. The book is some kind of a mixture between history, present inter-state relations and a travelogue, yet it simply fails to be interesting, to intrigue you to go in-depth into some topics or even to create a vivid picture of the places author so poorly describes in it.

[Red Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is always interesting to read a book 20 years after publication to see how the author did in predicting the near-future, and in this case Pettifer had remarkable insight regarding the path that Turkey would take. In addition, Pettifer provides some explanatory power to explain not only where Turkey was heading but why, and what internal forces would be difficult to contend with for anyone wanting to alter the course.

I also recommend the book because Pettifer makes it readable with poetic passages to make his points: "the Greek tragedian Euripides wrote that the sea washes away the ills of man, but every wave of the Black Sea washes them back towards him."

Advocates on either side will likely disagree, but Pettifer seems to present the Armenian question and the Kurdish question fairly, and even interestingly intertwines them back to the day when the Armenians and Kurds were not fighting the Turks as much as fighting each other (Pettifer claims that the Turks issued weapons to the Armenians in 1905 as a barrier against the Kurds, and those weapons were later turned against the Turks).