With his unique view of Islam and the West, Orhan Pamuk deserved the Nobel Prize, says lewis jones |
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Given the gloomy relationship between Islam and the West, Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Prize for Literature shines like a good deed in a naughty world. No other writer addresses that relationship with such humanity and wit.
Pamuk (right), notes the Nobel citation, has "discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." With exemplary scepticism, erudition and playfulness, he reverses the conventions of Orientalism.
Born 54 years ago in Nisantasi, the ritzy district of Istanbul where he still lives, Pamuk grew up in Europe, with a view across the Bosphorous to Asia. Grandson of an industrial magnate, he was educated at an American school, studied engineering, architecture and journalism, but left them all for fiction at 23.
For years he lived, unpublished, with his parents. Then he became the bestselling |
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| As the only Turkish writer the West has heard of, he is a ‘traitor’ to Islamists |
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novelist in Turkish history. With his third book, The White Castle (1985), about the relationship between an Ottoman astrologer and a Venetian scientist, he established his international reputation.
Pamuk sees Turkey as the prism of the East-West relationship. He explores the 'two souls' of his nation - conservative Islamic and liberal European. Fundamentalism, to him, is "the revenge of the poor against educated, Westernised Turks". As the only Turkish writer the West has heard of, thus a 'traitor' to Islamists, he speaks from experience.
Last year, after he told a Swiss newspaper that 30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians had been killed in Turkey, Pamuk was charged with having "blatantly belittled Turkishness", an offence entailing a three-year prison sentence.
As an embarrassment to Turkey's EU hopes, the charge was dropped in January. An embarrassment now compounded by the Nobel Prize, especially by its announcement on the same day that denial of the Armenian genocide became a criminal offence in France. Vive la difference! 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 13, 2006
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