Ottoman History Podcast - Türkiye, Iran, and the Politics of Comparison

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

with Perin Gürel hosted by Chris Gratien | Comparisons are everywhere in American discussions of Middle East politics. As our guest, Perin Gürel, argues in a new book, this cultural impulse has political roots in the Cold War period. In this episode, we explore the origins of comparitivism through the lens of America's evolving relationship with Turkey and Iran over the course of the 20th century, focusing on how gender and race shaped the terms of the assymetrical relations between the US and other countries in the region. We discuss the "daddy issues" reflected in comparisons between the founding figures of the Republic of Turkey and Iran's monarchy, the changing image of Iran's empress on the global stage, and the ambivalent claims to whiteness and anti-imperialism that took shape in both countries. Throughout the conversation, we return to a critique of comparison as a placeholder for knowledge and a political instrument wielded with varying degrees of success to further American foreign policy goals, and we reflect on how this American project has shaped how all of us conceptualize the region's major social and political questions today.    « Click for More »

This is the Ottoman history podcast, and I'm Chris Grayton. Comparison is everywhere in global discussions of Middle East politics today. Who's more democratic? Who are the moderate rebels? Who treats their women better? And who is the lesser of two evils? The comparisons are usually offensive and uncharitable to everyone involved, and they don't communicate anything particularly concrete about what these countries are like. Rather, comparison is often a placeholder for analysis that nonetheless justifies policy. As Perenguil explains in her new book, Turkey, Iran, and the politics of comparison, there's a history to this.

Using a wide array of sources from press, movies, and magazines, to government documents and textbooks, she studies ideas about how modernity, gender, race, and religion shaped the relationship between the United States in the Middle East over the course of the 20th century, or put differently, how made-up notions had real-life implications for Cold War era geopolitics. They don't have to go into these, like, philological details. They don't need to go too much into history. They can come up with the categories, who's more modern,

who deserves more of these sort of dividends of Pax Americana. In this episode, Professor Gurel shares what motivated her to explore this history and examines how America's use of comparative logics prompted people in Turkey and Iran to compare themselves to one another. They are picking up this American-accented language, these categories, and they are sort of mobilizing them against each other. Join us.

Professor Gurdow, thank you for being here, live at University of Virginia. Perenggurel is a professor in the Department of American Studies at Notre Dame University. She's at University of Virginia today to give a talk about a book that is really hot off the press, Turkey, Iran and the politics of comparison, America's wife, America's concubine. It's a great read, and the book really resonated with me as someone who's taught the Middle East history survey many times. It kind of hits. I knew where so many moments were going because it kind of hits like every single thing that I don't like about teaching that survey. And I saw the author as someone who's frustrated with that framework and the way the history of

the region is kind of always framed. And I don't want to assume that that's the case. I might be reading into it or reading my own experience. But just tell us why you wrote this book. Yeah, I'm so glad. I mean, am I glad I interested that that came across? Because frustration is definitely a part of it. I'd say there are sort of three key moments that birthed this book even before I was aware that this book was taking shape. First is growing up in the 1990s, Turkey, and being projected to this will Turkey become Iran panic around the headscarf, going to university and having like our, you know, having to remove a beanie. And even then, I think my generation was like, like, hey, is this a little overplayed? You know, I was raised in a very secularist family, but we were like, I don't think this analogy, like this fear is holding. I think it's doing some interesting work,

these comparisons. The second, I came to the United States pretty soon after 9-11, really interesting time to be a Muslim immigrant. And all these categories of moderate Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, and every time I would read an article in the New York Times about Turkey, Iran would come up.

We'd be like, well, Turkey is not likely to become another Iran. I'm like, why is this? You know, what are you doing? And the third was more recently, like maybe a few years back. Ruhani was in power in Iran. I remember that. A colleague went to a big conference and he came back. He was really excited and he wanted me to know that the keynote speaker had made this really interesting point. Now that Turkey is becoming more authoritarian, maybe Iran is going to be the shining example of moderate democracy, Muslim democracy. And he was like,

what do you think about that? Isn't that interesting? And I was like, ah, I was just sort of smiling me like, ah, very interesting. And then I was like, I need to write about this.

I need to write about comparison, comparatism, specifically this like dyad that keeps haunting me of Turkey and Iran, Turkey and Iran. Well, a really unique thing

about the book is that it's kind of about international relations, but not in an eye. are not in the mode where it's actually about international relationships, right? And you play off relationship metaphors in your work. And the first book, The Limits of Westernization, was kind of about Turkey's love-hate relationship with America

as its biggest ally and biggest threat at the same time, this sort of complex around that. And the new book, you've expanded your view to a love triangle between Turkey, Iran, and the United States. and you mentioned that in the book that you actually acquired Persian just to write this story that you wanted to tell.

Yeah, it completely broadened a lot of the stuff that I looked at in my first book. I think Iran is sort of haunting that first book in the background because you can't talk about westernization and all these debates about like limits of westernization

without this sort of provocative Iranian concept of Garzadeghai, right? And I realized that I was using a lot Iranian feminists to talk about this Turkish development. And it just kind of helped bring to forward that this sort of love-hate relationship or these worries wanting to modernize, but also fearing cultural corruption was, you know, not just endemic to Turkey. Like there was nothing exceptional in some ways, but these were sort of transnational discourses. I think another thing that it helped me realize and sort of humbled me was in that first book, I was looking at like how

Turkey became a model student of modernization or a little bit of these like moderate Islam discourses. And what I realized even more was that whenever the United States was praising Turkey, it was in subtle distinction or comparison to other Muslim majority countries. Like most obviously during the Cold War, Nasser's Egypt, but also Iran. So like when they were talking about how Turkey is this model Muslim democracy, you couldn't understand that post-9-11 without talking about looking at what they were saying about Iran. And that was really humbling for me. And that's like the very effective term that kind of links together all the chapters of the book on this idea of comparisons. But you call it comparativism. That comparativism, I guess,

is a tool of American foreign policy. But it also becomes like a framework for dealing with Turkey, Iran. And perhaps you could say the Middle East in general and maybe even beyond. Do you, do you think in the book, you know, at moments I felt like this is a broader story about like the West and Islam and Orientalism. And in certain points, I felt like, no, this comparativism is like an American way of dealing with the world. You know, to what extent is that the case? Is this like, is this really a story about the unique way in which the U.S. kind of structures international relations? I think there is a longer history there. Foucault talks about it in the order of things about 17th century, colonialism. We're meeting all these different people. We're meeting all these

different people, how are we going to understand these different cultures, peoples, in a way that's going to be productive for colonialism. So there's a longer history of proof by comparison that Foucault dates back, I think correctly, to the 17th century where we need to rank these people. That's going to help how we relate to them in terms of the standard of civilization. But there is a specific American story here, like post-World War II, because the United States comes relatively late in the knowledge-making game when it comes. West Asia and North Africa. So they're scrambling. They don't have these history, you know, the history, the experts, the people who know the languages. So they need to find very fast a way

to deal with these people. And they're kind of operating from a knowledge deficit. And, you know, Zachary Lockman talks about it. Even Saeed talks about it in his last chapter, right? And then what they do is lean into social science. Because with all their respect, it proves helpful to them. Now, they don't have to go into these, like, philological details. They don't need to go too much into history. They can come up with the categories. With knowing very little about each nation and its complexities, they can kind of rank them, and they can determine how the U.S. polity is going to deal with them.

So this type of comparativism, it has a long lineage, but I think it gains its power post-World War II with the rise of American Empire, not rise, the cementing of American Empire, especially as it tries to deal with new people, like outside the Monroe Doctrine. No, it really comes out in the book that this constant act of comparison is a way of exercising power or the power to shape the comparisons that happen is like a form of power or violence that becomes, you know, at times epistemological, but actually translates into real geopolitical ramifications, particularly because all the other countries in the world have to engage

with this discourse in some way. And it becomes the mode in which they engage with each other to a large extent because so much is mediated through American politics. Hollywood, it brings, it just widens the scope of what international studies, international relations is to kind of think about it in this cultural terms. You make a really great point about U.S. hegemony here, the cultural violence and the ways in which sort of middle powers have to respond to these discourses that are emanating from the superpowers, specifically the United States, who's sort of, love they want, right? And all the benefits that come with that.

That is the Shah's metaphor and complaint to JFK that America treats Turkey as a wife and Iran as a concubine, right? That's the sort of love triangle, but also using the force of comparison to demand better rankings, better dividends from the U.S. Empire. And it completely influences, there's, again, a long history here because Ottoman Empire and Safavit Iran, there's a lot of comparatism and transculturation between those entities,

those political entities as well, but they are picking up this American accented language, these categories, and they are sort of mobilizing them against each other. No, you really illuminated so many things about sort of the political shorthand we use to talk about current affairs

in the Middle East, things like words like moderate, like that we just use, okay, like so this, what you need to know about this guy, he's a moderate cleric or something, As if, you know, that was just a neutral marker, it's a comparative marker, right? Moderate implies not extreme or not progressive, you know, so. Anybody who is sort of really well worst in a place that's like not the United States is like,

ah, they're representing me like this and they're comparing me in this way, but it's so much more complicated than that. So we're all a little bit frustrated and I wanted to write a specific history of that. I don't intersects with what comparison means and how comprehensive. comparatism became a tool for power. Yeah, and we've had a little bit of an intellectual conversation here so far. Foucault got a name drop. The book is super accessible, and I think undergrad students could actually benefit a lot

from reading a book like this, especially alongside a modern Middle East class, precisely because American foreign policy has structured how they see the world, and they move to questions of comparison when dealing with the course material. I think comparison makes you feel like you're creating knowledge. You know, it oversteps comprehension in so many ways. So it becomes an easy way for very little knowledge to function as actionable knowledge. So that's what's really scary about it and what can be really frustrating about it. And I'm using sort of the modern Middle East survey as my reference point for what this conversation is.

Because it's the place where I experience the dissonance between like what I know and what I think to be like good academic knowledge and what I have to convey to a broad educated but novice audience. And the first chapter is the perfect representation of what I'm talking about. And the title is amazing, daddy issues. It's funny, but it conveys the point so effectively. So this chapter is about the Republic of Turkey and Iran's two founding figures after the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and Reza Khan, who became Reza Shah. They're often compared to each other, even in the time they were alive as you talk about. And this is typically how a modern Middle East survey structures the inner war period.

It's like, let's talk about two forms of authoritarian modernization. Ataturk and Reza Shah. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and the history of that story? What was the actual relationship between these two figures? The Ataturk Iran, Ataturk-Razhan comparison, appears very early on in Western press and also in diplomatic reports. And already there's kind of an interest in Attaxan. Turk as this like almost European figure, phenotypically and, you know, someone who reads

Voltaire and who is conversant with sort of environment, sorry, enlightenment thought, and sort of Reza Hahn as, you know, they're really interested in his background as a stable boy and the sort of usurper who beats people. So they immediately did the comparisons are class, they're gendered, they're racialized in these ways. And early on, I think Westerners are, you know, there's some diplomatic crises that get precipitated in how Rezahan is depicted in Western analyses. But they're even saying, well, you know, Iran is so backwards. It needs a strong daddy like Rezahan. You know, it needs a good beating.

And maybe Turkey, like, it was closer to Europe. So it needed a more refined man. Like it was really the gendering of this is incredible in the sources. But that Reza Shah Rezahan versus Atatur Comparatism that you're seeing in contemporary Middle Eastern studies, textbooks, dates, back to the Cold War era, especially this 1951 book, The United States and Turkey and Iran, by Lewis Thomas, who was at Princeton, and Richard Frye, who was at Harvard.

These are the early architects of menace studies in the United States. And they completely build this narrative of Etatirch as the model, and Reza Shah as the imperfect failed copy of Etatouc. What was amazing about that book? And it also relates to what you said about comparativism as being like an American shorthand for relating to the Middle East at this period is they include very little background and they get praised for including very little background. When you look at the book reviews in Washington Post, they're like, thank God these scholars just included very little knowledge.

They didn't say too much about ancient glories or linguistic details. We didn't have to wait through info. They just gave us just enough background to understand why these needs. are what they are today and what that means for U.S. foreign policy. So people were really happy with this book. And it completely influenced how we still teach Middle East history in the United States. The famous Cleveland survey that I had when I was an undergrad does it. I've been standing in front of the room doing it with my students knowing that it's like kind of contrived like framework for talking about this period.

Like Galvin tries to not do it a little bit. And then it ends up being, you know, you're still referencing that moment of Reza Shah as imperfect model or you're mobilizing different comparisons. Like maybe they were over westernizers compared to Islamic modernists. So comparatism is still there. But yeah, we all do it. And I mean, Turks do it, right? Interestingly, revolutionary Iranian literature does not do it. They do something totally different.

Yeah, you say in the book that the revolution fixes everything for us in that regard because it's all the U.S. and Great Britain's. like imperial plot. Yeah, so Ataturk and Reza Shah, like, there's no difference. And that comes from Khomeini's writings, Ali Shariati does it, right? They're like, well, these two guys are basically the same, you know, and it was all the British plot. So we don't even need to compare the Turkish Republic to the Iranian monarchy. It's basically all the same thing.

And it's really interesting how they do that. So looking at, I think one of the fun parts of comparison is when you look at the scholarship and compare different scholarly traditions. And all of it, you demonstrate very effectively, plays out in very gendered terms, both in terms of the daddies, the gender of the daddies, the different ways of being a daddy for a country. But also sort of a lot of the politics around westernization is this sort of superficial questions about women's attire and public role. Dress in general plays a big role in both of those stories, usually how we tell them, right? Vailing or not veiling. no more Fez, top hat for the boys.

Unvealing too harshly, unveiling the right amount, right? Yeah. Because Esoteric had blue eyes. So, of course, he unveiled people in the right arm, you know. But I think there's also another part of this resha, Atatur comparison. The other part that doesn't, the other people who don't compare them as much are the Iranian monarchists, right?

Where they're like, oh, look at these great leaders versus look at the present now. So they will also lump them together, kind of almost like a mirror image of the revolutionary literature, but kind of be like, hey, these guys were buddies, they spoke Turkish together and they could communicate and they were modernists, they were defensive developmentalists, and now look at us, you know, and now women are in this position. Now we have mullahs in ruling Iran, and mullahs in suit in Turkey. So it's really the strategic, I think it's the strategic part of comparison that I really wanted to emphasize. Yeah. We can keep moving with the story then, and I encourage people to check out that chapter and read it, like if what we've been talking about resonated, because there's a lot more there in terms of details about the different iterations of this comparative story. But I want to jump forward a generation in the story to the Cold War period where you have Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, Zashaviran. And this is another thing that has to be mentioned in the modern Middle East survey. His third wife, like he hit the jackpot with his third wife it's a famous story right she's she's presented as this international beauty queen that shows everything that iran is about can you tell us the story for those who who don't know it and how you see this as part of the gendered politics of comparativism yeah phara pahlavi is such an amazing figure and she's still alive and she's done i mean she's also a political figure of her own right i feel a little bit bad that i don't do enough justice to all the

you know, incredible work that she did because I was looking at the comparativism and the image. So she becomes immediately the brunt of comparativism. She's put into these grids in women's magazines and tabloids and Life magazine and its sort of Middle Eastern varieties as like, which women is prettier? Who wore it best? You know, ask your husband, which one of these women he prefers. And you can cut it exactly. You can get a sense into like your personality or his personality.

So she is compared to Elizabeth, like Queen Elizabeth, Margaret, Jackie O, all these mostly Western women. I think Soraya, the Shaw's second wife and Farah, were the only non-obviously Western women in these surveys. So there's a comparability that gets established as, you know, between Iran, Iranian greatness, Iranian aspirations to whiteness, and Farah's beauty, Farah's elegance, her sort of class. position. So she becomes a representative of Iran progressing under modern rule. And I'm sure this is also in a part of the survey is what happens as the 60s turns into the 70s. She gets cast without changing anything that she's doing, by the way, due to none of her own agency, she gets cast as this Mary Antoinette figure, somebody who's completely distant from the essentially religious Iranian masses and she gets cast as the representation of all that is wrong with the Shah's

rule and the white revolution. So it is this gendered celebration of modernization that as the ascendant ideologies of the time shift turns into this gendered denigration of modernization and she becomes the brunt of these comparisons. You did a great job showing how that discourse can easily be like flipped so there was this i can't find the newspaper article now in the book but there's one where they based the village voice that one the village voice yeah can you talk about the village voice article oh my gosh i i feel so much for ferr about the village voice article i think i see you looking at the book it's a few it's a little bit further back it has this picture of empress ferra standing with andy warhol and has like marlin mineral like paintings that warhol did of her

which, by the way, were slashed during the Iranian Revolution. And I heard an interview with Farash. She was like, idiots, they could have sold that and made so much money. But, you know, but it should tell you how powerful these symbolic representations are, how angry people were about the sort of Garza Dagi and its gender formations. But Village Voice Leftist magazine does this article on the Shahs like Savok and corruption and torture apparatus. And underneath that image,

it says, Perra Pahlavi and Andy Warhol, why are we of them so far away? And the whole article doesn't even talk about Farah at all. It just talks about how oppressive the Shah's police state is and how we shouldn't be supporting and how Shaw is like also peeling the, helping the war in Vietnam,

like all these terrible things. There is no mention of Farah in it. She's a symbol of like the opposite, the dark underground, like the what the gloss that the Pahlavi regime is putting on its like sort of terrible policies. So she represents the aesthetic realm, the realm of appearance, the realm of like fakery along with this sort of repeated portrait. So it's such an evocative image. No, it's great.

And it kind of shows us where the argument of Rarb Zadigy is coming from or this West toxification, as it's sometimes translated, this idea that like, West, culture and media has like made us ill at our at the core of our being but it's also like an economic and political argument right so can you just preview we're jumping ahead in the book but what happens in chapter four with this story um with the the emergence of discourses like islamic feminism which just a few decades earlier are not like really allowed in in the comparativeist discourse right it's like how un-Islamic is this country that's that's the standard of modernity And then things change. It changes for a reason, right?

Their historical realities, the first law that the new regime scraps is that sort of the family law that had given modest rights to Iranian women. Not full rights, not equal rights, you know. The Shah is actually not for equal rights. He does not necessarily want anything that he says that contradicts the Quran to become law, especially inheritance law. And, you know, he has like a very sexist discourse himself. So we'll bracket that. We'll bracket that. Okay, the garbzadig discourse and the way in which sort of it's gendered, immediately the first thing that the regime, the new regime does is like scrap that national, the family act.

There's an image component of that is no longer we're talking about Farah, we're now talking about the woman in the Chadur, right? And with movies like, not without my daughter, becoming huge worldwide hits, including in Turkey and becoming fodder for then Turkish comparisons against like, oh, we can't become Iran. Look at Iran. So using this American narrative to understand your neighbor and then kind of explain yourself. It was just a really fascinating moment. How do you see that transformation? Because now in both Turkey and Iran in different ways, like there's a big backlash basically to this way of presenting gender. What we call Islamic feminism, again, has really long roots, right?

Like looking at Islam as a religion of gender justice is almost as long as looking at. Islam as a religion of racial justice and it intersects with it as well. So, you know, you have Zainab al-Gazali in Egypt kind of not absolutely not identifying as a feminist, but, you know, doing things that we would identify as sort of modern working women would do, kind of putting restrictions on who she will marry and why, like, whether they can interfere with her work or not, they can't interfere with her work. So there's a long discourse of that, like how Islam liberated women, et cetera. And you see a lot of that in Khomeini's sort of speeches as well, right? He makes the speech that he says, are women were warriors?

They made them shameful instead. Ali Shariati does something very similar. But post-revolution, there is a restriction of the kinds of discourse that is allowed in Iran. And I don't mean to say they're being just strategic. I think a lot of sort of people that we identify as Islamic feminists, Faiza Hashemi, Raghnavar. they are, I think they're devout and they are trying to unearth this discourse of gender justice from Islam and use it to advocate to expand women's rights, women's presence in an Islamic framework. And the West is fascinated with that, you know, because I think the main Western

idea of the Middle East still, I'm so totalizing about the West, I know, but I'm going to tell how the West is totalizing about the Middle East is that Middle East equals Islam, right? So any form of progressive move that is not going to take Islam into account is already Westerners are a little bit suspicious of it as much as they praise it. They're also like, ah, this doesn't, something's wrong with it. Where's the Islam? Where's the Muslimness of it? So, you know, this becomes very appealing, I think, to a part of academia. That's also Western academia and elsewhere that is very keyed into sort of a critique of modernization discourse. So, yeah, there are interesting connections and disjunctures between what's going on in Turkey with the headscarf crisis and what's going

on in Iran at the time. So I think, you know, in the middle of the book, you have this chapter that deals with race. And this is a subject that's gotten more attention like in the past decade, both geopolitically and domestically in these countries. And there's a lot in play because whether we're talking globally or locally, we see races meaning different things to people, and there's multiple conflicting forces. Your chapter tells the story of how, in different ways, both Turkish and Iranian nationalism, laid claim to whiteness or proximity to whiteness, or for reasons that are evident geopolitically

wanted to be part of that white world. It's the white revolution, after all. But at the same time, even before the Islamic Revolution, there's also a sense of proximity to like anti-imperial non-white identities in these countries and genuine mutual resonances with like black international politics. So the question I want to ask you to maybe get you to talk more about what's going on there is actually the question that comes up again in this comparative as framework, which is can we use the category of race to talk about? the Middle East. When Ottomanists do it, for example, like, oh, race in the Ottoman Empire. Some people say there's no race is an American thing. There's no race in the Ottoman Empire.

What are you talking about? So these kind of conversations actually happen even in academic circles still. How do you see it? What's going on? Yeah, it really depends on how we define race. Right. So when we think about race as a species of power that naturalizes difference, I think it completely applies in multiple contexts. Of course, it's going to be infused with other things, like the Ottoman context, like religion plays a really important role. But I think one of the things I point out is in the United States as well, religion plays a really big role how whiteness is allocated, especially to people from West Asia, right? So the first people that managed to become white officially are Western, sorry, West Asian Christians. And

they argue for their whiteness on the basis of this cultural opposition to being Muslim and also being Turkish, which at the time of race science is like being yellow, right? Race is never going to operate on its own. I think it always intersects with local categories. And also at this point, it's intersecting with religion. It intersects with gender. It intersects with nation. And it's completely, because it's so made up, it's completely dependent on comparativism, right? So you have people saying, well, I am like a Syrian Christian and we never marry Muslims. So, therefore, I've never mixed with these people with Mohamedans. And, you know, you have, like, Armenians making these arguments similarly comparative.

And then you have, like, people referencing Iranian sort of supposed Aryan heritage to make these arguments. So it's completely in flux, as it should be, because race is a social construct that justifies relations of power. Turks and Iranians have their eyes, the ruling classes, have their eyes on Western race science. they are the Iranians under Reza Shah are like completely obsessed with this Aryan myth that does come from you know these this race Western race signs and Turks are really incensed that they're being called yellow they are upset about it and they try to battle it in all these various ways so in an uneven discursive environment the discourses of like the people in power they won't fully apply but they're going to resonate and people people are responding to them. We can see that in the primary sources. Yeah, absolutely. Race is actually a moment in the book where I also kind of see how comparativism flattens social

class and kind of masks it because it's pretty common that like the elite of a particular country would believe that they are like not just culturally superior but racially superior to people in the rest of the country. And when we're in this like American fantasy world where Turks are Turks and Iranians that are Iranian Persians or Persians, whatever, that's kind of like lost. And then it's like all the actual power that's going on, which is like the king of a country or the president of a country engaging with another like John F. Kennedy or a dignitary of another country, all that's lost, right? That there's a, there's like also a class politics going on. Turkish class politics is so racialized. You only need to look at the types of plastic

surgery as women who are aspiring to the higher ranks of the economy undertake and you can kind of see it right like there is an aspirational whiteness and it's just it's not just women but you know I know plastic surgery is big right now but yeah we can see the types of phenotypical things that they're aspiring for is very much this idealized stereotypical western figure and you know Just read in any elementary Turkish school textbook about Ataturk's blue eyes. And I brought it again. It's completely racialized. And this aspiration to whiteness, I mean, I grew up in Turkey.

You were never escaping that, you know. And I wonder if it's, I think it has become a little bit milder now, partially because of the history of like Islamic anti-racism, you know, and maybe potentially third worldism. But we feel it, you know, you definitely feel it about what kind of. the features are desirable. Look at the features among Disney stars. Like, it's completely there. But it does get erased.

But I noticed that every time the United States is mad at Turkey, they'll make Erdogan a little darker in their cartoons. Like, there was a New York Times cartoon. Erdogan is a pretty fair-skid guy, you know. But whenever they're criticizing him, he becomes a little bit darker. And whenever they like him, he becomes a little bit lighter. I mean, I think Americans are pretty subconsciously aware of what they're doing with that, the people, the cartoon makers, yeah. And like you said, it's all made up.

That's why it's all so malleable. Yeah. But for various reasons, Turkey and other countries for African Americans and like with the rise of nation of Islam are seen in as there's like a solidarity there, which based on what we just said, sounds like a little bit of a disconnect. But that also kind of resonates for people in the region, right, when they see that like a figure like Malcolm X is interested in Egypt or Turkey, that means something to people in those countries. Yeah. It's so amazing. I think these are like American famous people too. So even the fascination with someone like Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, there's a way in which it's like, I don't mean to say like, oh, everything comes from the West.

But the reason why these opponents to American Empire are visible is because of the role of American media and American Empire, right? So I, you know, like Salman Rushdie talks about this in satanic verses, you know, that I quote at the end. But, oh, I think this is so political. Again, right, as Turkish relations with the United States sour, I think there's an idealization of Muhammad Ali early on. Just this cultural understanding, he's Muslim. He is, you know, his name is similar. People are like, oh, Ali, you know, are Ali. So there's this understanding, there's this masculinity and masculinity that people are responding to.

But as U.S. Turkish relations sour with the Cyprus crisis and the invasion of Cyprus, there is an expansion of that discourse and looking to Ali as an ally and a spokesperson and this sort of great coup that happens when Najmit and Arabakan does actually manage to bring Ali to Turkey to, you know, basically praise Turkey and according to the Turkish newspapers also praise Turkey's actions in Cyprus. It is this very interesting. The thing that makes Muhammad Ali famous is the dominance of Western U.S. media, but it also works in some ways against mainstream U.S. interests. And for the younger audience who are listening, just to make sure they're clear on it.

Muhammad Ali was, at one point, the greatest boxer in the world who had converted to Islam, but was also an anti-war advocate, right? He was an anti-Vietnam war advocate. And so you see how that's portable as well in that context that you were mentioning. I can't believe there are people who don't know. I know that most of our listeners probably know who he is. It's such a, yeah. And there's a picture of him posing with a Turkish flag in the book that I was very happy

to reproduce. also the flag of nation of Islam was reportedly influenced by the Turkish flag so he responded to that and there is a like again thinking about gender there is an establishment of like the Turkish army as heroes as Kahraman on like in Cyprus and a connection between now that to Turkish nationalists are trying to build between Muhammad Ali the greatest as the hero as this muscular Muslim figure as the hero of like the world boxing heavy word world world boxing. So I want to circle back to where we started this conversation a little bit, which is your personal investment in the topic, which you very transparently say is like what inspired the book is being confronted with these images. And you have points where you show your reader that you too are not immune to this. None of us are immune to this comparativism, that we're all like kind of inside it in some way. One of the interesting sentences was that you said you had become inoculated to Turkish Kemalism, but not in its English language

variations. And you just kind of like left it there at the end of a chapter. So I want you to unpack that or unpack in the more personal way, what what you got out of writing this book and what you're trying to say. I think when you write a book that says knowledge making, us political and we're none of us are coming from these objective sort of places we're all subjects coming from certain experiences and when you say like comparison is a triangular thing you have to I it didn't come very naturally to me to kind of put myself in there but I made an effort to put myself into every chapter to remind the reader like hey like it's me I'm writing this you know this is the perspective obviously I use primary sources I did my best I did due diligence

and this is the story, but I wanted to remind the readers that the author is there, you know, and that they need to work on their own meaning making in conversation with me. What happened when I was researching the Raza Shah Ataturk chapter, and we looked at Persian language sources, we looked at Turkish language sources and English language sources. And every time I would read like the Turkish language sources, they would always delve into like, and of course no one could match Ataturk, you know, he was amazing, you know, and it had this like lulling effect on me. I mean, when I was in primary school, I wrote one of those nationalist poems about Etaturk that I read with tears in my eyes, you know, I have a picture of Etatirc in my

house. Like, he was a remarkable person in so many ways. The sort of the picture of him dancing with his adopted daughter, you know, it goes into, anyway. Like, so I'm not dissing Ataturk at all, but I had become, when I read those sentences in Turkish, I was like, oh, this is our civic religion, right? We're doing the thing. That's not scholarship. that we just have to do, right, to get published, et cetera. So I recognized it and I was like, okay, okay, what else do you have? What else do you have? Right? Where are the footnotes? But when I would read like English sources, I didn't have the same reaction. So I was noticing that. I was like, ah, that's interesting. I guess that's a

trick was, huh? You know, so I would catch myself. It would be like, well, what are the sources these people are using? What are the, like, how do they understand leadership? And why is it that I'm having this sort of eyes glazy reaction to Turkish praise and not to English praise. And I think I have also internalized this idea that knowledge making is done in English and that to be objective, you have to talk about Turkish history in a certain style, in a certain language. So it was just a waking up moment for me. And I just wanted the reader to know that. But your book also kind of for that reader who might have the same reaction, because I,

I know many people, you know, who are from Turkey, who have sort of an international experience, who probably have had a very similar experience to you. But your book shows us that even when they're saying something nice, they're setting you up to either say or do something potentially not so nice, right? That these backhanded compliments to Turkish modernization that are sort of at the heart of how we narrate the modern Middle East, it's a mind game, right? and in a way. And so bizarre. I went to like a panel and the scholar that was there was like, Ataturk's democracy has been turned into a time.

I was like, what? You know, it is that comparativism between like who, what was supposed to be happening at the time. You lose a lot of nuance and then comparison to like, oh, look at now, you know. And it's ironic. I find that like tracing the... In the 1990s, you'd have this like, oh, Ataturk was so foresightful.

That is why we now have Turkish democracy. I think that comparative is so much harder to maintain now that Ardoin has ruled longer than Ataturk himself as, you know, a non-dictator, quote-unquote. So, yeah, I think comparisons are always strategic. They're always trying to do something. And you just kind of, as a scholar, try to do justice to do nuances of it

and the ways in which transnational histories break down those simplistic comparisons. This is the Ottoman History podcast. We're talking to Professor Perrin Gurel about the new book, Turkey, Iran, and the politics of comparison. And to conclude our conversation, I want to ask you a little bit about some of the other fun and interesting things you do. Even though not everything in the book we've just talked about is a fun read,

you are someone who likes to have fun. You teach classes on humor and politics, and it does kind of shine through that you want a more interesting version of things. And you found a new outlet for your endless creative passions. You have a novel coming out. It's described on your website as a feminist eco-fantasy retelling of the 12th century Sufi legend, the Conference of the Birds. This is a really fun and exciting project. Like you say, it's almost like the id of this. book.

Okay. I started writing this novel when I chanced upon a cover that my daughter, who was then eight years old, had made for this novel called Got Wings. And it was about this girl who gets bullied for being a bird nerd and gets to travel to the realm of winged creatures. Okay. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is like a tar, you know, conference of the birds. And I saw so much of like the old Sufi literature in it.

Of course, she didn't see any of that. And I would wake up and be like, what happened to that girl? And I ended up writing it. And in the last chapter, not the epilogue, but we didn't get to talk too much about. I talk about mysticism and it's used as nation building and this sort of comparison. And I'd been like pretty dismissive of, not Sufism itself, but like the way it is in which it gets politically mobilized. So I just did like a deep dive into that literary heritage, you know. And I hadn't done much in this book about like sort of what people call the Turco-Persian kind of cultural mixture.

and I ended up writing this book. It's coming out in spring, Lale, in the language of the words. So, yeah, look out for it. No, I love that you said it was the id of the book. That's why, you know, I didn't ask you about that fifth chapter on mysticism, but I see that novel as another way of engaging with what's going on with you on that topic. And in that chapter, you talk about things that maybe some of our listeners are familiar with, like, the de-Islamicization of Rumi as a poet.

Yeah, but that place, there's something appealing about Islamic mysticism to, like, modern middle-class Americans that I can't quite put my finger. I mean, I know it when I read it, but there's something going on with that. And it's interesting that you said you're kind of also, like, getting a little more mystical curious, like, as, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's almost like the Turk, like, there's a long history of Turkish engagements with especially Meblevei, right? mysticism, like Ottoman engagements with mevlai mysticism. So like that chapter is like so cynical about it. And I felt, I don't know, like I'm not that cynical. I teach a class on Islam and feminism.

Personally, I am fascinated by this, this connection between Islam and feminism, not just like the mystical aspects of Islam. I think the reason why they appeal to an American audience, there's a long history of that that dates to the Cold War and like sort of these projection of Protestant ideas of like internalized relationships. religion onto Islam. Also, there's a lot of nation like public diplomacy by Turkey to be like,

hey, we're not like other Muslims. You know, have you heard of Rumi? I heard you like Rumi. Support our initiatives, right? I don't know what happened, but I think, yeah, it's the it of like all the things that don't belong in a cynical academic book, but all the things that are kind of internal and that I was thinking about like birds and sort of this mystical feminism and what Islam can do about ecology, going beyond borders. It just all came out. And it's basically like a YAA middle grade novel that's super fun to read. And yeah, I actually recently won the AOR Fantasy Award. So yeah, it's almost like the companion volume to this. I think that's amazing that you did those, that you have these both coming out at the same time, can have a

companion volume. It's such a cool idea. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who have been on the Ottoman history podcast who also had like a companion hobby that was either completing the picture or at odds with the picture that didn't you know didn't publish that novel didn't release that album or whatever but it's so cool that you did it and we want our listeners to definitely check out both of these new books turquia iran and the politics of comparison out from cambridge university press and lale in the language of the birds from wildling press in april in April. Yeah. So pre-order when it is available. Professor Greil, thanks so much for talking to us today.

Thank you so much. This was super fun. It's been a pleasure. You are a guest we've wanted to have on for a long time. There are a lot of such guests who we've been chasing for years. And so it's great that we were able to have you on the Ottoman History podcast. And maybe it won't be the last time. I'm a huge fan. So thank you for having me. We appreciate your support. And we appreciate all. you, the listeners. Go to the website. There is a bibliography. There are some images and of course links to check out the different publications of Professor Perrin Gurel. That's all for now. Until next time, take care. Thank you.