CAIRO, EGYPT — My international relations professor is a smart man. He is head of Cairo University’s Faculty of Political Science and a member of Egypt’s senate. He’s spoken at lots of conferences with very prestigious-sounding titles. He is well-steeped in almost every aspect of Middle Eastern politics. He wears very nice suits.
His teaching assistant is quite something as well. She’s finishing her dissertation at the moment — some long-titled thing about religion in Iranian politics versus religion in American politics. I can barely understand the title in English, let alone Arabic. She can hold forth, without preparation, on subjects as diverse as Iranian politics and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.
However, neither one knows exactly where Cyprus is.
In Turkey, this would have been impossible. It’s rare to find a map of Turkey that doesn’t also prominently display Cyprus, an island located to the south, just west of Syria’s coast. Turkish maps even include a line demarcating the Republic of Northern Cyprus, a country no one else recognizes. Cyprus is part and parcel of the Middle East, despite its presence in the EU. Selim II brought it under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Besides, just look at its location on a map — what other region could we call that?
A debate for another time, perhaps. Still, my professors’ lack of knowledge in this area is troubling. Cyprus, especially the island’s division, is an issue every Turkish schoolchild knows about. That neither of my IR teachers have studied it is an interesting distinction.
Disparities can become even more blunt. In Turkish, there are two g’s: one silent, the other not. The silent one is actually a “?,” but foreign printers omit this. My professors will frequently refer to comments made by Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, or by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister.
Neither one seems to realize the g’s in “Davutoglu” and “Erdogan” are silent ones.
This is excusable — Turkish is a tricky language. Even so, it is very off-putting for my professor to read aloud a statement about Turkey’s role in the Middle East, and then attribute it to “Minister Da-vut-o-glue.” It denotes a lack of familiarity with the topic, especially considering how excellent his pronunciation of “Khomeini” is.
In short, my professors, while extremely knowledgeable on almost every aspect of Middle Eastern affairs, seem to know Turkey only from newspaper articles, short news clips and cultural stereotypes. My professor even spelled the name of Kemal Ataturk, the Republic of Turkey’s founder, incorrectly in one of his PowerPoint presentations.
This gap goes the other way, too. The Turkish students I mentioned, the ones taught about Cyprus’ importance since childhood, know little to nothing about the rest of the Middle East except that Ottomans used to rule it. University friends of mine in Istanbul warningly informed me that in Egypt I would have to learn to ride a camel (for the record, I didn’t — last time I went into the desert, I rode shotgun in a jeep). Well-educated friends in Turkey can say little more about Egypt’s politics than to call it a “series of dictators” — not even differentiating between the Kingdom of Egypt and the Arab Republic of Egypt, let alone distinguishing between individual rulers.
This divide is very much institutionalized. Turkish university students don’t plan their study abroad experiences for Syria or Egypt, despite the close proximity (a flight from Cairo to Istanbul is only two hours). They want to go to Italy, Australia or the United States. Likewise, university students I meet here in Egypt seem to have never considered Turkey as an abroad destination, except for a weekend fling along the Bosporus. Turkish universities don’t seem to make it into Egyptian discussions of the Middle East’s higher education apparatus — not even Ankara’s own Middle Eastern Technical University.
If the Economist and other journals like it are correct when they declare Turkey to be moving “to the East and South,” then this divide is especially troublesome. Turks will not react kindly when Egyptian leaders are unfamiliar with the career of Kemal Ataturk. Egyptian leaders will not respond well when a Turkish professor claims there is no point of distinction between Nasser and Sadat. Syrians will understandably get upset when someone refers to Syria as a kingdom instead of a republic, as a Turkish classmate of mine did once. These kinds of mistakes don’t just cause awkward press conferences — they can escalate into diplomatic incidents and even real problems.
When I was in Turkey, I only ever met one student studying Arabic. Koç University didn’t think to offer it. Here in Egypt, I’ve only met two students, both upper-class, who know any Turkish — and they didn’t learn it in school.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
