The New York Review of Books: Divorce Turkish Style

Turkey, in particular, is seeing a record number of divorces, as both women and men are looking for a way out of unhappy and sometimes abusive marriages. Over the past fifteen years, the divorce rate has risen from under 15 percent of marriages to nearly a quarter of them. Domestic violence is almost always cited as a leading reason by Turkish women seeking a divorce. This is true even outside urban areas, which have also seen a slight growth in divorce cases; increasingly, women are willing to seek divorces in smaller, religious towns such as Konya, in central Anatolia, where Nebiye was raised. More of these girls and women also now have access to education and online information.

Ipek Bozkurt, an outspoken women’s rights activist and Istanbul-based divorce lawyer, told me that one reason for this change in social norms is that more women are working, and they are more aware of their rights. “They’re so fed up with their marriages and the treatment they receive, the treatment their kids receive, all the physical and psychological pressure that they have suffered,” she said. “They’re just willing to let that marriage go.” [...]

In November, speaking to a roomful of his women supporters at a “gender justice” summit, Erdoğan boasted of presiding over an increase in the proportion of women in the workforce, up from 28 percent in 2002 to 38 percent today. At the same conference, Zehra Zümrüt Selçuk, the minister of family, labor, and social services, insisted that the government was working hard to encourage marriage and prevent divorce, but she balanced her message with an appeal to women’s growing desire for independence. “Our primary goal,” she said, “is to minimize and solve the problems encountered by the family and to protect its unity without ignoring the rights of the individuals.” [...]

It is true that femicide has grown steadily in Turkey over the last decade, with more than 2,000 women killed by their partners. Feminists say that the number of murders is up because more women are resisting inequality and abuse in their marriage, and reporting domestic violence more. Unfortunately, some men are retaliating with deadly violence, said Gülsüm Kav, the co-founder of We Will Stop Femicides, a women’s group that advocates for victims’ families and independently counts women homicides in Turkey. But the solution, activists argue, is not what the government says—that women should stay in abusive marriages and try to work things out with their husbands—but legal reform.

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The Atlantic: Catholic Church’s Battle Between Rhetoric and Reality

So it was striking on Thursday to hear two of the conference’s opening speakers use the term crimes in no uncertain terms—a marked change from Vatican rhetoric of the past. “An essential aspect of the exercise of stewardship in these cases is the proper interface with civil jurisdiction. We are talking about misconduct that is also a crime in all civil jurisdictions,” said Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who spent a decade as the Vatican’s top investigator on abuse cases. He later said it was important for the Church to move “from a culture of silence” to “a culture of disclosure.”

The give and take between Church and state can also be opaque. Even today, in the most advanced democracies where the crisis has erupted—the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France—the decision for a diocese to report an abuser to the police is still a matter of interpretation and context, not canon law. Seventeen years after the sexual-abuse crisis erupted in Boston toward the end of the papacy of John Paul II, and after it reemerged in 2010 under Benedict XVI, Church norms on the issue are still difficult to understand, not just for outsiders, but for the clerics who must uphold them. [...]

This week, Monsignor Scicluna said he was pleased that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that defends Catholic doctrine, increased the number of canon lawyers from 10 to 17. In the past, Francis has said that the CDF handles about 2,000 cases at a time. The backlog is enormous. The numbers are chilling. The Holy See has said that in the past decade, 3,420 credible cases of abuse worldwide were reported to the CDF, while in the United States, the Catholic Church has said that 6,900 priests have been credibly accused since 1950, according to BishopAccountability.org, an advocacy organization. [...]

It was also significant that the attendees watched painful video testimony from victims from around the world, including Africa and Asia. One woman testified that she had had a sexual relationship with a priest for 13 years, starting at age 15, and that he had forced her to get three abortions because he refused to use birth control. “I feel I have a life destroyed,” she said, according to a transcript provided by the Vatican. “He gave me everything I wanted, when I accepted to have sex; otherwise he would beat me,” she said.

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The Atlantic: Europe’s Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism

Growing up, I used to think anti-Semitism was like the black death: tragic, nightmarish, and historic. It had wiped out millions of people. It was theoretically terrifying. But only occasional outbreaks in poor and faraway countries remained. It had ruined the life of my grandmother, but it would not be part of mine.

But now I realize that anti-Semitism is actually like the flu: uncomfortable, sickly, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us. Every few decades, it mutates into an epidemic. The rest of the time it lingers, producing headaches, sweats, and dizzy spells. Not killing us, just wearing us down.[...]

I felt it again, stronger, like a cold sweat, when I saw the footage of the Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut being mobbed by gilets jaunes—the yellow-vested protesters—who had crossed his path. They yelled, “Palestine,” “France belongs to us,” “Dirty Zionist,” and “The people will punish you.” [...]

Don’t let your Jewish identity be defined by those who hate you. Instead make it a source of strength, something they can never touch, what our ancestors wanted Jewish life to be. They saw the rituals, the togetherness, the songs of the Sabbath as a palace in time, not a cage, a way of life whose purpose was to bring the deepest calm.

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Aeon: African art in Western museums: it’s patrimony not heritage

The immediate paradox here is that, whereas objects from the periphery were welcome in the centre, people were very much not. Since the independence of West African countries throughout the late 1950s and early ’60s, the retention of objects and the simultaneous rejection of people has become ever more fraught. Young undocumented migrants from former French colonies stand metres away from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a museum in Paris full of their inaccessible patrimony. The migrants are treated with contempt while the objects from their homelands are cared for in museums and treated with great reverence. The migrants will be deported but the objects will not be repatriated. The homeland is therefore only home to objects, not people. [...]

The objects taken from West Africa during the colonial period indexed many things, most of them problematic and racist. Some objects acted as a catalyst for the creative work of Western artists, and consequently entered the artistic canon as prompts and props (seen in the background of artists’ studios such as that of Pablo Picasso). The objects that Picasso encountered at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris were the impetus for his ‘African period’ at the beginning of the 20th century, which produced one of his most famous works, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). [...]

The acts of return in themselves are a symbol of strong contrition, re-opening the dialogue on past wrongs to better establish relationships for the future. It seems that behind proclamations of the complicated nature of the process of return lies this more difficult truth. Human remains have been returned from museums to be reburied with dignity. Nazi-looted art has been seized from unsuspecting collectors and returned to Jewish families. Now is the time for colonial patrimony to be reckoned with because patrimony indexes the biographies of those who made and acquired the objects, drawing their descendants into moral relationships in the present. It is now not a matter of if but when objects will be returned, and whether this happens with good grace or through a fractious period of resistance.

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Aeon: Between gods and animals: becoming human in the Gilgamesh epic

Not only does Gilgamesh exist in a number of different versions, each version is in turn made up of many different fragments. There is no single manuscript that carries the entire story from beginning to end. Rather, Gilgamesh has to be recreated from hundreds of clay tablets that have become fragmentary over millennia. The story comes to us as a tapestry of shards, pieced together by philologists to create a roughly coherent narrative (about four-fifths of the text have been recovered). The fragmentary state of the epic also means that it is constantly being updated, as archaeological excavations – or, all too often, illegal lootings – bring new tablets to light, making us reconsider our understanding of the text. Despite being more than 4,000 years old, the text remains in flux, changing and expanding with each new finding.[...]

What does this tell us? We learn two main things. First, that humanity for the Babylonians was defined through society. To be human was a distinctly social affair. And not just any kind of society: it was the social life of cities that made you a ‘true man’. Babylonian culture was, at heart, an urban culture. Cities such as Uruk, Babylon or Ur were the building blocks of civilisation, and the world outside the city walls was seen as a dangerous and uncultured wasteland.

Second, we learn that humanity is a sliding scale. After a week of sex, Enkidu has not become fully human. There is an intermediary stage, where he speaks like a human but thinks like an animal. Even after the second week, he still has to learn how to eat bread, drink beer and put on clothes. In short, becoming human is a step-by-step process, not an either/or binary.

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