TheDaak review

OPINION

Sana Chaudhary

Films and TV series are overwhelming sources of influence in the sphere of popular culture. Their reach and impact, now aided by fast internet connections, also make them a very crucial medium to sway public opinion and beliefs. It is not surprising that films and series are often used as tools of propaganda by authoritarian regimes, a phenomenon which is not of recent origin. Perhaps the most striking example is the work of the German director Leni Reifenstahl who championed the Nazi ideology through her films, glorifying Adolf Hitler with peculiar depictions of the Jewish people. Nazi propaganda is best portrayed in her film Triumph of the Will. It becomes imperative to understand how the increase in the production of films and TV shows of a particular genre and its subsequent popularity sprout from and for the sympathies of the ruling ideologies. Unsurprisingly, the themes of hyper-nationalism and cultural majoritarianism have proved to be the most evident ones in today’s popular culture.

A Turkish period drama titled Diriliş: Ertuğrul (Ertuğrul is the father of the founder of the Ottoman Empire—Osman) was dubbed in Urdu and released in Pakistan, which has broken digital records for its popularity. In India and Bangladesh, too, it has found a major audience.

TV series or dizi, as they are called in Turkish, have become a major constituent of Turkey’s soft power, especially in the last couple of decades. Turkey is now the world’s second-largest exporter of television shows, after the United States. With more than 150 TV programmes, the nation has successfully drawn viewers from 146 different nations, delighting over 700 million people worldwide, primarily in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, according to an article by Shudipta Sharma. Fatima Bhutto, the niece of Benazir Bhutto, came out with a book in 2019 titled ‘The New Kings of the World’ in which she talks about how such TV and movie culture emanating from Bollywood, Korean and Turkish dramas is challenging the once hegemonic American pop culture. 

Ertuğrul is about central Asian Turkish tribes coming together to defeat the Crusaders, the Byzantines, and the Mongol armies, and eventually establishing the Ottoman Empire. The most important aspect of it is the portrayal of the ghazi spirit of Turkish tribes which ostensibly stems from Islam, and how Turkish tribal societies strictly abided by the Quran and the Hadith. This depiction of Islamic values does not come across as propaganda but as cultural history, the remnants of which have been passed on and some still being lived, and the resultant family and faith values. This is the apparent charm of the series. The coveted aims also include the portrayal of the ‘good side of Islam’. One newspaper report stated how a couple in Mexico actually reverted to Islam after watching it. 

It is the politics associated with Ertuğrul that is quite interesting. The then Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had announced on Twitter, during the month of Ramzan, that this series will teach us Islamic values and that everyone should watch it. Ertuğrul became a household name in Pakistan. The lead actors of the show have promised to visit Pakistan. The leading media figures and politicians in Turkey are basking in this newfound bromance between Turkey and Pakistan, popularising slogans like “blood runs thicker than water”, implying that Muslims anywhere in the world are brothers and other nations/communities are just friends.

This wildly popular series has caught the attention of many, with numerous news websites,from across the political spectrum reporting on it. Opindia, a website which harbours far-right Hindu nationalist views, also has a piece on the same, focusing on why Muslims in India like Ertuğrul so much. It is, the article argues, because Muslims are always going through an identity crisis where they deny their Hindu heritage but focus on the Arab and Turk heritage, which does not treat Indian Muslims with any sympathy or the sentiments of brotherhood. (Perhaps Muslims in India have a crisis related to the same, but it is more about internalising the guilt of being made to believe that they are responsible for partition and everything bad that has come in India’s way since.) The crisis is not about deciding whether they are more Hanafi/Salafi/Wahabi or Deobandi/Barelvi but an identity crisis of the self, a crisis augmented by the political-economic context of neoliberalism.

In West Asia, and especially within Turkey, however, this becomes more controversial. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have banned this show in their countries, suggesting that this is Turkey’s soft power and a cultural war. The Arabs are reminded of the time of the Ottoman Empire when the Turks had the Arab provinces under their wing. (It is interesting to note that the first Palestinian nationalist resistance of any kind was not against the Zionists but against the Ottomans in the 19^th century). Another point that could be made is that one characteristic of Turkish Islam has been the revered place it has given to Sufi saints and orders, and in the show, it is the character of Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi mystic and philosopher, who directly guides Ertuğrul spiritually. The idea of Sufism has for long bothered the Wahabis and the Salafis, and very interestingly Mustafa Atatürk himself, whose project of modernising Turkey included destroying all Sufi orders and mazaars. 

Such soft power also very conveniently lines up with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s vision of Neo-Ottomanism, in which he sees himself as the Sultan and Islam as the guiding light. It should be noted that the creator of this series, Mehmet Bozdağ, who is known for creating period dramas around and of the Ottoman times, was all praise for Erdoğan’s new Presidential system of governance, which was denounced by many within and outside Turkey as a naked rise of dictatorship. For Bozdağ, such governance and leadership have smoothened the way for the cinema and TV industry in Turkey. 

While Ertuğrul might be imbuing a sense of pride in Muslims by making them see the glimpses of a once glorious religious past whose only principle was that of justice, within Turkey, critics of Erdoğan and his brand of Islamist, anti-Kemalist politics worry that such period dramas are a textbook example of state-sponsored propaganda through popular culture. It also aids Erdoğan in countering a major belief of Atatürk that the latter tried to imbibe within the Turks. For Atatürk, the Ottoman Empire was a glitch in the progress of the otherwise great Turkish race. The post-Ottoman Turkey that he created and succeeded in creating (at least in the big cities of Istanbul, Ankara, Bursa, Izmir), was all about treating Turks as a great race which just happened to pick Islam on the way and eventually, the Ottoman empire bringing this greatness to a screeching halt. Erdoğan’s politics, on the other hand, is all about the glory of Islam which has from the start guided the Turks, the Ottoman Empire being the epitome of it. 

Ertuğrul is not the only show of its kind. Its sequel, Kuruluş Osman, tells the story of Ertuğrul ‘s son, who finally founded the Osmanlı or the Ottoman Empire. Filinta Mustafa, Yunus Emre are other period dramas set in the glorious Ottoman days. The rise in such dramas during Erdoğan’s reign has been a two-way street. Erdoğan has facilitated the production and dissemination of such shows while the growing popularity of these shows, especially amongst the conservative masses of Turkey, aids Erdoğan’s Islamist politics. When Ertuğrul’s scenes of discussion on Islam and the Prophet, wrapped up in the Turkish tribal style are shown, devout Muslims immediately relate to them. In a very interesting incident, during an awards ceremony, the actors and directors of the show were not allowed to speak by the host of the ceremony. They were even mocked on stage. Erdoğan himself came out to defend the show fiercely after the incident. 

While in Pakistan even liberal voices have come out to appreciate the cultural and religious theme of the show (it does have a very addictive quality to it), not to mention the conservatives and ultra-conservatives in Islamabad’s corridors of power are already quite impressed, this show back in Turkey has become another point of irreconcilable difference within an already polarised society—the glorious Islamic Ottoman Empire vs the Kemalist politics of limiting Islam (if not anti-Islam); secularism and Turkish racial superiority.One political takeaway from such an analysis is that the maddening popularity of such shows from the non-Western part of the world challenges Herbert Schiller’s notion of cultural imperialism whereby cultural dissemination occurs only from the powerful to the non-powerful cultural context. The American popular culture might have enticed the elites and later the new middle classes of the developing nations, but American shows and movies are unable to cater to those who migrate from the rural and small towns to the big urban centres. This constituency of internal migrants has a difficult time processing the dual contexts that they find themselves in—the conservative homeland values versus the fast-paced neoliberal life of the big cities. The availability and propagation of shows that appeal to a glorious nationalist past without reliable sources of history to back them up has dangerous political consequences for democracy, as evident in the rise of right-wing populists worldwide. 

Sana Chaudhary is a PhD candidate at Centre for Political Studies at JNU.