Hugh Pope

Author, Reporter, Editor

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Writer of books on Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Formerly Director of Communications & Outreach and Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group. Ex-Turkey & Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

  • Tank tracks in Babylon

    Photo (c) Hugh PopeJohn Ash writes poetry that I really love, and his new collection “In the Wake of the Day”, just published by Carcanet, once again offers great moments of hovering between East and West, ancient and modern, the personal and the historical.

    Ash nearly drops his pose of elegant nonchalance once or twice when he edges close to the vicious sides of the contemporary Middle East and the insouciant West’s share of responsibility for the mess.  “Babylon” asks the reader to “remember the shattered windows of the stores,/the blood smeared on torn newspaper … tank tracks are driven over Babylon.” More representative of the typical Middle Eastern condition, perhaps,  is “The Cut,” as people rush home on a snowy winter evening and the lights go out – again. “The grid overloads. The power fails./It is like this often. We shift and change,/Slipping to a poor, third place.” And Ash has all his pithy poise at hand in this short meditation:

    Olives

    In the lands to the west of the Jordan

    Olive groves were guarded by the soldiers of the kings

    By night and day, and the destruction

    Of a single tree was punishable by death

    Or mutilation. This is no longer the case,

    But I am not convinced of the improvement.

    We’re neighbours in Istanbul, so I guess that it’s no surprise that we share many of the same perspectives, which I try to capture in down-to-earth, anecdotal prose in Dining with al-Qaeda. I wish I could get away with the grand historical sweep beloved by Ash, as here in “Difficult”, a poem in which he mocks his incurable name-dropping of ancient oddities, then unrepentantly wraps his poem up with the couplet:

    Let us now consider with care the lost

    Recital platforms of Sogdiana.

  • French rights sold to Presses de l’universite Laval

    The French rights to Dining with al-Qaeda have already been sold! The translation will be done by Les Presses de l’universite Laval in Quebec, a respected Canadian university press. PUL will soon also be publishing a translation into French of my second book Sons of the Conquerors as well.

    The distributor of their French-lanugage edition in U.S./Canada is PROLOGUE INC., +1 450 434-0306, and in France it’s SODIS, +33 1 60 07 82 00.

  • Black Snakes, Undershirts and the Peacock Angel

    The penultimate chapter of Dining with al-Qaeda focuses on my experiences during the Iraq war with the Yezidi community, who straddle the northeastern corner of Iraq and patches of southeast Turkey. These 500,000 people seemed to me to be as representative as any of the other pieces of the Iraqi mosaic before, during and after the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein. Their fate seemed particularly unfair to me, since they had laid good plans for the future. Like many Iraqis, any hopes of quick improvement were dashed.

    I also chose to write about them because, thanks to my Kurdish interpreter and fixer Sagvan Murad (see picture left), a Yezidi activist in his regular life, I had privileged access to the community. A strange aspect of the Yezidi faith is that even its adherents know little of the exact tenets of their religion — except for emphatic denial of outsiders’ prejudice that they ‘worship the devil’. Ultimately they are monotheists with a special reverence for their protector, the Peacock Angel.

    One of the outsiders who knows the Yezidis best – Eszter Spät of Hungary, author of one of the only good books on the community – has now put together an intriguing website illustrating Yezidi holy objects from their peacock standards to the religious ceremonies surrounding their traditional undershirts. Through photographs (click on them to make them bigger), she and her collaborators show how straightforward observation and photographs gets as close to the truth about the Middle East than any formal history, theorizing or journalistic shorthand.

    Spät’s website also set me straight on one thing about the black snake on the wall of the shrine of Yezidi divine Sheikh Adi in Lalish (visible on the photo here too). Nobody knows quite what it symbolizes, but Yezidi myths have it that a black snake led Noah and his ark of animals to safety. Yezidis had previously joked with me that this snake was kept black with shoe polish. According to Spät, however, it’s really done with the soot of the holy oil lamps…

    The oil is still stored in ancient amphorae deep in the shrine, where, equipped with my trusty headlamp,  Murad and I explored the inner recesses and stone-carved underground spring. Murad taught me how to make a wish in the amphora store by tossing an old rag backwards over my head to land on a ledge (I was successful on my third attempt). One of his wishes must have come true: while things have been pretty tough for Yezidis since 2003, he’s now risen high to become acting chief of protocol for Iraqi President Jalal Talabani!

  • Your Son is in Good Hands

    This photo — from Turkish photographer Sıtkı Kösemen‘s fun new album of Istanbul photographs Today is Today — sums up a lot about what I’m trying to say about the many faces of Islam in Dining with al-Qaeda. What do you think these girls represent?

  • The Daily Planet Spins into the Mideast’s Parallel Universe

    Sometimes I feel that for Americans, the dramas of the Middle East play out in parallel universe. It was with fascination, therefore, that I saw that the Berkeley Daily Planet in California had spun into an intergalactic war as it tried to bring debate about the region down to earth.

    I bring this up because a principal idea I want to get across in my book Dining with al-Qaeda is how hard it is for reporters covering the Middle East to frame the story right. This is especially true when issues dealing with Israel, anti-Semitism, or terrorism come up.

    The mismatch of perception and reality that has built up over decades can trip up even a local American newspaper. The Daily Planet, which published letters critical of Israel, was the subject of this story in the New York Times in November 2009.

    BERKELEY, Calif. — For the last six years, The Berkeley Daily Planet has published a freewheeling assortment of submissions from readers, who offer sharp-elbowed views on everything from raucous college parties (generally bad) to the war in Iraq (ditto).

    But since March, that running commentary has been under attack by a small but vociferous group of critics who accuse the paper’s editor, Becky O’Malley, of publishing too many letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel. Those accusations are the basis of a campaign to drive away the paper’s advertisers and a Web site that strongly suggests The Planet and its editor are anti-Semitic.

    “We think that Ms. O’Malley is addicted to anti-Israel expression just as an alcoholic is to drinking,” Jim Sinkinson, who has led the campaign to discourage advertisers, wrote in an e-mail message. He is the publisher of Infocom Group, a media relations company. “If she wants to serve and please the East Bay Jewish community, she would be safer avoiding the subject entirely.”

    I assume that both journalist and the New York Times were acting in good faith, just as was the case of my experience in the Middle East. Yet this account showed again how successful lobbying groups have been in developing U.S. newspapers’ particular approach to Israel.

    First the headline: “In a Home to Free Speech, a Paper Is Accused of Anti-Semitism” Note: not something neutral like “Paper in Home of Free Speech Attacked for Publishing Anti-Israel Letters.” An anti-Semitic slur is slung, and the mud sticks. A headline-hopping reader gets the message that anti-Semitism is taking root in America and must be stopped. It sets the tone for the whole article, legitimizing the idea that publishing material critical of Israel – apparently the main problem — is necessarily anti-Semitic, as does the choice of quote for the third paragraph.

    As the story eventually points out in its concluding paragraphs, the local Jewish community in fact wants little to do with this campaign against the supposedly anti-Semitic Daily Planet. The community does rightly protest an unpleasant letter from an Iranian student in India claiming that Jews brought persecution upon themselves – the only item cited that backs up the anti-Semitic charge in the headline. Indeed, the Times points out that the Daily Planet‘s owner, Ms. O’Malley, later firmly distanced herself from this “nasty” view in her paper.

    I’d like to stress again that I mainly want to draw attention to the way the Times article is constructed. Much of the information for a fully-aware reader to make a judgement is there, just lower down in the story. Better late than never, Ms. O’Malley is cited as pointing out (in print) her reason for making her readers aware that criticism of Israel is out there.

    I still don’t think that keeping sentiments like [that of the Iranian student in India] out of The Daily Planet will make him or people like him go away.

    Ms. O’Malley is quite right. Airbrushing out uncomfortable realities helps nobody. Israel’s overpowering conduct in its dispute with the Palestinians, and U.S. support for its actions, have stirred public opinion not just in California but to a far greater degree in Middle Eastern countries. Framing can also go too far the other way, as broadcasters like al-Jazeera spin scenes that inflame Middle Eastern viewers. This poisonous mix has fed distorted, sometimes perverted and disgraceful views of Jews, Israel and America. It certainly underpinned the motivation of several of the 9/11 hijackers.

    My late Journal colleague, Danny Pearl – a Jewish victim of this wave of hatred, killed by real anti-Semitic extremists in Karachi in 2002 – had wanted to write a story after 9/11 that exposed the way Middle Easterners had persuaded themselves that the attacks on the U.S. were actually organized by the Israeli secret service, Mossad. He wished to explain how it was that the whole Muslim world was ready to believe conspiracy claims emanating from a small Jihadi group, not the clear reality of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the United States evident to the whole world. The Journal’s editors declined to publish it. Pearl was furious, believing that they avoided the story because it would inevitably have raised the issue of Israel’s conduct.

    And so it was that yet another light mile was added to the outer space of ignorance that separates Americans from the reality of the Middle East —  a gap in public knowledge that that is policed by campaigns like the one reported by the Times against the Daily Planet.

  • Politics & Prose, Washington DC – 7pm, 31 March 2010

    Dining with al-Qaeda Front Cover

    Dining with al-Qaeda will be featured at venerable Washington DC bookshop  Politics & Prose on 31 March 2010. I’ve been invited to do a reading, discussion and book signing at 7pm – hope to see you there!

    Politics & Prose

    5015 Connecticut Ave NW
    Washington, DC 20008
    (202) 364-1919

  • ‘A charming writer…a rıch life’s work’ – Kirkus Reviews

    Many thanks to trade reviewer Kirkus Reviews for enthusiasm and praise for Dining with al-Qaeda in their 12 December 2009 assessment!

    British journalist Pope (Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World, 2005, etc.) shares deeply engaged dispatches from the Middle East hotspots he visited during his long career.

    The author organizes the narrative topically around the big stories he covered as a journalist in the Middle East. The son of a scholar of ancient texts and a “handsome Englishwoman of the indefatigable school,” Pope was studying Oriental languages at Oxford and became enthused with the romantic idea of becoming a Middle Eastern journalist in the style of Times correspondent Robert Fisk, “so close to the action, so clear in [his] moral vision”—however not overly concerned with factual precision. The author first got a job at the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo, embellishing news out of a sense of perverse boredom. He became a stringer in Turkey for the Independent in 1991 when the Gulf War broke out, before being expelled for something written by Fisk. Pope subsequently worked for the UPI in Syria covering the Palestinian crisis of the early ’80s; Reuters in Lebanon and Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet withdrawal of 1989; and the Wall Street Journal, serving as the Middle Eastern reporter in the ’90s based in Istanbul, until 9/11 abruptly challenged his sense of invulnerability. The author is a charming writer, intensely sympathetic of the Arabic people he moves among and eager to make known their voices, especially in terms of their resentment of imperial powers and Israeli aggression. In between his newsmaking interviews with Yasser Arafat, young King Abdullah of Jordan, an al-Qaeda operator in Saudi Arabia and a Taliban ambassador in Kabul, Pope offers intimate glimpses inside the Arab world, including his study of the beloved medieval Persian poet Hafez as a means to help decipher Iranian political rhetoric.

    An enjoyable chronicle of a rich life’s work.

  • News from Tartary

    To talk to Uygur leader Rebiya Kadeer has been a personal ambition ever since I visited China’s Xinjiang Province in 1999. It was a meeting with the first Uygur leader, the late Isa Alptekin, that inspired my travels through two dozen countries seeking to understand the essence of Turkishness in my 2005 book, Sons of the Conquerors. By chance, a discussion about Turkey at the National Endowment of Democracy in Washington DC – which bravely and rightly gives Mrs Kadeer a helping hand, despite great pressure from China — led me to her small office on Pennsylvania Avenue. Our hour together made me feel that those years of travel were worth it all over again.

    I still find it remarkable that Mrs Kadeer understands when I speak my Istanbul Turkish, and that I can understand the gist of what she says in Uygur – even though the languages are separated by thousands of miles and centuries of completely separate development. Luckily, though, Omer Kanat was on hand to translate – as he had been when I last met Isa Alptekin in Istanbul in the mid-1990s. But many things about Mrs Kadeer need no translation.

    Rebiya Kadeer has had an extraordinary career: she rose to become one the richest women and a member of parliament in China, became an activist for Uygur rights, was thrown in jail in 1999, won her freedom, took up residence in the United States, and even survived an apparent assassination attempt in Washington DC. 61 years old in 2009, she is the mother of 11 children, diminutive and wears a trim black long skirt and jacket topped by an embroidered black Central Asian cap. She often plays with her two traditional Uygur plaits of hair, thick, long and reaching down to her waist, and her serenely beautiful face and compelling manner are passionate and commanding.

    Like Isa Alptekin, she insists on the non-violent nature of her increasingly successful quest to unify the squabbling factions of Uygur exiles and to win international recognition of the Uygur cause. Her goal is to win the same status enjoyed by the Dalai Lama. As a one-woman human force field, working the world from Washington, she certainly has a much better chance of doing so than Alptekin did in Istanbul.

    Her people, the Uygurs (sometimes spelled Uyghurs or Uighurs), can only be included in the broadest of all possible definitions of the Middle East, since they are a distant Turkic-speaking Muslim people in Central Asia. Their claim to importance is that they are half the population of Xinjiang, itself one-sixth of China’s territory. The problem is that their 8 million population is a drop in the ocean of 1.3 billion Chinese. They are being crushed by fate, history, overwhelming immigration by ethnic Han Chinese and an extraordinarily strict and illiberal approach by Beijing, about which I wrote at length in Sons of the Conquerors.

    Our conversation reminded me of a problem that is a theme of Dining with al Qaeda: the question of  what makes a violent Islamist or a terrorist. For me, Islamism is closely bound up with nationalism, indeed I’d say these two phenomena are two sides of the same coin. Mrs Kadeer also saw them as closely linked, a reaction to the way the Chinese first neutralized Uygur religious leaders in the mid 1990s, then the intellectuals and urban commercial middle class like herself and her husband in the late 1990s.

    When I visited Xinjiang in 1999, Chinese government bulldozers were driving great boulevards through Uygur neighborhoods in towns – work that is now nearly done, with the Uygurs pushed out of their old courtyard homes to soulless apartment blocks — but they had left alone the villages and the traditional, almost mediaeval lifestyle there. In recent years, Mrs Kadeer said, Uygurs felt that this rural repository of their culture was increasingly under threat from population transfers and work-seeking immigration of young Uygur women to the industrial towns of the Chinese east – according to her, a key factor behind the outburst of violence in Urumqi this year.

    Given her feeling of being part of a culture under existential threat, she says she cannot bring herself to label the occasional Uygur “Islamist” militants who use violence as terrorists, at the same as she is trying to dissuade her people from using such tactics. “We have marginal groups, but we won’t say [they are] terrorists. China has put them in this state,” she said.

    As a journalist, I faced the same problem when writing about the Middle East. Using the ‘terror’ label made it look as though I’d taken sides, whether in relation to Iranian policies, the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel, or the Turkish Kurd rebellion against the Turkish government. Militant groups’ actions could deliberately or inevitably kill civilians — my understanding of a terrorist act — but then so could the actions of the state they were fighting — which people called terrorist only if they disapproved its politics. I do use the word terrorist as an adjective to describe to individual outrages. But I try to avoid using the noun “terrorism” or “terrorist” as an adjective to describe groups that have real popular support, and among whom I live and report. There is no neutral path to take. Whether I use or don’t use the term, it makes one side or the other think I’ve taken sides against them.

    The underlying point she made was about why young people sometimes turned to Islam. “The Uygurs were very desperate, so they embraced God,”  as she put it. I’ve seen the same thing even in Israel, where my research assistant said her sister adopted the Orthodox Jewish tradition of a wig to cover her hair because she thought the difficulties faced by Israel were a punishment by God for lack of adherence to religious ways.

    Those difficulties in Israel pale in comparison with the hopelessness of the Uygur fight for more rights – “our people are crushed” as Mrs Kadeer puts it. These days, when the world is increasingly turning to Beijing on many matters, it seems anachronistic to suppose that the Uygurs are “splittists” automatically seeking a separate and doubtless impoverished state of their own. In fact, Beijing would be well advised to seek some compromise with a charismatic, secular leader who can unite most Uygurs and better manage this aspect of the complex minority issue within China, rather than to scorn her and face the near-certainty of endless tensions and Islamist radicalization over the coming decades in Xinjiang. Any Chinese researchers who came to visit Mrs Kadeer in Washington and really talk to her would soon be convinced of that too.

    (title note: News from Tartary is the title of one of my favorite Central Asia books, by Peter Fleming, elder brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. In it Fleming describes his daring journey through Xinjiang and China in the 1930s. The title’s evocation of utter obscurity reminds me of the way my account of visiting the Uygurs only saw the light of day in newsprint when a Sons of the Conquerors chapter excerpt appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal Asia as a news story a whole six years – yes, six years – after I had visited Xinjiang. Nothing had much changed in that time, and judging by Rebiya Kadeer’s and visitors’ accounts, I believe that today the situation is not qualitatively much different).

  • Lunch with the editor

    A major theme of Dining with al-Qaeda is the difficulty reporters like me faced in translating what I experienced in the Middle East into reports that really explained the situation to American readers.

    Sometimes I felt that we’d invented a virtual Middle East with our convoluted attempts to bridge this divide, using artificial one-label-fits-all concepts like “peace process”, “terror”, “Arabs”, or “Islam”.

    This difficulty stemmed from lots of different factors, including our readers’ physical distance from the subject, unfamiliarity with the peoples of the region, domestic US lobbies distorting national debates, misapprehensions about how different Islamic cultures are in every country and an overall cultural disconnect between America and the Middle East.

    Meeting up again in November with my charismatic former foreign editor at the Wall Street Journal, John Bussey, I told him how frustrated I had been by all this in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, when I was the only Journal reporter traveling to the Saddam Hussein’s domains. Bussey, now the Journal’s Washington DC bureau chief, immediately invited me in to discuss Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East over sandwiches with my former Journal colleagues.

    For me, the occasion turned into a first chance to discuss in public these key themes of the book. I still had plenty to prove for some. But it was invigorating to feel how the intellectual climate in the US is changing, making it possible for people like me to make my case and feel like people are listening. Seven years ago saying the same things was like shouting in a gale.

  • A “vivid panorama” – Publishers Weekly

    A first formal review of Dining with al-Qaeda from Publishers’ Weekly — topping the bill in the non-fiction review section on 23 November 2009!

    The 30 years Pope (Sons of the Conquerors) has spent living and traveling in the Middle East, from a 1980 visit as an Oxford student through a decade-long stint as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, color this reflection on the region’s recent history. Moving back and forth through time in vignettes set in Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, this fascinating memoir of his career tackles subjects as varied as the sexual attitudes of Middle Eastern men, the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Iraq-Iran War, and the poetry of the mystic Persian poet Hafez. The text has a loose episodic structure that sometimes feels desultory, though it does end with a series of chapters that focus on Iraq in the years before and after the American invasion. The author’s writing is journalistic but imbued with the author’s personality and long involvement in the region—he decries uncritical American support for Israel and the West’s tendency to treat Islam and Muslim cultures monolithically. Pope’s exquisite photographs accompany his vivid panorama of the region. (Mar.)