Traveling
across Borders of Hate
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
History
is a great teacher and a sign from the heavens
to draw humankind towards divine presence. Unfortunately,
nations have turned it into a compendium of self-serving
myths, dividing themselves, and erecting borders
of hate. The passions that erupt in the flames
of war arise in the hearts of men and women. It
is here, in the deep recesses of the human breast,
that love and hate wage their battle and manifest
themselves on the stage of history. The fuel that
propels them is the perception of history, often
self-serving, subjective and tailored to keep
those passions alive.
There are many such borders of hate in the modern
world: Bosnia-Serbia, Greece-Turkey, Chechnya-Russia,
India-Pakistan, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Israel-Palestine,
Israel-Lebanon. And the list keeps growing by
the day. Often, these borders are trans-national.
At other times, they exist within the same geographical
entity.
That hatred is now institutionalized with governments
feeding their nationals as well as the visitors
to their borders with doses of prejudice about
their perceived enemies. Hatred has now become
embedded into tourism. Travel brochures deliver
carefully crafted misinformation. Travel guides
transmit it, sometimes in subtle tones and at
other times brazenly.
I had the occasion to travel across one such border
recently, that between the Greek and the Turkish
worlds, where neighbors who live within a stone’s
throw are separated by emotional chasms a thousand
miles wide.
I have visited Turkey many times, enjoyed the
hospitality of its beautiful people, savored its
sumptuous foods and have marveled at the magnificence
of its monuments. I have stood in reverence at
the tombs of Mevlana Rumi and Ayup Sultan, Companion
of the Prophet. The Bosphorus is where Asia and
Europe meet. It is where the axes of three great
world religions, Islam, Catholic Christianity
and Orthodox Christianity intersect. If you disregard
the hassles at the Istanbul airport, Turkey is
a land one must visit at least once in a lifetime.
While in Istanbul I have spent days absorbing
the Greek architecture of the Aya Sophia and the
engineering marvels of the ancient underground
Byzantine water reservoirs of Istanbul. What you
see in Istanbul whets your appetite for Greece.
So, on this visit I traveled to Athens. I was
full of enthusiasm and curiosity. This was the
land of Socrates and Plato, Aristotle and Alexander,
Euclid, Herodotus and Demosthenes. The legacy
of its civilization is claimed by the West and
imbibed in the East. It sparked the Renaissance
in Europe and was instrumental in the Mu’tazalite
eruption in the Islamic world.
The Greeks are also a handsome people, friendly,
good natured with a love of Mediterranean food
and wholesome music. But here the analogy with
the Turks stops.
The Greeks and the Turks hate each other.
My first stop was at the Acropolis on which stands
the Parthenon, a magnificent structure of engineering
perfection. The Acropolis is a rocky hill with
a commanding view of the area surrounding it.
From ancient times it has been a location of a
temple dedicated to whichever deity the local
population believed in at the time. For this reason
it is also called the sacred rock of Athens. The
imposing Parthenon which dominates the hill was
built by Pericles around 447 BC.
“The Turks were responsible for much of
the destruction at the Acropolis”, started
the tourist guide on the hill. “They built
a store house here for gun powder which was hit
by a shell during a siege by Venice in 1687. Many
buildings caught fire and were destroyed”.
This was a jarring prelude to a long litany of
complaints about the Turks. As I followed the
guide around, he pointed to every stone that was
supposedly moved by the Turks from the temple
to build a wall around the Acropolis. The historical
fact is that the Venetians laid siege to Athens
(1687 CE), bombarded the Acropolis, occupied it,
and used material from the ancient structures
to build a wall around the hill. When the Turks
recaptured the town (1689) they reinforced the
wall. The Greeks themselves tore down the temples
of earlier civilizations to build their structures.
Evidence of this may be found in the extensive
underground water Cistern in Istanbul built by
the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in 532 CE. .
The following day we took a taxi from Athens to
Mykenia, a distance of about sixty miles. The
Mykenian civilization (circa 1200 BC) was a forerunner
of the Hellenistic civilization (circa 750 BC
to 100 BC). The Mykenians were master builders,
skilled craftsmen in the bronze age, advanced
in the art of administration and used a numerical
system based on alphabets. An understanding of
the Mykenians is a must for anyone studying the
classical Greek civilization.
“We were slaves of the Turks for four hundred
years”, began the taxi driver’s version
of history. “When they occupied Greece”,
he continued, “many churches were destroyed
and our culture was ruined”. The historical
fact is that under the Milli system, the Ottomans
gave complete autonomy to the Greeks (and other
Christian Orthodox people in Eastern Europe).
The Greek Churches were protected by Christian
waqfs and administered by the Patriarch of Istanbul.
This patronage enabled the Greeks living in the
hills and those in the plains develop a kindred
sense of belonging to a common heritage. Indeed,
a sociologist may develop a plausible thesis that
it was the Ottoman patronage under the milli system
that ignited the consciousness of a unitary Greek
nation among peoples of Greek heritage living
in isolated islands and different parts of the
mainland.
We proceeded on to Nafplion, the first capital
of modern Greece. It was here in 1829 that the
Greek rebels, incited and abetted by the British,
declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire.
The old city plaza is still there and the Turkish
flavor endures. The jami masjid of Nafplion is
now a museum, a fate better than those of other
masjids in Greece that were converted outright
to churches. But the Greeks have their eyes closed
to the excesses that they committed. They have
no recollection of their invasion of Turkey (1921-24)
in which they killed, burned and destroyed much
of Western Anatolia. It is an asymmetrical memory,
which stores only what the Turks did to them.
We took the flight from Athens to Larnaca in Cyprus.
This was a week before the Israeli onslaught on
Lebanon flooded Larnaca with thousands of refugees.
We visited the Sultaniye Tekke which dates back
to the first Arab attempt to conquer Cyprus during
the reign of Amir Muawiya, circa 670 CE. Larnaca
had a sizable Turkish population until 1964. On
Christmas night of that year, the Greeks invaded
the Turkish quarters and slaughtered thousands
forcing the Turkish population to flee north to
what is today the Turkish Republic of Cyprus.
I wanted to make a telephone call from Larnaca
(in Greek Cyprus) to Lefka (in Turkish Cyprus).
I was firmly reminded by the receptionist at the
hotel that there was no such place as Turkish
Cyprus, and that it was “occupied Cyprus”.
“You cannot make a call to occupied Cyprus
from here”, she continued, “you must
first call Turkey and from there the call is directed
to Lefka”. A sadness consumed my heart as
I realized that a bird could fly across a border
in a minute but it would take a human voice a
thousand miles to reach a neighbor. Cyprus is
a small island but it is separated into two parts
by borders of hate.
Greece and Turkey are not the only neighbors wherein
the borders are sealed with suspicion, distrust
and outright hatred. On a recent trip from Delhi
to Sirhind on the India-Pakistan border, I noticed
how complete was the obliteration of Islamic monuments
(except Sufi tombs) in Eastern Punjab. Prior to
partition (1947) East Punjab was more than one-third
Muslim (as opposed to Western Punjab which was
more than seventy percent Muslim). Today it is
less than one-twentieth Muslim. One cranes ones
neck in vain to see if there is a minaret here
and there. The destruction was mutual across the
border. Partition erected barriers of hate right
across the heart of Punjab.
Sometimes the barriers of hate exist within a
geographical or national boundary. Several years
ago I visited the ruins of Hampi, the ancient
capital of the Vijayanagar kingdom in the Deccan
on the Tungabhadra river. It was here that the
combined armies of the Bahmani sultans defeated
the raja of Vijayanagar in 1565 CE at the battle
of Tylekote. It was one of the decisive battles
of history that destroyed a great medieval empire
and replaced it with the (Shia Muslim) Bahmani
sultanates. The (Shia) Safavids of Persia, who
were at that time engaged in a fierce struggle
with the Great Mughals for control of Afghanistan,
saw a golden opportunity to circumvent the Mogul
empire and made overtures to the Bahmani sultans
for a common stand against the (nominally sunni)
Moguls. It was this Persian interference into
the affairs of Hindustan which provoked the Great
Mughals and brought the Mogul armies hurling south
into the Deccan, first under Akbar, and then under
Shah Jehan and Aurangzeb. In any case, Hampi was
destroyed in the battle of Tylekote.
“The Muslims destroyed Hampi”, began
the guide, repeating this litany as he showed
me each monument or every piece of sculpture lying
on the ground. What was a power struggle between
a raja and his neighbor sultans was now presented
as a war based on religion. When I asked some
pointed questions, the guide realized that I was
a Muslim and his tone changed. I wondered how
many thousands of ordinary folks who had no knowledge
of history and whose only interest was to visit
the ruins of an ancient city had received a poisonous
dose of anti-Muslim tirades from this and other
guides at the site.
History is an interpretation of events. It happens
only once but is narrated in a hundred ways. In
modern life, as tourism has increased and people
travel in increasing numbers from one country
to another, a subjective view of history has penetrated
the tourist industry. Millions of tourists each
year are bombarded with distorted versions of
historical events and return home with the prejudices
which are thrust upon them during the tours. Men
and women of goodwill who strive to build bridges
of understanding across religious and cultural
divides would render a service if they worked
together to reform the tourist industry so that
history becomes a mechanism for healing not of
hate.
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