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Around Town Dining with a Pope
Hugh Pope
Maria Eliadesdelves into the politics of the Middle East with Hugh Pope Hugh Pope has been writing about the Middle East for the last 30 years. His three books following his journalistic career include Turkey Unveiled (with his daughter, Nicole Pope), Sons of the Conquerors: Rise of the Turkic World, and his latest, Dining with AlQaeda, which is a reflection on that 30-year career. We caught up with him over the phone before his return to Istanbul in December, just in time to give a talk at Molly's Cafe. We read that you took Oriental Studies at Oxford. How did you get into journalism? I guess I did some writing for the school newspapers, a very small amount. I didn't get jobs anywhere else and the other thing was, I couldn't think of anything else I could do with my Persian and Arabic, which I studied. I booked a one-way ticket to Damascus translating for people and writing stories for obscure publications. Because it was a very
difficult place to be, whenever a big shot journalist came through and they couldn't speak Arabic, I was able to translate and fix for them. Gradually I got to know people. After one particularly successful fixing, I got hired to be a radio monitor, as it was called then, a translator and editor at UPI in Beirut. That was a full time job that paid pretty well, so that's where I got started. What inspired you to write about the experiences in your career for your latest book? My main reason was that I wanted to get across what the Middle East was really like. I left Iraq a year or so afterwards because I couldn't believe in what I was doing. I was very upset at the way that nothing I had personally written or anyone else had written in the press before the Iraq War had managed to persuade people that it was a crazy idea. I think, at the end of the day it's a lack of context. American readers don't have the proper context for the Middle East to know where to position the newspaper stories that they read. I thought by writing this book I could give the context, I wondered, 'since I'm writing this book about what the
82 Time Out ‚stanbul December 2010
I wondered, 'since I'm writing this book about what the Middle East is really like, what's the best way to get the stories across?' and then I thought, 'I'll write them all from a first person perspective and it'll be only what I saw with my own eyes.' Middle East is really like, what's the best way to get the stories across?' and then I thought, 'I'll write them all from a first person perspective and it'll be only what I saw with my own eyes.' There are 300 books coming out about the Middle East every year. It's very difficult to say anything original. A lot of things have already been said. I thought I would then use the funny things, the sometimes tragic things and the meaningful things that happened to me to illustrate the whole
Middle East from Istanbul to the south of Sudan to the edges of Pakistan to the borders of Central Asia, which to me is the Middle East. I don't think the Middle East is a political entity but I do think there's a lot of shared elements throughout the Middle East, and that's that it is the dysfunctional backyard for the rest of the world. As a journalist, I had always felt I had done a perfectly honest job and that while some people may have made things up or exaggerated, on the whole we were telling the whole story. As I wrote what I really thought, I realized it wasn't what had come out in my newspaper articles. As I was writing the book, I would always use the first draft of what I had sent to the newspaper, not the published draft. I felt that wasn't really my voice. Will you be speaking about this when you come in December? I'll be talking about the book. Turkey and the Middle East is part of the book and I do use the achievements to show. All the countries in the Middle East have suffered wars, revolutions and upheavals in the last 50 years. For them to get where Turkey's got in 90 years is going to take a couple generations. I try and contrast the two and show how people are going to have to be patient and invest time and basic problems like getting stability in place before you can start talking about democracy. Molly's Cafe, Camekan Sokak 7, Galata. December 11, 16.30.