City Life | 15 November 2008

It was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well, life-size images of her — flaunting her curvaceous clunes at shoppers in the Agent Provocateur lingerie outlet at Istanbul’s Kanyon Mall. It was a shocking exhibition in a country that is 98 per cent Islamic. But the thing was, it was me who was shocked. I’d been reading press accounts of Turkey’s gathering fundamentalism: how its women had embraced the hijab, while those who were disinclined to do so were having it forcibly pulled over them by Islamist vigilantes. Once a secular standard-bearer, Turkey seemed to be fast morphing into Tehran, or so one read. There were even suicide bombings of louche infidels; the remains of the worst visible across from Kanyon in the scorched ruins of the old HSBC headquarters. It was all bad for business in an ancient land that virtually invented commerce.