The world is changing. It is globalising undoubtedly quickly, yet, also, in some rather unexpected ways. Some would say that, while the West begins to turn markedly inward, the rest of the world continues to connect and grow. Part of these latter dynamics can be illustrated through the snaking reach of popular culture across the globe. Soft power in the form of cultural influence can, on occasion, serve as a valid counterweight to economic, political and military designs. Over the last decade, Turkey has enjoyed a televisual revolution that has seen its audiences expand from Anatolia to the Middle East, South America, and beyond. Fatima Bhutto joined me to talk about the changing faces of popular culture and the long shadow that Turkish television casts.

Luke: Can you start by telling me how you got interested in Turkish television?

Fatima: Well, I was aware of  the Turkish wave when it hit Pakistan. When “Magnificent Century” started getting aired on television, it really was an event in Pakistan. It just stopped life. There would be people who were not particularly interested in television or drama who suddenly became drawn to the medium. You know, you would go out in the evening and there would be lots of people gathered around in the çay shops chatting about the show. It occurred to me that this was strange, but at the time I wasn’t one of the people watching, I must admit. And yet it was everywhere: at home, on the road, in villages. It always stayed in the back of my mind. When I was sitting down to begin thinking about the new kings of the world, it became really obvious that Turkish popularity was one of the things to cover, even before everything else. 

Luke: I’d like to ask you a simple question that has been bugging me. How is a “dizi” different from any other kind of soap opera? 

Fatima: In the beginning, I was being corrected all the time when I referred to them soap operas - and I wondered the same thing. However, I do think it is different - primarily, in length. A soap opera is half an hour, forty minutes long. Every minute of that is filled with scandal and revelations and betrayal. It is one thing after another. The mother isn’t really dead, she’s alive - but she’s not your mother, she is your aunt. Oh but wait! Your child has vanished, etc. However, a dizi is really slow burning. For me, that is the real difference. They are really layered stories. Every episode being as long as it is is slow burning, so the tension is a guarantee. It is never really quite fulfilled in the same way for a soap opera or telenovela. It is constantly giving you what you want: the drama, the betrayal, a dizi promises it, but also withholds it. 

Luke: What I found interesting is that you said you got corrected a lot when you called them soap operas. I’m curious to know why you think Turkish directors and producers felt the distinction was important. 

Fatima: Well I think they are are quite right, because it is an important distinction. They are not packaging scandal, they are not packaging thoughtless daytime television. They are working with serious scripts. They have nuanced writers on their teams. They believe that their products deserve more consideration and more mental and emotional attention and I would argue that that is true. 

Luke: You went to lots of communities around the world and talked about the influence of Turkish TV in different places. What is the appeal of the dizi outside of Turkey?

Fatima: It was the one thing that people seemed to be watching everywhere I went. When I went to Peru and Dubai, people were watching Bollywood. They were watching it a tiny bit in Lebanon, too, but nowhere else. However, whether I was in Peru, in the Emirates, in Lebanon in Seoul, or in London, people were watching dizis. I think its appeal comes from a couple of things. A show like “Fatmagül”, if you think about it, can be located in the age of #metoo, and so has an appeal not just in Peru and Lebanon, but in the belly of the beast that is the Western world. The story of a young girl fighting power and fighting the rich in an attempt to get justice from a sexual assault is a story with a lot of relevance in Hollywood, in New York and Washington. They just haven’t realised that yet, I don’t think. The English-speaking world really hasn’t embraced the dizi yet, but I think if they did, they would find some of the shows incredibly relevant to the time. 

I think, on the other hand, if you are watching television and you’re watching something like let’s just say “Friends” as a comparison, it’s entertaining and fun, but quite thoughtless in that it doesn’t connect to any part of your life if you are sitting in a refugee camp, or if you are a new migrant moved from your village to the city. What does “Friends” say about your life, and your fears and your worries? Nothing really, but the Turkish shows do. The Turkish shows are ultimately about people struggling to live honest, true and principled lives in an environment against all those values.In that sense they are kind of timeless. They are timeless and they travel incredibly well. 

Luke: Did you hear the same thing in every nation? Were people in Peru taking different things from the shows than people in Syria?

Fatima: There were slight differences. In Peru, when I was there, there was a lot of activism against machismo and violence towards women and there was a particular campaign happening at that moment. So the Turkish shows, particularly “Fatmagül” were incredibly popular. They were obviously a big part of the conversation, but so were others. “Aşk-ı Memnu” was also very big there. I remember being constantly given it in DVD shops. In Lebanon, it was slightly different. There, they were responding to “Magnificent Century”. The Lebanese are otherwise really combative when it comes to Turkey, due to political tensions, Ottoman history, and because the Lebanese are considered the first nation in the world, they are Phoenicians and not Arabs, in their own imagination. The thing I kept hearing again and again from them was, “This is our culture.” When you sort of push back on that and say “Our culture?” Then they would say “Well well, yes, we are all Muslims here.” That was a different thing.

I interviewed Ece Yörenç, the script writer, in London. I was watching a few episodes of “Fatmagül” before going to meet her . I was staying with an Italian friend and I asked her if she would watch a few episodes with me. “Oh yes, fine, I will” she said, very begrudgingly. She was watching it on her own by the end, she had it on her own computer. So it is hard to say what people respond to where. But I think the point is that they respond. They are captured pretty swiftly wherever I’ve seen it happen. 

Luke: The Turkish producers and directors that you spoke to said that the Anglophonic world is the only place the dizi doesn’t do well. Why do you think that is? What do your interviewees say to this?

Fatima: They have a couple. First, subtitles were part of the problem. They said that English-speaking audiences generally watch things with subtitles only as a one-off. 

Luke: I had thought about that because I remember you saying this previously in another interview. It occurs to me that most dizis are dubbed into the language of the country they are played in. Is that right? 

Fatima: In English, no. 

Luke: I see. 

Fatima: In Urdu, yes. It is dubbed in Urdu, it is dubbed in Arabic, it is dubbed in Spanish, but in the case of English, if you are going to watch a Turkish show on Netflix, youtube, or amazon, it’s not dubbed - only subtitles. 

Luke: I see. Do you know why English dub tracks have never been made for English? 

Fatima: Because English speakers don’t like watching dubbing. If you think of the old kung fu movies of the 1970s, the way the mouths move and words follow, dubbing is considered unsophisticated and kind of tacky. English audiences don’t respond to it. So they will watch a foreign film like “The Lives of Others” or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, which is more on the physical than verbal side, but to ask them to watch something subtitled for two hours a night every night is too much. That is what everybody says. So that is what Timur Savci, the head of TIMS said when they were working on an English version of the “Magnificent Century”. I think the other reason is that Turkey is a Muslim country and a Muslim power, and this creates a certain level of discomfort. At the time, that made sense at some level, but I think it makes a lot more sense now as the political situation heats up and Turkey presents itself as a power to be reckoned with in confrontation with America and Europe.. 

Luke: Do these shows do well in Eastern Europe? I guess they do well in the Balkans, but do they do well in the Russian world as well or is there a similar dynamic there as there is in western Europe and the States?

Fatima: I think they have been watched. Of course, tensions always present themselves. They are popular in Greece, but tensions will materialise or there will be a remembering of older tensions and there will be an interruption. But the point is, that in these places people respond strongly enough that there can’t really be any interruptions. Whereas in the West, people haven’t been introduced to them. A Macedonian,Russian or Albanian audience may have a problem with Turkey, but the people are already so far gone into the shows that you can’t do much to stop it. I think the same is true for the middle east at this point. But the problem in Europe and America is that they don’t even know that the Dizi exists yet. They don’t know that there were a few shows that were adapted but didn’t work out.  People didn’t realise that what they were watching came from Turkey. But there hasn’t been ‘the show’ to break out in the English speaking world yet. The ones that were massive everywhere else are dormant in the west. I think they will probably have to cater it to that part of the world to break through to it. 

Luke: I wanted to talk about the place of Istanbul in all of this. I think there is a bit of a misunderstanding in Europe and in America, both on the left and the right to be honest. I think that people there believe that Middle Easterners are desperate to come to London, to Paris and New York. But when I talk to Iraqis, Egyptians, Iranians and Syrians, though they are a bit different for obvious reasons, Istanbul is where they wanted to end up. It was the city that they wanted to come to and they don’t necessarily have great ambitions to go further west. I’m curious to find out if you think that the image created of Istanbul in these shows is causing this or whether something else is going on there. 

Fatima: I think there is a complete misunderstanding. It doesn’t meet the truth in many ways. People migrating are not running to the West. Most migration is internal and, as you said, for a Syrian or Iranian, Turkey is much closer to home in many ways. It is a more accessible and attractive option. I think that the West is hysterical at the moment on this point. I think the West’s hysteria has given Turkey a lot of leverage for Erdoğan to threaten Europe with in terms of opening the doors. I think this also comes from a general Western misperception that they are the centre of the universe, that nowhere else exists with an interest in the values of freedom and justice. All this is becoming transparent. All these illusions or delusions of the Western world are being exposed and I’m sure that this one, immigration, will be no different. 

Luke: I think this pull that Turkey seems to have on other Middle Eastern nations becomes an issue of soft power. I was wondering if you would be able to talk about the televisions rivalry that has developed between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. 

Fatima: I think that it is quite interesting that the first order of business for M.B.C, once it had its new owners, was to cancel Turkish television. They don’t quite say that M.B.S is the new owner. At the time, the spokesman said he was not at liberty to say who took the decision, but I think it points to the incredible importance of popular culture and culture in general. It is often dismissed as frivolous entertainment. But it is clearly more than that. Soft power is an accompaniment to hard power. It is a necessary arm of diplomatic relations and obviously the capturing of hearts and minds we see playing out between Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Following all these tensions, not just political but trade tensions as well. The first hit was culture. You understand how people are threatened. To spend two hours a night with Turkish people who you want your own people to be frightened of isn’t as useful for a ruler who is trying to cut down communication. It makes sense that it would be the first thing to go, that that would be the immediate response. However, I don’t think that it is effective. The point is that thanks to the internet people have access to other products. They don’t require a satellite TV to watch something. What I noticed after that whole incident was that Turkish online streaming platforms seem to be pushing themselves more towards middle eastern audiences. You can go on something like blu TV and watch a Turkish show with Arabic subtitles, but you can’t go on and watch something with English subtitles. 

Luke: I’m curious to know if the Saudis are trying to replicate something similar to the success of Turkish television and the soft power that comes with it.

Fatima: There is no way that they can do that. Saudi Arabia needs more than one hundred years before it can have even a slight push on soft power. I mean, this is a country which allowed women to vote just two years ago, that used to jail women for driving up until one year ago. There is no way that they can present themselves in an effective way for soft power. The first rule of soft power is that the power behind it has to be seen as credible. You know the Saudis are trying and they have got a lot of money. They are bringing in Instagram influencers as if that is going to make a difference. They are trying to lure people over. But I don’t think they have a chance. 

Luke: I noticed that your book focuses on K-pop, Bollywood and Turkish television and although none of these countries have the greatest histories of democracy, they are all broadly free societies. I wonder if that is what makes the success of Turkish TV irreplaceable in that there is still quite a bit of creative freedom in Turkey despite the political situation. 

Fatima: I think that all these countries, now that you bring them up, have struggled with dictatorships and authoritarianism. India wasn't ruled with a dictatorship, but if you are looking at the Indian political landscape, it resembles very much a dictatorship - but that’s Modi. They are all democracies vulnerable to authoritarianism and have experienced their fair share of violence, but I think that is why their pop cultures are so alluring. This is because a country in that uncertain space, in the terrain between freedom and authoritarianism, knows very well the importance of how one is presented. Pop culture is ultimately, especially if we are talking about movies or television, a fantasy of how a nation sees themselves and how they wish to be perceived. You can read so much about what a country wants to share of itself and what it wants to keep secret from the culture it produces. In that sense I think that none of these are replicable. You can’t replicate Bollywood, you just can’t. It is so unique to India that to try won’t work. We know from the Pakistani example that Pakistanis can’t compete on the same format of film, so what we see coming out of Pakistan are very serious TV dramas. There is no singing or dancing but they are very artistic, tension filled, nuanced productions. I think that is the trend Pakistan are working towards in film too, which is still quite a new industry. 

Dizi itself as well would be so difficult to replicate. You know, their local competitors would have been Egyptians or Syrians. The Egyptians, of course, were very melodramatic when it came to television. They Syrians were less melodramatic, but again they produced very sophisticated, nuanced and literary dramas, but very short. A season would be fifteen episodes then that’s that. K-pop is the one I wonder about because the Chinese have obviously learned a lot from being such big consumers of K-pop but also by having their own Mandarin-speaking stars in the industry. I think the Chinese might be able to do it. They might be able to offshoot well enough, but let’s see. The point I think is that the Koreans are so innovative that before something is tried they have already reformed it. 

I don’t know if you have already heard about it this band called Super M. 

Luke: No (I’m so uncool! ed.)

Fatima: It’s a new band. One of the biggest studios S.M. entertainment -I write about them in New Kings- has taken band members from other big existing bands and kind of smushed them into one new band. It is kind of clever, like taking the Beatles, the Monkeys and the Stones and putting the best ones together into a super group. 

Luke: “The Avengers” of pop bands? 

Fatima: Exactly. You know they are breaking whatever mould they have made for themselves and it will be interesting to see if anyone can keep up. 

Luke: Returning back to soft power. I’m curious to see if you found examples of when the Turkish government has been able to turn this soft power to some sort of policy advantage. 

Fatima: I think that there are two things. When I was doing the research for this I talked with people across the industries in the Middle East and in Turkey. When I talked about the dubbing, they would say that the decisions to dub the dizi into Syrian Arabic was taken because of the high number of graduates in theatre studies and also because Syrian people are considered to have the most beautiful of the dialects. All of that sounded fine at the time. However, when you see Turkey pushing into Syria, it seems less innocent; the decision to choose Syrian Arabic. I think also the fact that Syria was a great market for the dizi until it was interrupted. It was well received, encouraged and a lot of the dubbing itself was done in Damascus, which is interesting. But at this point, whatever the differences are and whatever the tensions are between Syria and Turkey politically, you have a generation of Syrians raised on Turkish culture. That does have a profound effect. I think also shows like “Ertuğrul” are very interesting in how Turkey is positioning itself in the Muslim world. I don’t know if you caught Imran Khan at the UN.

Luke: I did not.

Fatima: Well I did, so you don't have to. His closing salvo on his UN trip was to say that Turkey, Malaysia and Pakistan were going to come together and produce a television channel that is going to combat islamophobia. 

It has become more apparent what strategic geopolitical advantages Turkey is going to reap from this. 

Luke: There is also a domestic political side to this. I think the AKP realised a long time ago that there was an importance in television possibly even more so than papers. Controlling TV networks seems to be one of the most important parts of their political rise to power. I’m curious to know, you spoke to lots of creatives within television, did any of them complain about censorship or pressure from above? 

Fatima: Well they didn’t. At the time I was there, there was a real celebratory air about what they were accomplishing.

Luke: When were you here? 

Fatima: Last year, 2018. There was a celebratory air just in terms of what they were doing, how well it was being received. I did wonder about “Söz” when I was let onto the set. That is obviously a military drama. Watching it from the outside it was very rah-rah about Turkish military might. Who are the enemies of Söz? I asked everybody and nobody would tell me. They were incredibly vague about it, but of course all the licence plates were Syrian and written in Arabic. But when I asked about it, there was a sense that you watch all these god-bless-America shows, now we have god bless Turkey shows, why not? But there was no suggestion, at least that I got, that this was coming from above. Also they seemed to be a very secular industry in that they are not great AKP fans. Ece Temelkuran spoke to me about censorship and how these anti-Gülen films were being screened and people were being brought to watch them, but she felt that people were resistant to that, that people were aware when they were being fed politics from the state and those films were not incredibly popular. 

Luke: I bring this up because there is the very famous story of Erdoğan complaining about “Magnificent Century” and it got in trouble until it reformed its message and moved more in a direction he liked. Did anybody have anything to say about that? 

Fatima: I mean it wasn’t really discussed at the time. Obviously he didn’t like it and they withdrew their permissions and made all those statements about ancestors fighting on horses but the sense that I got was different. I don’t mean to speak for anyone when I say this, I was just an observer, the sense I got was that “Magnificent Century” captured so much of the Turkish imagination that the president or prime minister dislike wasn't going to be enough to pull it of people's screens. 

Luke: And did the creators feel like they had been compromised? 

Fatima: When I met them, I talked to them about what they were doing then which was Söz. We didn’t really talk about “Magnificent Century” except for its reach, who they had sold it to recently, it was Japan while I was there. At that point, “Magnificent Century” was far enough away that we were just talking about its continuous travels out into the world. So I can’t really speak to that question because I wasn’t asking it. 

Luke: Do you think that a show like “Fatmagül'ün Suçu Ne?” that I think is quite political, could get made today? 

Fatima: I do think so. I think that what Turkey has been very good at doing is addressing these issues in a way that are accepted and palatable. Even “Fatmagül”, an entire show whose premise rests on violence and rape obscures that moment. It’s not explicit. I mean, I always think about Bollywood or South Asian examples. We become masterful at saying the thing we need to say in way that can travel rather than being blunt and getting stopped. I think the Turks are masterful about that, as are other cultural producers I’ve seen in the Middle East or in Iran. I think if you are intelligent, which the Iranians and Turks certainly are, then it is very hard to control what they do. Ok, in a show like “Söz”, which is shooting and blowing things up, there isn’t a whole load of room for nuance. That has got to be more in your face. But in terms of issues like women, like violence, honour and justice, I think Ece Yörenç is a very skilful story teller and I would imagine her now or in ten years putting the message she wants out. 

Luke: So obviously your work on Turkish TV is part of a much broader book on the internationalising of pop culture. We’ve touched on this, but do you want to give me a bit more information about the broader picture you are trying to paint in your books? 

Fatima: Well the argument of “New Kings of The World” is essentially that the last century may have been an American one, where American pop culture was largely uncontested in movies, music or TV. But this present century, to me at least, is clearly an Asian one. The evidence is that the most dynamic and exciting challenges to pop culture are coming from Asia already, but we are only 19 years into it. I think that is going to pick up. The other thing that I think should be said but isn’t is that the publishers of this book had a very strict mandate. They were publishing books about globalisation. Whatever you did had to be demonstrated from point A to point B, to point C, to D and to Z. It wasn't enough to have a theoretical argument. You had to go out into the world to prove it. They also had a strict limit of fifty thousand words. The idea is that these are digestible arguments that you can come to without any prior knowledge and after reading them you can begin a conversation on topic X or topic Y. Certainly there is so much more to say about Turkey and India. Part of the reason I didn’t want to touch China in this book is there is no way you can begin to do this with just ten thousand words or seven thousand words. So there were constraints in terms of space, which was a good exercise as a writer to force yourself to limit, but difficult during the research and travel because you have to make hard decisions of what you cut out.

Luke: It gives you plenty of material for the next one. 

Fatima: Yeah. 

Luke: Earlier this year I interviewed a historian called Peter Frankopan. He wrote a book called “The New Silk Roads”. In that he argues that the Silk Roads are reasserting themselves. He uses it more as a metaphor than a description of a physical road. Do you think that he is right that this new pop culture that you are observing is part of a reassertion of Asia’s importance in the world? 

Fatima: I do think he is right. I did read Silk Roads for this book. I think that if you look at the world today, I can’t tell you very confidently that America seems to have a clear path that it has cobbled ahead of them and I can’t tell you that Europe seems to have any certainty of what’s to come. But when you look at Turkey, it does appear that Turkey is moving very confidently into a vision of the future, that they have taken the time and care to construct and that they have full faith in.. I think certainly we see that with the Chinese too. The Chinese are of course the giant, the elephant in the room because they are making strides on all of those fronts. When it comes to music, they are already producing and cultivating their own talent, bands, producers and platforms. They have taken really quickly to digital streaming of music. They adapted to it much faster than Koreans, say, even though Korea was so well prepared in terms of internet technology. Again with movies there is a lot of Chinese money in Hollywood studios already. 

Luke: That’s right. It’s almost like they have decided to not build their own film industry, they are just going to buy the American one. 

Fatima: I don’t think that’s true. I think what they are doing there is learning. And the moment they’ve got it, they are going to do it at home better, faster, stronger. 

Luke: That makes sense. 

Fatima: That is what they did with music. They have a lot of creative producers and talents and they are consuming and investing in it. The founder of Alibaba was one of the early investors in S.M. Entertainment. One of if not the biggest music studio in Korea. When they decided they had had enough of K-pop and wanted to create C-pop they had all the mechanisms ready to go. I would put my money on that being what they are doing in Hollywood now. If you look at things like TikTok, which was founded and created by a Chinese company, I think that they are going to be incredibly innovative and creative about how they use the internet.. I do very much agree with the idea that culture is a way for Asia to assert itself in the years to come. 

Luke: My last question is, could you recommend some books that have been important in your research or that you think speak to this changing world?

Fatima: One of the books that I thought was very good about India was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana by Pankaj Mishra. There is an Ashis Nandy book called “The Secret Politics of our Desires” I think that was also a very good book. I liked Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country” on Turkey. About Korea there is a very academic book by John Lie K-pop: Pop Music, Cultural Amnesia and Economic Innovation in South Korea 

Those were the best of what I read. 

Luke: I think that is all I wanted to ask. Thank you for your time. 

Fatima: Thank you Luke.