It is tempting to read Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Architect’s Apprentice, as a love letter to Istanbul and its Ottoman past, or even a kind of apology to the city she left behind when she moved to London with her two children four years ago. The book, which Shafak wrote in English before revising its translation into Turkish, spans the era from 1546 to 1632 and tells the story of the great imperial architect Mimar Sinan, through the eyes of an invented apprentice and elephant-keeper, Jinan, who stows away from Goa as a 12-year-old to escape an evil stepfather.
The novel evokes the glory and cruelty of the Sultanate at its peak, under Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors. But to see it as anything as simple as a celebration of the city in which Shafak has spent much of her life would be a mistake.
“This book is very critical,” she says. “The main historical narrative in Turkey does not talk about human beings and the very few individuals we mention are sultans. How did so-called ordinary men and women feel through the centuries, when Turkey was going through these changes? I’m interested in sexual minorities, ethnic minorities, and I’m interested in silences. Animals of course we never mention, women we rarely mention. For me there is always a desire to bring back stories and subjects that have been forgotten or pushed to the sides.”
The novel, Shafak points out, foregrounds many injustices and illustrates the close connection between architecture and war – with the most spectacular mosques funded by plunder. Alongside Jinan, Sinan, the elephant Chota and cross-dressed apprentice Yusuf (a girl in disguise), it makes a hero of the Gypsy Balaban. And it highlights the practice of fratricide, whereby sultans on ascending the throne had their brothers strangled. Warmly welcomed in Britain, where one reviewer called it her best book yet, The Architect’s Apprentice, has had a chilly reception in Turkey – though as the country’s most popular female author, with 1.65 million followers on Twitter, Shafak says she is used to taking the rough with the smooth.
“I get a lot of criticism from the cultural elite and a lot of love from readers,” she says. “The more you are read in the western world, the more you are hated in your motherland. Being a writer in Turkey has a very humbling and moving side because if readers like a story then they share it and pass it round.”
Shafak was born in Strasbourg in 1971. Her mother had fallen in love and dropped out of university to get married; her father was studying in France for a philosophy PhD. But the relationship fell apart and Shafak’s mother returned to Ankara with her baby and the prospect of being remarried, quickly, to a much older man.
“That’s the tradition, it’s a very male-dominated society”, she says, and when you’ve already been married, “you’re not in a top place in the marital market any more. You have fallen down and you’re not a virgin, but you have to be married off so that you’re not a threat.”
But Shafak’s maternal grandmother decided her daughter should complete her education before attaching herself to another man. Shafak’s mother became a diplomat, and Elif spent a lonely childhood, first with her grandmother and later in embassy postings in Madrid (where Spanish became her second language), Jordan and Germany.
“Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer,” she says. “My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn’t meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me. I had no centre in my life, no sense of continuity, and I do sincerely believe books saved me from insanity.”
At the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Shafak – who gave up her father’s surname when she was 18 and renamed herself Shafak (which means “dawn”) after her mother – studied international relations and took Turkey’s first course in women’s studies before signing up for a PhD on masculinity. But though she cherished her interdisciplinary training, the priority was always fiction. An eclectic reader of philosophy, religion and stories of all sorts, who was “almost addicted” to Russian novels at one point, her first book told the story of a heterodox hermaphrodite dervish and employed a deliberately esoteric vocabulary in protest at the Turkification of her mother tongue from the 1920s onwards.
People were surprised, she says. “They didn’t expect that kind of language from a 24-year-old feminist, leftist person. We have taken out hundreds of words because they came from Arabic or Persian and were not Turkish enough, and I am very much against that kind of linguistic purification.”
She published more novels and her readership grew, but life as a public figure in Turkey was suffocating. Having relocated to Boston with a fellowship at Mount Holyoke women’s college, in 2004 she published her first novel written in English, The Saint of Incipient Insanities. From there she moved to Michigan and then Arizona, where she was a full-time scholar.
But personal and professional life were drawing her back to Turkey, where she met her future husband Eyup (they married in Berlin, she wearing black as usual) and was prosecuted, following publication of her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul, for insulting Turkishness (it tackled the Armenian genocide of 1915).
“I was surprised,” she says coolly. “When you write about Armenians you know there will be a reaction, but I didn’t expect this. There was a huge reaction, and demonstrations at which people were burning my picture, spitting on my picture.”
The case lasted a year before the charge was dismissed, during which she was protected by bodyguards. “It was demoralising and upsetting but I don’t want to paint a very dark picture,” she says, “because I also had so much support. I have experienced both love and hatred and as a writer in Turkey you get used to that. We move very easily from one to the other, we are very emotional people, so you learn not to take it too seriously. The hullabaloo is temporary.”
The trial ended the day after the birth of her first child, which precipitated another crisis in the form of postnatal depression. In her memoir Black Milk, she puts this down to an unresolved conflict between warring aspects of herself (and barely alludes to the fact that hanging over her pregnancy was the possibility of three years in prison).
The book intersperses brief essays on famous women writers including Zelda Fitzgerald, after whom Shafak named her daughter, with chapters describing the quarrel that raged between Shafak’s six “finger women” – each representing an aspect of herself and “no taller than Thumbelina”, with names such as Mama Rice Pudding and Miss Ambitious Chekhovian – over what direction the rest of her life should take.
The effect is comic, and she doesn’t say much about the form her depression took, but Shafak says it “was a very important phase in my life. I had taken it for granted that all I needed was a pencil and paper, because I had my imagination, which was so vivid. When I lost my connection with words I had to rethink many things and remodel myself. It wasn’t only motherhood that challenged me. I had lived out of a suitcase all my life and the basic assumption was that I could go where I liked. I was a free spirit and it terrified me that I had to settle down.”
Today Shafak and her husband live in different cities – she in London, he in Istanbul. But they are not separated and the family gets together around twice a month. “It’s a different marriage,” she says, “and I find it very difficult to explain particularly to people in Turkey because it’s not like anything they have seen before.” Their two children, she believes, manage the arrangement well.
Shafak chose London because she loves the English language, because it’s nearer than the US and because it is one of the few truly cosmopolitan cities in the world. “I know it sounds like a cliche but to me the fact it’s so multicultural is a treasure. It’s not something you see everywhere, even in major European cities that are supposedly multicultural there isn’t much interaction and there are more ghettos. London is unique. It can be challenging as well because it doesn’t open up very easily so it takes a while to find your feet, but it’s worth the effort.”
The city’s literary scene, though, she says, is less cosmopolitan than you might expect and “can be surprisingly insular”. She knows the proportion of translated books published in the UK by heart: 4%, while in Turkey it is around 47%. “It’s a one-way street, isn’t it? We read western literature more than western readers read Turkish literature. There has to be more balance.”
Shafak doesn’t believe in categories of low- and highbrow. Her bestselling novel to date, 2010’s The Forty Rules of Love, sets the contemporary story of a New England housewife embarking on a new romance against an account of the 13th-century friendship between the Sufi poet Rumi and wandering mystic Shams. She may have given up writing novels in Turkish for now, but Shafak has made herself a literary ambassador for Sufism, which she is not alone in regarding as a crucial and too-often ignored strand in Islam. “Maybe I am able to notice things some of my British friends don’t,” she says. “I like to question cultural biases wherever I go and I question Islamophobia as much as I question anti-western sentiment because I think all extremist ideologies are very similar.”
Uninterested in organised religion, she is strongly drawn to Islamic mysticism and the idea of an “inner-oriented journey. With that inner space you come across Jewish mystics, Christian mystics, Islamic mystics, Daoists. And you’re surprised at how similar are the things they say.” In the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in her latest novel, she believes she has found a hero after her own heart: “he was the kind of person who saw the dome as an all-embracing concept – not a symbol of Christianity or Islam but a symbol that united human beings.”
Shafak has tackled controversial and current topics in her fiction (the Armenian genocide; “honour killings” in her novel Honour), and has also written as a journalist and commentator: last month she declared her opposition to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s comments that men and women are not equal.
But she is strongly critical too of a view of Muslim countries that concentrates on women’s rights at the expense of everything else: “I don’t think we can talk about women’s rights if there are no human rights,” she says. “We as women in the Middle East have supported some very authoritarian rulers who on the surface seem to have introduced progressive reforms for women, but who are clearly not pro-freedom of speech, not pro-media diversity. I would love to have a women’s movement that goes beyond this paradox. I want us to believe in democracy.”
Her own experience of cooperation, between her old-fashioned grandmother and highly educated, westernised mother, makes her believe in the possibility of a greater degree of solidarity between different kinds of Turkish and Muslim women. She is a champion of gay rights. “If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don’t have the luxury of being apolitical. You can’t say ‘that’s politics, I’m just doing my work’. For me, coming from the women’s movement, politics is not just about parties and parliament. There is politics in our private space and in gender relations as well. Wherever there’s power, there’s politics.”
• The Architect’s Apprentice is published by Viking.
• This article was amended on 10 December 2014 because an earlier version said Middle East Technical University was in Istanbul. It is in Ankara.
