Like a Sword Wound by Ahmet Altan

Author:Ahmet Altan [Altan, Ahmet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609454753
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2018-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

XV

Within hours of Mihrişah Sultan’s return to the Ottoman capital, the whole city had heard about “that Egyptian whore’s arrival”; she was all they talked about in the palace, in all of the mansions, in neighborhood corners, in tekkes, in mosques, in coffeehouses, in brothels, and in hammams. Everyone was confused and angry because it was the first time since the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul that a Muslim woman had gone about without her head covered.

Not only were her thick red hair and her unforgettable face uncovered, but so were the upper part of the marvelous breasts that she didn’t allow anyone to touch and the arms under the tulle shawl that was draped over her shoulders; the people of the city considered this to be an open attack, an insult to their religion, their Caliph, their Empire, and, perhaps most importantly of all, their own honor.

Religious leaders were ready to issue a fatwa that the “whore” be stoned, and the public was willing to carry out the decree; but Mihrişah was too wealthy to be declared a “whore” and too powerful to be touched; the smallest attack upon the lady, even the slightest innuendo, might cause tensions between the Ottoman Empire and her cousin the Khedive of Egypt; a beautiful face and a bared cleavage could have led to a war that would have resulted in thousands of deaths.

As he usually did during times of difficulty, the Sultan overcame his ambivalent and indecisive nature and gave strict orders to his thousands of spies in the city to act immediately, spreading word that the “Egyptian” was a crypto-Christian, and that she had been baptized by French priests as a child; the spies, who usually tried to inflame the public, were this time successful in calming it, and the anger of the people of Istanbul died down as quickly as it had risen; a whisper that soon turned into a murmur spread from mansion to mansion, from pier to pier and from district to district: “The whore is an unbeliever!” Hüseyin Hikmet Bey said with a sarcastic smile, “In the beginning there was the word; in the Ottoman Empire, as in the holy book, the word was enough to kill people as well as to save them, and in the end the truth was not so important.”

If Mihrişah Sultan heard the angry rumors, she ignored them; she was the kind of woman who was as comfortable wherever she went as she was at home; she didn’t believe that anyone could touch her and in fact no one could.

She was more concerned that her porcelain be handled properly than about the people’s wrath; she supervised the placement of her belongings without giving any thought to the fading face of the son who knew the city he lived in better than she did, her ex-husband’s anxiety about possible disaster, or the terror of the servants who fluttered around her; she gave orders for dinner and then strolled with her son in the garden of the waterfront mansion.

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