In Xanadu by William Dalrymple Page A

and outside the compound you could hear the dogs of the town barking. They always began howling at this time of day, during the evening call of the muezzin, and generally took at least half an hour to calm down afterwards.
    'My father did not want me to go to university,' said Rajep. He thought it would be anti-Islamic, and only let me go after I begged him on my knees. The people here are very conservative, and they are frightened of progress. There are many - how do you say? - fanatics. They do not like what Attaturk did for this country: creating democracy, making industry, freeing the women. Many of the old men want their mullahs to rule them, like in Iran.'
'Do you still go the mosque?' asked Laura.
    'Sometimes. I believe in Allah and read the Koran, but do not like the mosque. The mullahs do not talk to me or my friends because we go to university, and they will not discuss our ideas with us. This country has two problems. One is the mullahs, the other is the army - both want to rule the country, and to stop democracy.'
'I thought the military had stepped down,' I said.
    No. It is better now, but still we do not have full freedom. Many of my cousins are socialists, and there are many problems for them. My cousin - my uncle's son - was arrested for his socialism and given electric shocks by the police. They wanted him to tell them the names of all his friends, but he refused and denied everything, and eventually they let him out of prison. Still he talks about the prisons. The robbers, they beat up the political prisoners and the guards they beat up everybody. There are gangs, and many killings. Another problem for our country is that the military censor the Press: we still do not have a serious newspaper. When the military came they closed down all the good ones and left only the bad. Like Tan - have you seen Tan?'
    We certainly had. Tan was a wonderful paper, a strange cross between the Guards' Magazine, the Church Times and the Sun. Most of its news items concerned the highly respectable doings of the President, General Kenan Evren, or those of the senior mullahs, but on the outside were splashed huge colour pictures of topless Western tourists photographed on the beaches of the Aegean coast. If none were being worn, bikini bottoms were always drawn in, and any visible nipples were covered with a tiny black mark. Underneath were captions reading something along the lines of, 'Lovely Helga comes from Copenhagen where she studies geography. This is her second visit to Turkey. "I love Turkey," says Helga. "Kebabs are my favourite food." '
    I asked Rajep if he found it difficult being educated when the rest of his family were not.
    Sometimes there are problems. But I respect my father. He and my grandfather have worked hard and expanded our farm. When my grandfather came here much of this was waste, and we were given only very little land. Now we have nearly one thousand hectares.'
'You are not natives of Sis?' I asked.
    'No, no one here is. We all came from Salonica after the Great War.'
'What happened to the original inhabitants?'
'I do not know. I know no history. Ask my grandfather.'
    Rajep took us inside, where we found his grandfather sitting at the table in the stone-flagged living room. He was a typical Geordie-Turk, all flat cap and wrinkles, but you could see that he had once been a handsome man, and he still had an air of authority about him. He spoke no English so we had to go through the tedious procedure of channelling our conversation through Rajep, who acted as interpreter.
    'My grandfather wants to know whether you are Muslims.'
    'I'm afraid not.'
    'He asks whether you are Christians.' 'We are.'
    'My grandfather wants me to tell you that it does not matter....' 'Oh, good.'
    '... and that he had many Christian friends when he was a boy in Salonica. He says he had a pretty Christian girlfriend.'
    'A Greek girlfriend? Wouldn't that have been regarded as rather wicked? I thought the Greeks and the Turks were