THE EXPERIMENT.(conversations with author Orhan Pamuk, and others in Turkey, reveal little support for the likely US war with Iraq)

Five hundred years ago in Constantinople, at the height of the Islamic empire, a young prince named Cihangir lived with his father, Suleyman the Magnificent, who was the most revered of the Ottoman sultans. Cihangir cut a pallid figure in the Ottoman court. He was a hunchback, weak and withdrawn, and when he learned that the Sultan had ordered the execution of his half brother Mustafa, the prince died of heartbreak. In his honor, Suleyman ordered that a mosque be constructed on a hill overlooking the confluence of the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara. The Cihangir Mosque burned to the ground in 1720, and another mosque was built on the same site; the new mosque, the "Blue Guide" sternly advises, "is of no interest whatsoever."

That seems harsh. Early in the evening just a few weeks ago, I walked up a steep side street past the mosque on the way to an appointment, in a nearby high-rise, with Orhan Pamuk, a novelist who holds a position in Turkey rather like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's in Colombia--he is the house postmodernist. Pamuk greeted me at the door of a spacious one-bedroom apartment, which he uses strictly as a place to write; he lives a short walk away, near the city's busiest shopping district, Taksim Square. In the apartment, thousands of books were teetering in stacks of varying heights, a mesa of Dickens, a butte of quarterlies, vast and interesting geological formations accreting over time, all on the brink of seismic catastrophe. Pamuk is fifty, and boyish-looking, with straight floppy hair, oversized glasses, and an eager, unassuming manner. He led me into the main room, a living room that he has converted into a study. His view of the water, of the ship traffic and the slender bridges that connect Europe and Asia, is precisely framed by the tapered minarets of the mosque.

"It's something, isn't it?" Pamuk said. "I've been working here for years, from early morning into the night, and I never get tired of the view."

Pamuk grew up in a wealthy family, which made its money through the establishment of the secular Turkish republic. His grandfather was a civil engineer who built railroads just as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was building a nation after the fall of the last Ottoman sultan; his mother's family was in the textile business. Although much of the money is gone now, Pamuk is regarded around town as a kind of Istanbul aristocrat: a few of his friends even joke that he is a sultan himself. As an artist, he is the avatar of a new breed. Traditionally, Turkish novelists have been leftists who cultivate an image of modest wisdom; they portray, in the main, the hardships and domestic dramas of village life in the Anatolian heartland. A Turkish novelist, Pamuk said, is generally regarded not "as a person with demons but, rather, as a man of good will." In Pamuk's work, the setting is native but the imaginative models--Borges, Calvino, Nabokov--are not.

Pamuk waved me out onto the balcony. He pointed to the illuminated mosques on the far shore, then to a Russian oil tanker plowing north on the Bosporus toward the Black Sea. As he was describing the bridges across the Golden Horn, a muezzin, that buzzy summons to prayer present in all Orientalist narratives, wailed reliably in midsentence, and Pamuk laughed. "Sometimes my agent will call from New York, and the muezzin will start," he said. "You can tell that at the other end of the phone line he is thinking, Ah! The exotic East!"

The polarities of Pamuk's books echo the basic polarities of Istanbul: the tension between East and West, the pull of an Islamic past and the lure of modern European manners and materialism. Sixteen centuries of empire--the Christian Byzantine, then the Islamic Ottoman--lurk in every corner of the city, and yet the greatest ambition of the contemporary elites is to join someone else's country club, the European Union. In the days when the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates, its leader could announce, "In Baghdad, I am the Shah, in Byzantine realms the caesar, in Egypt the sultan." Who today knows the name of Turkey's Prime Minister? The political class comprises modestly talented, often spectacularly corrupt politicians, whose pathos and ambition are the same: their fiercest desire is to leave behind a history of glory and blood for a ...