Based on the life of Suleiman the Magnificent, the 10th Ottoman Sultan, Magnificent Century told the story of the sultan’s love affair with a concubine named Hurrem, whom he married, in a major break with tradition. A largely unknown historical figure, Hurrem is believed to have been an Orthodox Christian from modern-day Ukraine.
When it first aired in Turkey in 2011, Magnificent Century claimed one-third of the country’s TV audience. The foreign press called it an “Ottoman-era Sex and the City” and compared it to a real-life Game of Thrones. It had multiple historical consultants and a production team of 130, with 25 people working on costumes alone.
Magnificent Century was so popular in the Middle East that Arab tourism to Istanbul skyrocketed. Turkey’s minister of culture and tourism even stopped charging certain Arab countries broadcasting fees. Global Agency estimates that, even without counting its most recent buyers in Latin America, Magnificent Century has been seen by more than 500 million people worldwide. It was the first dizi bought by Japan. Since 2002, about 150 Turkish dizi have been sold to more than 100 countries, including Algeria, Morocco and Bulgaria. It was Magnificent Century that blazed the way for others to follow.
Fatima Bhutto
My late mother was a big fan of Turkish television, as are many others in Romania. But there is more to the story than writing emotional drama and making money: for Turkey, these dizi project cultural influence in the Arab world and beyond, some of them promoting the image of Turkey as important regional power by associating historical leaders of the Ottoman empire with the current president Erdoğan. Their influence was deemed so large that they were banned by Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago. Their portrayal of women, far from the conservative norm of Islamic society, would be reason enough for a ban in Saudi Arabia – and paradoxically Turkey retains many of these customs, even while projecting a more progressive image on the TV screens of the world.
It was such a persuasive vehicle for soft power that in 2012, Eset was hired by a “Republican American thinktank” to write a dizi telling the “good American story” of a woman in the Middle East out to enact positive change, “a woman who softens America’s image”. Eset declines to say which thinktank commissioned him, except to hint that a former Bush administration undersecretary was involved with the institute. “I wrote it,” Eset shrugs as he rolls a cigarette. “But they weren’t able to sell it.”
Five minutes on the streets of Istanbul presents multiple encounters with women in headscarves, yet they are nowhere to be seen on screen. “They tried it,” Eset says, “but even the conservative folks don’t like to see conservative women on TV. You can’t get them to kiss, to stand up to their fathers, to run away, to do very much at all that would be considered drama.” Women in hijabs are almost never shown in television adverts, the journalist and novelist Ece Temelkuran tells me. Her diagnosis was clear: “This country is torn between these two pieces of cloth – flag and headscarf.”
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