ISTANBUL - Everything here seems to shimmer with unsteadiness. You can see all the layers at once. And right now, the forces of secularism and Islam are in contention.

In some cases, like the sixth century Hagia Sophia, a museum that was a mosque that was a church (for a millennium after its construction, it was the world’s largest cathedral), these forces overlap. In other areas - like right now in Turkish politics, they clash. For an outsider, the threads intertwine with almost byzantine complexity.

Until the early 20th century, so intimate was the connection between political and religious power in Turkey that when Ataturk founded the republic in 1923, he imposed secularism almost as a religious doctrine.

At the same time, the secularism of the modern republic had to embrace the Islamic history of that empire.

You can see the nature of the problem in the museums of Topkapi Palace where the sultans once lived. In one gallery there are sacred relics once viewed only by the royal family and its guests. The labels tell us we are looking at hairs from Muhammad’s beard, King David’s sword and a turban worn by Joseph. Secularism has to be more powerful than it is here to contend with such objects.

And secularism here was a form of militarism: the veil was prohibited in schools and in the government. Religious services and sermons were controlled. And the military became the arm of secular authority.

The most powerful, double-edged tribute to Turkish secularism may not be the commerce of Istiklal, or the nearby art galleries, but the enormous Military Museum. More than a thousand years of Turkish history are told in the form of military history. The exhibitions begin with an inspirational quotation from Ataturk: For more than 7,000 years, it portentously declares, “have these lands been the Turkish cradle’’; now, out of “thunder and lightning and the sun’’ emerges, triumphant, “the Turk.’’

The museum is nothing less than an attempt to shape a modern mythology in which Turkish history becomes part of a single coherent tradition culminating in the modern secular state.

This effort to shape a tradition accounting for the triumph of the Turk may also be the reason for the way the 1915 massacres of Armenians are treated here.

We read that there was an era when Armenians demonstrated the principles of “Tolerance, Affection, and Justice,’’ the basics of “traditional’’ Turkish rule. But then, in the 19th century, an “Armenian terrorist organization’’ killed “thousands of innocent Turks.’’ The gallery is full of photographs meant to provide evidence not of the Turkish massacres of Armenians, but of the Armenian massacres of Turks.

There was undoubtedly a tradition of tolerance of minorities in Islamic Istanbul under the sultans. But why is it so difficult to recognize this? The Jewish Museum of Turkey here seems deliberately to ignore qualifications; it opened in 2001 under the auspices of a foundation established to celebrate 500 years of tolerance and harmony between Turks and Jews. Many of the Jews in Istanbul were exiles from the 1492 expulsion from Spain and Portugal.

The displays in this small museum repeatedly stress the religious freedom Jews found here, “provided by both the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic.’’ But this is wildly out of sync with the empire’s bloody history and its sultanic power.

The very presence of the museum inspires some skepticism on this point. It is housed in an old synagogue, not because of any imposed idea of secularism, but because whatever remains of the Jewish community here has dwindled.

In recent years Islamist terror has struck: attacks against other city synagogues have killed dozens and wounded hundreds. And the museum is almost impossible to find.

At the end of a small alley, there is a little sign that says “Museum,’’ with an arrow. The sign is mounted on a white booth housing an armed guard.


Edward Rothstein