It is undoubtedly a truism that the less a person knows about a place, the more they can simplistically project their hopes, fantasies, or fears upon it. For the Western world, through mass tourism in one direction, immigration in the other, and television cameras or self-recorded online videos, much more is known by the average person in the West of the Islamic world and its civilization than could ever have been the case in earlier times.

The area had been of intense interest to earlier generations of Westerners, but then almost exclusively in the more simplistic projective manner. That is the case, even though, as the previous piece in this series indicated, the Enlightenment witnessed a new, more open-minded interest in the Islamic world that was not derived from traditional ecclesiastical prejudices. Ironically perhaps, it was also at the dawn of the Enlightenment that a literary endeavor was undertaken in France, the most culturally dominant country in the continent, which would eclipse both the traditionally hostile fanatical Christian view and the tolerant Enlightened one to color the Western mind vis-à-vis the Islamic world in a very different way and in a way whose effects still linger today. It was a work of translation into French and, to a fair degree, a work of innovation.

This book was the "Thousand and One Nights," also to be known as the "Arabian Nights," which would soon also be translated into numerous other European languages. Save for the Bible; it is probably the case that no other single book, or any other single work of art, has had such a defining impact on the modern Western attitude toward the Middle East. For generations in the Western world, the names of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his 40 thieves have been household names. Some would welcome this as they regard "Thousand and One Nights" as one of the greatest works of world literature. I, however, strongly disagree with this evaluation.

The tales can be fun, but they are like junk food in that they may be gorged upon, but provide no real lasting nourishment. The stories, on the whole, are highly simplistic. The characters found in it are shallow and almost always manipulative or victims of manipulation. Overall, its facile characters being practiced in guile but lacking any real wisdom surrounded by cloying decadence have helped to create an infantilizing view of Arab peoples that has deeply affected the Western mindset. The resulting attitude can be compacted into that most loaded of words – the Orient.

Another pernicious effect of this book is that this stereotyping has not been limited to the Arabic-speaking world from which the original work came. Due to a widespread inability to recognize that the Islamic world contains numerous different peoples and cultures, the Western mind, stamped with the imagery of the "Thousand and One Nights," has invariably when approaching any land in which the skyline is dominated by minarets and domes instead of spires and steeples, used it as its go-to reference work. I have become fed up with the number of times I have come across in a Western piece on the Islamic world words to the effect that something "was straight out of the Arabian Nights." As this cliché has been done to death, it would be a mercy if it were put out of its misery for good.

In short, for many Western travelers to Türkiye, it is above all the "Thousand and One Nights" and the atmosphere that it has engendered that has shaped the expectations of those who arrive here. That the second visitor to Türkiye covered in this series, the American writer and poet John Dos Passos (1896-1970), traveled in the Middle East with it in mind is evident from his work and attested to by his biographer Virginia Spencer Carr. Moreover, the title of his 1927 travelogue, "Orient Express," while being a pun on the famous train that brought him to Istanbul, is also deliberately loaded with the Arabian Nights aura of the East.

Nevertheless, Dos Passos has not been chosen for one of the sketches in this series as a typical exemplar of the orientalist mindset. Regardless of the book's name, it is a valuable travelogue because its writer is not seduced by a desire to depict Türkiye in orientalist clichés but rather to try and understand this country with an unbiased eye. He succeeds in doing this by giving a fair voice to a country facing its most severe crisis since the invasion of Tamburlaine half a millennium earlier.

In 1921, when Dos Passos arrived in Istanbul, a city under foreign occupation; the Ottoman Empire surrendered to the Allies in the autumn of 1918. His stay in Türkiye, which will be given in more detail below after a quick character sketch, was part of a more comprehensive journey he was to take in the region. From Istanbul, he sailed along the Black Sea, traveled through the Caucasus, and from there into Iran and next Iraq. From there, he crossed the desert with the Bedouin to end his trip to Syria, where he learned that his novel Three Soldiers had become a sensation in the United States.

His experiences inspired that novel as a voluntary ambulance driver in the Great War. The reason for its success is that it spoke directly to what those who fought in it went through. It launched Dos Passos’ literary career which includes "U.S.A.," his masterpiece. As a writer, Dos Passos is one of the so-called "Lost Generation" of American writers that includes Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. An unflinching realism marks the greatest of their works. In addition to being a writer, Dos Passos was also active on the political left, although he parted ways with it following his disillusioning experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Later in life, he was to become a rightwing figure and his literary star was to wane.

Today, he is less well-known than other members of the Lost Generation. Yet, Dos Passos remains a writer who gives a powerful voice to the distressed of his time. His ability to do so indeed stems from his outsider status. In an America still dominated by white men in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, he was of Mediterranean appearance due to being half Portuguese. Moreover, he was illegitimate, which then was still a significant stigma.

As for his "Orient Express," which will now be drawn upon for the rest of this piece, with his first sentence to describe the old city of Istanbul, it appears as if Dos Passos is going to use his adeptness power with words to unveil yet another work inspired by the "Thousand and One Nights" stereotype. He writes "Stamboul, domes, brown-black houses, bright minarets set about everywhere like the little ivory men on a cribbage board." Nevertheless, he quickly switches to a description of rubbish being dumped near a cemetery which is then leaped upon by desperate women with sacks on their backs. The tone shift is from a typical orientalist one to one in which the current socioeconomic problems besetting the occupied capital of a long war-ravaged country come to the fore. Rather than a "Thousand and One Nights" inspired dreamscape, Dos Passos is interested in the real people of the city in this most challenging of times. That is the "many lives packed into narrow streets."

Dos Passos who, like many other famous visitors to Türkiye, is staying in the luxurious Pera Palace hotel, contrasts the suffering "ragpickers" and "beggars" of the streets with the "waiters in dress suits" who work in the hotel. Of course, the staff in the hotel are locals as well. Still, as they are employed to minister to the needs of a wealthy clique of foreigners, sartorially they represent the latter, providing a perfect contrast with the sordid world just outside.

Moreover, the hotel itself with its "red plush" upholstery – an image of luxuriousness that Dos Passos repeatedly uses – is not, an island of tranquillity. It too is subjected to another of the problems plaguing the city at the time – politically-motivated violence. Dos Passos relates that a diplomat has been assassinated in the lobby. Then deftly uses his narrative to highlight his observation that the desperate financial situation is paramount in people’s minds at this time. He states that "the waiter who brings the drinks from the bar is in despair" leading the reader to suppose that he is shocked by the violence that has found its way into his place of work, but he follows with the observation that "the drinkers have all left without paying" thus making a single event a revelatory metaphor for a city that is becoming inured to violence and in which the struggle to financially survive is paramount.

As for the occupying forces of the allied countries of the U.K., France, and Italy, they are depicted as living a life of luxury and symbolized by the "gold braid" they wear. Yet they are not triumphant conquerors. Rather, they are shown as incompetent and disunited. They are depicted as being lost in a world that they do not understand and which is relatively indifferent to their activities.

At the point in which he is in Istanbul, the local Greeks remain optimistic about the war in Asia Minor against the resisting Turkish forces. Like other foreigners from the West, Dos Passos is exhorted by the Greeks to back them. In one instance Dos Passos relates that a Greek girl is irritated by Dos Passos’ desire to learn Turkish, telling him that "you must side with the Greeks, you mustn’t learn Turkish." This provokes a reflection from Dos Passos in which his respect for the Turk's manners and impassivity is manifest, which brings him to conclude that "there are reasons for learning Turkish."

The impassivity of the Turks is an image that Dos Passos returns to. It seems to reflect a belief that Turkish patience will eventually win out against Greek triumphalism, and that the patient time-honored way of life as lived in the old city of Istanbul has more to recommend than the hectic activity of the Europeans and local Christians over in Pera. Indeed, the frenetic appeals for support by the Greeks are repeatedly contrasted with the inscrutable and age-old composure of the Turks.

The Turks are depicted as a united people despite their social differences. In the Bayezid II Mosque, he sees it filled with Turks of all walks of life, united, "all squatting close together" to be stringently reminded by the mullah of the fate of the Turks of Edirne, which was then under Greek occupation. The conflict between Türkiye and Greece forms the backdrop to the travelogue. Across the Bosporus, Dos Passos sees "the rim of a blood orange moon rolls up out of Asia." This is a profoundly symbolic image in the Asian part of Türkiye that the fight for the future is taking place.

Dos Passos also empathetically depicts the refugees then crowding the city. Istanbul had become a place of exile for those fleeing the Russian revolution. He pities the Russian stage performers, women "trying to earn a few pennies for the hard bread of exile," as well as those forced by their situation into prostitution. As for the men, there are also the ex-Russian soldiers dressed in ragged uniforms, pathetically forced to earn a pittance of a living by pedaling anything they can get their hands on. The ages of these Russians vary widely but they all share the same physical trait of "a drawn hungry look about their cheekbones and a veiled shudder of pain in their eyes." Particularly poignantly, Dos Passos depicts one of them simply breaking down in the street.

It has already been noted that Dos Passos the Turks as a united people. But, more fundamentally, Dos Passos sees all of the city's people as subject to the same fate. At one point, he considers all of the faces of the local people, the refugees, the occupiers, the rich and the poor: "merge slowly in the cruel white sunlight ... into one face, brows sullen and contracted, eyes black with suffering, skin taught over cheekbones, hungry lines about the corners of the mouth, lips restless, envious, angry, lustful. The face of a man not quite starved out."

Fundamentally, all human beings are one in the struggle for survival in a hostile world. By summarizing that for him, the city is an "intricate arabesque scrawled carelessly on a ground of sheer pain," he uses an orientalist image. Still, he subverts it to his genuine interest – suffering humanity.

In the final part of the Turkish section of this narrative, Dos Passos then travels along the coast, of the Black Sea on an Italian steamer that was once Austrian, intimating that the Great War has caused colossal upheaval to more than just the Ottoman Empire. He is almost the only ordinary passenger on a ship that is being used to send back Russian prisoners. His sense of relief in escaping the occupied city is palpable. He says that out at sea just off the long coast "here the air was clean of misery and refugees and armies and police and passport officers." However, this feeling of comfort was not last. As the steamer sailed eastward along the Black Sea, each time it was put into a port, Dos Passos was not allowed to disembark as it was suspected he was a spy. As a cosmopolitan traveler who prided himself on his ability to easily cross barriers this was highly frustrating.

Moreover, the tense situation in Istanbul also appears on the steamer when Dos Passos comes across six Turkish army doctors onboard. They are heading to Ankara to join the national resistance movement. They accuse Dos Passos of siding with the Greeks in a biased reporting of the war until he tells them that he is not a European but an American. They then expressed their disappointment with U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, who had initially insisted that peace be secured on the right of national self-determination before being shifted to this position by the British and the French. They also make clear that the current war is a conflict thrust upon the Turks – one they are willing to fight, but not one that they initiated. They exclaim that "all we want is to be left alone and reorganize our country in peace." The doctors then tackle the "Thousand and One Nights" mentality that has confronted them by declaring that while "you think the Turk is an old man and sick, smoking a narghile" the fact is "originally we were nomads" and that "we are sober and understand how to fight." The Turks who have been so silent during his residence in Istanbul have finally spoken and their will is revealed to be a steely one to resist and endure. This part of the travelogue is indeed prophetic as it is men of this type who, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, later to be surnamed Atatürk, will soon turn the tide and liberate Anatolia from the foreign occupation which will enable the creation of a new republic – modern Türkiye.