UNCLE DIKRAN, Grandma Shushan and Auntie Zeliha may be figments of the novelist Elif Shafak’s imagination but they will all be in the dock this week in a bizarre trial that has become a test for Turkey’s European ambitions and commitment to freedom of speech.

Mrs Shafak, 34, has been charged under Article 301 of the penal code with “insulting Turkishness” through the fictional dialogue in her bestselling novel The Bastard of Istanbul, about the intertwined history of a Turkish and an Armenian-American family.

The European Union, with which Turkey began accession talks last year, has been a strong critic of the law and is expected to condemn curbs on freedom of expression in a report on October 24. Turkey’s parliament is holding an emergency meeting this week on further EU-related legal reform, but the Government has so far failed to act on Article 301 — which was also used to put Orhan Pamuk, the country’s most famous novelist, on trial — pointing out that cases end in acquittal anyway. That is not the point, Mrs Shafak says.

“I think the biggest worry regarding Article 301 is not that it puts people in prison but it silences them.” Even the briefest of Article 301 court cases has proved a platform for harassment of top writers but for Mrs Shafak it is even worse. She gave birth to a baby girl last Saturday and, since the court refused her request for the hearing to be postponed, she must now either excuse herself through a medical report or leave a five-day-old baby to go to court on Thursday.

Charging fictional characters “is a new step”, Mrs Shafak said. “It means they are now trying to control art, and this is very alarming because in Turkey — a country that witnessed three military takeovers — art and literature had always been autonomous.”

The crime committed by her characters is to refer to the taboo subject of mass Armenian killings in Ottoman Turkey in 1915. The Armenians call it genocide, Turks say large-scale wartime deaths. The fictional Uncle Dikran speaks of “Turkish butchers”, others talk about being “slaughtered like sheep” and claim all Turks are either nationalist or ignorant. More absurdly, some Turkish characters are charged over routine gripes about the country.

The accusations demonstrate a wilful misreading of the book, in which the families are so mixed up that it is hard to take sides. Mrs Shafak, describing how many contemporary Turks are descended from minorities in a multicultural Ottoman Empire, is critical both of Turks’ amnesia regarding events before the country became a republic in 1923 and of the Armenian diaspora’s apparent obsession with history.

This trial is not just about her book, she says. The case is part of a political effort by extreme nationalists to hamper Turkey’s EU aspiration by demonstrating how un-European it is.

As Turkey has undergone almost unprecedented reform over the past few years, including a curbing of the powers of the military, it has also witnessed rising nationalism. It is surely no coincidence, Mrs Shafak says, that early next month Ipek Calislar, a respected journalist, will go on trial for “insulting Ataturk”, Turkey’s revered founder, in a book that shared the bestseller spot with The Bastard of Istanbul.

“We are seeing a clash between those who wholeheartedly support the EU process, and others who want to turn this society into a xenophobic, isolationist country,” she said.

Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who brought the case against Mrs Shafak, is behind several other such cases. He insists that EU membership would be a disaster for Turkey, and has claimed that it was not Mrs Shafak but some shady imperialists who penned her novel as part of a plot to destroy Turkey.

Mrs Shafak says that many Turkish officials are embarrassed about the present situation. She does not believe that she will go to jail and is certain that Article 301 will be reformed. But that does not mean that Mr Kerincsiz is harmless. Nor does this exonerate the political elite, which is responsible for creating an environment in which he can operate.

THE ARMENIAN QUESTION

About 60 publishers, journalists and writers are being prosecuted currently under the law, which has raised considerable controversy as Turkey negotiates membership of the European Union

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