Politics & Power Quote by Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk is describing a novelist's dirty job: making the reader feel the pull of arguments he himself wants to reject. The key word is "lend" - conviction here isn't discovered, it's crafted, temporarily bestowed like stage light. That choice admits something uncomfortable: persuasion is often a matter of narrative competence. Whoever tells the more human, coherent story can win a hearing, even when the underlying cause is rotten.

The pairing is deliberate and politically loaded. "Political Islamists" and "officers justifying a coup" are opposing poles in Turkey's modern trauma: religious authoritarianism and secular strongman "rescue" missions. Pamuk refuses the comforting idea that extremism is always alien, irrational, or aesthetically ugly. He implies the opposite: the most dangerous ideologies usually arrive with plausible grievances, polished self-justifications, and an internal logic that feels, from the inside, like necessity.

Subtext: liberal writers are often tempted to write propaganda for their own side - caricatures of enemies that reassure the already-convinced. Pamuk is arguing that this is both ethically suspect and artistically thin. If you can't animate the abhorrent voice with real psychological pressure - fear, pride, humiliation, faith, the seductions of order - you're not engaging reality, you're publishing a bedtime story.

Context matters because Pamuk has lived the costs of speech in a country where "taking sides" can mean trials, exile, or worse. His line isn't moral relativism; it's a demand for moral seriousness. To portray the machinery of belief convincingly is to understand how it recruits ordinary people. That understanding doesn't pardon it. It arms you against it.