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Alexander Christie-Miller
ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been published in Newsweek, the Times, the Atlantic, and other publications. He is a regular contributor to The White Review.


Articles Available Online


Ada Kaleh

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Issue No. 17

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May 1931, it was said among...

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October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

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October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

A lattice of diamonds and crosses, painted onto a 21-metre long wall at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, scatters my gaze Artist Navine G Khan-Dossos painted the mural by hand, repeating a motif based on muqarnas – a kind of honeycomb vaulting used in Islamic architecture She moved across the wall on a scaffold, first with a cardboard template and later with paint, expanding the mural in careful variations of colour It shifts from red through to white, heating up at the centre and cooling at the edge, while kite-shaped inner pockets slide through shades of grey, complicating the relationship of flatness and depth   Echo Chamber is a portrait of a woman, although it would be impossible to tell without the accompanying text The woman in question, Samantha Lewthwaite (also known as Sherafiyah Lewthwaite), is a British Muslim who made headlines following her husband Germaine Lindsey’s involvement in the 7/7 London terrorist attacks in 2005 In the aftermath, Lewthwaite spoke out against his actions, but six years later she was charged by Kenyan police with possession of explosives She has since been dubbed ‘the White Widow’ by the press, a sensational moniker used for women radicalised at home in the west, who join the ranks of Islamic extremists   Born a year apart, both Khan-Dossos and Lewthwaite are white British women who became influenced by Islam as teenagers Navine G Khan-Dossos – an anagram for the artist’s birth name Vanessa Hodgkinson – moved to Kuwait in 2003, and later trained in traditional Islamic art in London Lewthwaite converted to Islam as a teenager, and married Lindsey in 2002, at the age of 19   Aside from an interview Lewthwaite sold to The Sun in 2005 denouncing her husband’s actions, she has not had much control over the dissemination of her story Journalists quote from her ‘diary’ – a set of papers seized in Kenya in 2011 – or cite tweets from a Muslim Youth Centre handle @MYC_Press that are rumoured to be hers, but neither are reliable sources Over the course of the years, Lewthwaite has been transfigured into a stock character in a cultural narrative, one that tells the tale

Contributor

August 2014

Alexander Christie-Miller

Contributor

August 2014

ALEXANDER CHRISTIE-MILLER  is a writer and journalist based in Istanbul. His writing about Turkish politics and culture has been...

Forgotten Sea

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Issue No. 11

Alexander Christie-Miller

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Issue No. 11

I. As I stood on the flanks of the Kaçkar Mountains where they slope into the Black Sea near the town of Arhavi, the...
Occupy Gezi: From the Fringes to the Centre, and Back Again

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July 2013

Alexander Christie-Miller

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July 2013

Taksim Square appears at first a wide, featureless and unlovely place. It is a ganglion of roads and bus routes, a destination and a...

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Art

August 2017

Becoming Alice Neel

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel...

Interview

March 2013

Interview with Billy Childish

José da Silva

Interview

March 2013

Buzzed in through the red metal door and down the stone steps into the bunker that is L-13. The...

poetry

January 2014

Tuesday Will Be War

Jáchym Topol

TR. Alex Zucker

poetry

January 2014

Jáchym Topol (b. 1962), like most Czech authors of his generation, wrote poetry for years before turning to prose....

 

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