A critical look at Ece Temelkuran’s beautiful, yet fundamentally tone-deaf, exploration of global displacement in A Nation of Strangers

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that all readers search for themselves in the pages that they read. Well, at least that is my truth. As a Muslim reader, in a landscape that often belittles or altogether ignores the Divine, it can be very frustrating. So even if I really enjoy a book, which in most instances I do, there can be a sentence or two that impact my Muslim sensibilities and leave me with a slightly unpleasant aftertaste.

From the get-go, Nation of Strangers has a problem. The author, an obviously well-to-do woman, wants to position herself alongside others who have been forcibly removed from their country of origin: refugees, asylum seekers, and the unhoused. As a journalist, she fled Türkiye due to its restricted press freedoms and her critical articles of the government, finding refuge in Germany where she holds a residency.

Early on in the book, she finds herself in an immigration queue with people from Sudan, Syria, and Ukraine. She associates herself with them whilst also telling tales of her annual family holiday to a Greek island, from where she can see her family holiday home on the horizon of Türkiye.

The book spans a period of four years. In that time, she travels multiple times across Europe to France, Croatia, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. She also mentions travelling to Lebanon, Tunisia, and the United Kingdom. Most of these are trips to award ceremonies, art shows, the Venice Biennale, and film festivals. She also travels to Davos and is utterly disgusted by the tech bros and the “immoral bubble” of the global elites. Yet, the reader is left pondering over why she was invited in the first instance, and why she accepted the invitation. She is a journalist by profession—surely she knows what Davos is about.

I really wanted to put this book down, especially after the tone-deaf trip to the Alps with the one percent, but then I also wanted to approach this work through the critical lens of a reader, not just the biased lens of a Muslim reader. In the end, it was disappointing on both counts.

Through her epistolary prose—which I must confess is beautiful—she explores the emotional experience of exile and displacement, but she does so while sipping champagne, cognac, and occasionally beer. By leaning heavily into the conventions of ‘creative non-fiction’ and the ‘lyric essay,’ Temelkuran uses poetic metaphors to transform a brutal, systemic global crisis into a beautiful literary aesthetic—effectively masking her immense privilege behind the romance of artistic wanderlust. At one point in the book, she mentions buying books for her “secular” six-year-old godson from every country she travels to—and she travels frequently to a lot of countries.

My biggest issue with the book is how comfortable she is in her status as “unhoused” in comparison to the vast majority of people globally. To assume hers is a shared experience that can teach the rest of us about fascism, for me, felt extremely arrogant. The notion of “rebuilding home” and centering the rise of fascism as opposed to global warming and environmental catastrophes seems somewhat short-sighted. At the very least, the two are interconnected. Can someone who travels so frequently truly imagine herself being uncomfortable having to build a “home” without all her privileges? Without her frequent travels to award ceremonies and art, film, and literature festivals?

Ultimately, my initial anxieties as a Muslim reader—knowing the author’s background and bracing for the familiar, frustrating tropes of an ex-Muslim critique of Islam—were completely subverted. Temelkuran does not attack the faith; instead, the book’s true failure lies in its structural blind spots. By attempting to universalize her highly privileged exile, she mistakes her jet-setting mobility for the harrowing realities of the truly stateless. For all its beautiful prose, Nation of Strangers leaves an unpleasant aftertaste not because of how it treats the Divine, but because it asks us to look at global suffering through the lens of a lifestyle that most of the world’s displaced could never possibly afford.