Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer who does not shy away from confronting the Turkish government, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. Much has been made recently of non-Western writers daring to critique their own culture, such as Naguib Mafouz, Salman Rushdie, Parviz Parvizian, Elif Shafak, and many, many more. The pen is as feared as the sword, even relatively calm works are excoriated without being read, subjected to the “the tics and manias of obscurantism.”