Chapter 20 "Istanbul" Religion

Before I was ten years old, God had a clear image in my mind: old and haggard, wearing a white gauze scarf, she was a respectable woman with an ordinary appearance.Although she was human, she had more in common with the ghosts in my dreams, not at all like the people I would meet on the street (the word "O" in Turkish means "he", "she" and "it").Because she appeared to me upside down, slightly to one side, the ghosts of my fantasy world shyly faded into the background when I noticed them, and so did she: in certain films and TV commercials After a wobbling shot of the world around her, her image sharpens and begins to rise, reaching its proper position in the clouds before fading away.The folds of her white turban, like illustrations in statues and history textbooks, are so clear and detailed that they cover her body so that I can't even see her arms or legs.Whenever the apparition appeared before my eyes, I felt powerful, majestic, and sublime, but strangely not afraid.I don't recall ever asking her for help or guidance.I knew very well that she was not interested in people like me: she only cared about the poor.

In our apartment building, only the maid and the cook were interested in the ghost.While I vaguely know, at least in theory, that God's love extends beyond them to everyone under his roof, I also know that we are lucky enough not to need her love.God exists to help the suffering, to comfort the poor whose children cannot be educated, to help the street beggar who begs her all the time, the innocent in distress.That's why my mother said "God help them" when she heard that roads to remote villages were closed due to snowstorms, or poor people were left homeless by earthquakes.Asking for help seems secondary to expressing a tinge of guilt that wealthy people like us feel at this time: help us forget the emptiness of our powerlessness.

Being logical beings, we take it for granted that this gentle, older deity, whose radiance is hidden behind a pile of white shawls, will not listen to us.After all, we did nothing for her, and the cooks and maids in our apartment, and every poor family around us, had to work hard to get in touch with her at every opportunity.They even fast for a month every year.When our Hanim does not serve us, she runs back to her little room and spreads the rug and prays; whenever she feels happy, sad, joyful, frightened or angry, she thinks of God; whenever the door is opened or closed, for the first time or For the last time to do anything, she invoked the name of the god, and then murmured it breathlessly.

She does not trouble us too much, except to remind us of the mysterious relationship between God and the poor.It is almost a relief to know that they depend on others for salvation, that there is another power that can help them "bear the burden."But this idea of ​​comfort is sometimes tempered by the fear that the poor will one day use their special relationship with God against us. I remember a few times—more out of curiosity than boredom—the uneasiness I felt when I watched our old maid pray.Peering in through the half-open door, our Hanim looked a lot like the god I imagined: leaning slightly to one side on the prayer rug, slowly bending down to bury his face in the rug, standing up, and bending over again. Lower body, prostrate on the ground, looks like begging, accepting her humble place in the world.For some reason, I felt anxious and somewhat angry.She only prayed when she had no pressing responsibilities and no one else was home, and the staccato prayers cut through the silence and distracted me.My eye fell on a fly climbing up the glass window.The fly fell on all fours, the buzzing of its translucent wings as it struggled to turn over, mingled with Hanim's prayers and whispers, and suddenly I couldn't take it anymore and yanked her turban.

In my experience, getting in the way of her prayers makes her unhappy.The old lady went to great lengths to ignore my intrusion, making it seem to me that what she was doing was fake and nothing more than a game (since she was just pretending to pray at the moment).But her determination to focus on prayer still impressed and challenged me.When God intervened between me and this woman—who loved me all the time, held me on her lap, and told people in the street to stop and praise me that I was her “grandson”—I Like everyone in the family, uneasy about the beliefs of godly people.The fear I share with everyone in Turkey's secular middle class is not the gods, but the fanaticism of the believers.

Sometimes when Hanim was praying and the phone rang or my mother called out to her because she suddenly needed something, I would run straight to my mother and tell her she was praying.Sometimes I do it out of good intentions, other times I'm more driven by that weird unease, jealousy, desire to get in trouble, just to see what happens.I was anxious to know which was stronger, the Maid's loyalty to us or her devotion to God: a part of me longed to fight this other world into which she had fled, and was sometimes met with threatening responses. "You pull my hijab while I'm praying, and your hands will turn to stone!" I continued to pull her hijab, but nothing happened.But like my elders, who profess not to believe this nonsense, but are still cautious—in case time proves them wrong—I know that beyond a certain point, I dare not mess with her, don't because this time Not turned to stone... Like my prudent family, I realize that if religion is mocked or lack of interest is shown, it is better to change the subject immediately: we equate piety with poverty, but never dare to say it aloud out.

It seems to me that they talk about God all the time because they are poor.It is entirely possible that I came to this erroneous conclusion because of the disbelief and mockery that family members viewed believers who prayed five times a day. If God no longer appears as a white-turbaned celebrity, if my relationship with Her is the subject of a modicum of fear and caution, one reason is that no one in my family thinks I should be given religion lessons.Perhaps because they had nothing to teach me, I have never seen any of my family prostrate on the rug, or fast, or whisper a prayer.In this sense, you could say that our kind of family is like an atheistic European middle-class family, lacking the courage to draw the final line.

It seems to be sarcastic, but in the secular fanaticism of Turkey's founding father, the New Republic, abandoning religion is modernization and Westernization.Complacency sometimes flickers with the flames of idealism.But that is in public, in private life, nothing fills the spiritual void.Eliminate religion, and the home becomes as empty as the ruins of Yali in the city, as dark as the fern-covered gardens that surround Yali. So in our house, it's left to the maid to fill the void (and to satisfy my curiosity - why build so many mosques if God doesn't matter?).It is not difficult to see the folly of superstition. ("You will turn to stone if you touch this," said our maid, "his tongue is tied." "An angel came and took him up to heaven." "Don't put the left foot first.") Bound in the Mausoleum of the Patriarchs The cloth on the table, the candles lit for Su’s father in Chihag, the “old woman’s folk remedies” prepared by the maids because no one sent them to the doctor, and the centuries-old Muslim monks who used aphorisms, proverbs, and threats The relics that entered our European families in the days of the republic in the form of ideas and proposals, may be nonsense, but at the same time they leave their traces in everyday life.Even now, in some large square or corridor or sidewalk, I suddenly remember stepping on cracks or black squares between paving stones, and I skip involuntarily.

My mind confuses these religious injunctions with my mother's rules (such as "don't point fingers").Or, when she told me not to open the windows or doors because the draft would blow in, I imagined the draft as some saint whose soul could not be disturbed. So instead of seeing religion as a system in which God speaks to us through prophets, books, and laws, we reduce it to a quaint, sometimes amusing set of rules to which the lower classes adhere.Removing the power of religion, we were able to accept it as part of our family, as some kind of weird background music to accompany us as we oscillated between East and West.My grandmother, my father, my uncles and aunts, they never fasted a day, but during Ramadan, they waited for the sunset in hunger like fasting people.The winter nights came early, and when grandma played cards with her friends, the end of the fast was an excuse to feast, that is, to enjoy more of what was in the oven.But there are still some concessions: the old women of these crowds play cards and eat continuously every month of the year, but during Ramadan, when the sun is approaching, they stop eating and stare salivatingly. A table filled with jams, cheeses, olives, meatloaf, and salami; and when the whistle on the radio announces the end of the fast, they stare hungrily as if they were with nine percent of the population. Like the average Moslem at fifteen, he hadn't eaten since dawn.They asked each other, "How long is it?" When they heard the cannon, they waited for the cook, Basil, to eat in the kitchen, and then they also rushed towards the food.To this day, whenever I hear the flute, I still drool.

My first visit to a mosque reinforced my prejudice against religion in general and Islam in particular.Almost by accident, our maid Hanim took me to the mosque without asking anyone's permission one afternoon—not in a hurry to pray, but tired of being indoors.At the Tesweqiye Mosque we saw twenty or thirty people—mostly small shopkeepers in the back streets, or maids, cooks, and porters working for rich families in Nishantashi, as they gathered on the carpet. , less like an assembly of believers, and more like friends gathering to exchange opinions.They chatted in low voices to each other as they waited for the time to pray.I walked among them during prayers, ran to a corner of the mosque to play my game, and no one stopped to scold me, but smiled sweetly like the adults did to me when I was a child.Religion may be the domain of the poor, but I see now—contrary to what is vilified in the newspapers and in my republican family—that religious people are harmless.

However, the teasing of them in Pamuk's apartment made me realize that their kindness and purity had to be paid for: Turkey's dream of modernization, prosperity, and Westernization was thus more difficult to achieve.As Westernized, positivist propertied classes, we have the right to govern these semi-literate populations, and we are happy to prevent them from relying too much on superstition—not only because it suits us in private, but because the fate of our country depends on it.If my grandmother catches an electrician running off to pray, even I can see that it has nothing to do with his minor repairs being done, but something to do with "traditions and customs" that stand in the way of "our country's progress." The faithful of the founding fathers of Turkey controlling the media, their mockery of women in black hijabs and bearded conservatives plucking rosary beads, and the ceremonies held in schools to commemorate the revolutionary martyrs of the Republic remind me that this nation-state belongs to us , not of the congregation of the poor, whose piety wears us down with them.But feeling in tune with the math and engineering fanatics in my family, I told myself that our control was not in our wealth, but in our modern, Westernized vision.Therefore, I look down on families who are as rich as us but not Westernized.These distinctions later became untenable, because when Turkey's democracy was more mature, wealthy country people began to flock to Istanbul to introduce themselves to "society".At that time my father and uncle lost a lot of business and had to be embarrassingly outnumbered by people who didn't like secularism or knew nothing about Western culture.If education entitles us to wealth and privilege, how do we explain these devout upstarts? (At the time I knew nothing about educated Sufis, Melanas, or the great Persian heritage.) I only Know that the new rich, whom the left denounces as "kulaks," hold the same views as our chauffeurs and cooks.If Istanbul's westernized middle class supported military intervention for the past forty years and never strenuously opposed military involvement in politics, it was not because of fear of a leftist revolt (the Turkish left has never been strong enough to achieve this feat), but rather, the elite The tolerance of the military is out of fear that one day the lower class and the upstarts will unite and flock from the provinces to wipe out the Westernized way of life of the middle class under the banner of religion.But if I continue to discuss military coups and political Islam (which has nothing to do with what Islam is generally thought to be), I risk undermining the hidden symmetry of the book. I find that the essence of religion is guilt.As a child I felt guilty for not being in awe and not believing enough in the white turbaned dignified ladies who sometimes popped up in my imagination.I also feel guilty about keeping my distance from people who believe in her.But—as I embrace with all my heart the fantasy worlds into which I so often escape—I welcome this guilt with all my childish powers, affirming that my insecurity deepens my soul, grows my intellect, Life brings color.As for the other happy Orhan, who lived in another house in Istanbul, religion did not, I imagined, cause him any unease.Whenever I got tired of religious guilt, I wanted to find this Orhan, knowing that he wouldn't waste his time thinking about such things and would rather go to the movies. Still, my childhood was not without surrender to the dictates of religion.In the last year of primary school there was a teacher who I now remember as obnoxious and authoritarian, even though at the time I was delighted just to see her.When she smiles at me, I'm intoxicated, but when she raises an eyebrow, it breaks my heart.This older, white-haired, sullen woman ignores difficult questions of faith, fear, and humility as she tells us about the "beauty of religion," deciding instead to see religion as rationalist utilitarianism.According to her, the Prophet Muhammad believed that fasting was important not only for strengthening the will, but also for improving health.For centuries, Western women, hostile to religious beauty, enjoyed healthy fasts.Praying quickens your pulse, like gymnastics, and keeps you alert.In our time, in countless Japanese institutions and factories, whistles are blown to signify a suspension of work, and everyone does five minutes of exercise, much like Muslims pause for five minutes to pray.Her rationalist Islam affirmed my little positivist's secret desire for faith and self-control, and one day during Ramadan, I decided to fast too. Although I was doing this under the influence of my teacher, I didn't tell her.When I told my mother, I saw that although she was surprised, she was very happy and a little worried.She is a "just in case" person who believes in God, and even so, fasting seems to her to be something for backward people.I did not mention this to my father or my brother.Even before my first fast, my longing for faith had soured into a shame best kept secret.I knew my family's subtle, paranoid, mocking class views and what they might say, so I fasted without anyone noticing or patting me on the back and saying "well done".Perhaps my mother should have told me that an eleven-year-old was not obligated to fast, but instead prepared my favorite things—twist cake and anchovy toast—for me when my fast was over.She was partly happy to see such a young boy in awe of God, but her eyes also showed that she was already worried whether this showed some kind of self-destructive temperament that might determine my spiritual suffering for the rest of my life. My family's ambivalence about religion was most evident at Saj al-Adha.Like all wealthy Muslim families, we bought a ram and kept it in the small courtyard behind the Pamuk apartment until the first day of the festival when the neighborhood butcher came and slaughtered it.Unlike the little hero in a Turkish comic book with a heart made of gold who hopes the ram will survive, I don't like sheep very much, so every time I see a doomed ram playing in the courtyard, I don't worry about it. Heartbroken, and even thankful that this ugly, stupid, foul-smelling animal will soon be eradicated.But I do remember what we did, which disturbed my conscience: after giving the mutton to the poor, we ourselves sat down to a family feast, and drank the beer which our religion forbids, and the meat we bought from the butcher, because we did not like fresh sacrifices. The meat tastes too fishy.The ritual focuses on replacing children as sacrifices with animals, proving our relationship to the heavens and ridding us of our guilt.It follows that we, the butchers, have reason to feel even more guilty about replacing the animals we sacrifice with the good meat of the butchers. Our family suffers in silence from more disturbing doubts than such matters.The emptiness of heart I saw in many of the westernized, secularist rich homes of Istanbul was reflected in these reticences.Everyone talks openly about math, good grades in school, football, buzzing, but they wrestle with basic existential issues - love, compassion, religion, meaning of life, jealousy, hate - trembling and bewildered, miserable and alone .They light a cigarette, listen intently to the music on the radio, and return to their inner world without saying a word.My fasts, which express my secret love for God, also spring from roughly the same psychology.Since the sun sets early in winter, I don't feel like I'm starving.Even so, eating the meal my mother had prepared for me (anchovy, mayonnaise and caviar salad, a far cry from the traditional Ramadan diet), I felt happy and at peace.But my happiness has less to do with godliness than with the simple satisfaction that I have successfully passed the test.After I was full, I went to see a Hollywood movie at the Kunak Cinemas and forgot about the whole thing.After that I never had the heart to fast again. Although I don't believe in God as much as I'd like, part of me still hopes that God, who is omniscient as people say, is wise enough to understand why I can't believe—and forgive me for it.As long as I don't go around proclaiming that I don't have faith, or attacking it with references, God will understand and alleviate my guilt and suffering for my lack of faith, or at least not focus too much on children like me. What I fear most is not God, but those who believe in her too much.The folly of the pious--their judgment can never be compared with that of the gods--the gods forbid it, and their devotion is the second thing that terrifies me.The fear I've had for years that one day I'll be punished for being "not like them" has hit me far harder than all the political theory I read in my leftist youth .Surprisingly, I later discovered that few of my secularist, half-believing, half-Westernized fellow Istanbulites felt the same guilt as I did.But I like to imagine them lying in a hospital bed after a car accident, people who have never performed their religious duties, who have always dismissed the pious, and start to understand God. A classmate in middle school was brave enough to reject this kind of understanding.A mischievous boy from a wealthy real estate family, he rode horses in the large garden of his family's mansion on the hills along the Bosphorus and represented Turkey in international equestrian competitions.We once talked about metaphysics after class, just like children sometimes do. Seeing me trembling with fear, he looked up at the sky and shouted: "If God exists, let it kill me!" Then he said: Some kind of confidence that astounded me, adding, "But you see, I'm still alive." I was ashamed of my lack of such courage, and guilty of secretly thinking he was right.Although I was confused, I was very happy, although I didn't know the reason very well. After I turned twelve, my interests—and my guilt—were more sexual than religious, and I no longer considered the immeasurable contradiction between belief and belonging.It seemed that since then, the pain was not away from God, but away from everyone around me, from the collective spirit of the city.Even so, I shudder every time I come face to face with some old woman in a white turban in a crowd, on a boat, or on a bridge.