Stranger to History (6 page)

They began to laugh again and traded more verses. ‘There are different points of view on that,’ Abdullah said, ‘but the major and central opinion is that, no, it’s impossible.’

My thoughts were on neither theology nor the afterlife. What interested me was Abdullah’s mention of an almost biological sense of being Muslim. Perhaps that was why Muslims always wanted to establish – and it had started as soon as I arrived in Turkey – whether or not I was Muslim, and it didn’t seem to matter what kind of Muslim I was.

‘You have a pan-Islamic idea of the world, yet the Muslim world has been so divided.’

‘Sunni and Shia?’

‘Yes, but also within countries. Turkey has its eyes one way, Iran another. What gives you hope that Muslims will overcome their differences?’

‘Maybe political views will not come together,’ Abdullah said, ‘but the people . . . You may say there are two levels. The ones at the top care about the political system, but there is something under that. And so if you look at those people in Muslim countries, they are not very different from each other. There might be differences in political structures – and even these are related to the West – but not in people’s lives.’

Abdullah had never been to a Muslim country other than Turkey, but he was sure of his brotherhood with Muslims beyond any national or political difference. This was also an aspect of the faith: looking upon governments and political classes as corrupt, in foreign hands, and the average Muslim as inherently good and of one mind. My father later spoke to me of this brotherhood, and what I wondered again and again was what his admission into this brotherhood was based on. And why was I so definitely shut out of it where he was concerned?

‘When you go to a country and you see two groups of people,’ Abdullah said, ‘you can easily tell who is a Muslim and who is not because to be a Muslim requires many things. For example when the time for prayer is called, he goes to prayer. Another example, a Muslim doesn’t lie—’

‘Oh, come on, that’s nonsense. You might be talking about good Muslims, but good Christians don’t lie either. Half the Islamic world is filled with bad Muslims.’

Abdullah laughed. I had heard this talk a lot already. Muslims couldn’t kill other Muslims. So what was happening in Iraq? Israelis. Muslims would never have dropped the atomic bomb, and so on.

‘You mentioned the conflict between Islamic countries,’ Abdullah said, his face growing serious, ‘but I’m trying to say that to be a Muslim is a very different experience from any other, no matter where you are. To be a Muslim is to be above history. It is a mode of being, an ideal, but the closer you get to that ideal, the better a Muslim you are.’

To be a Muslim is to be above history. That formulation, like an echo of Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
, saying ‘Truth is what is useful to humanity,’ explained so much about the faith’s intolerance of history that didn’t serve its needs.

Familiar with Islamic logic, Abdullah explained, ‘Therefore Islamic countries have an advantage, and that advantage will not go. You say there are differences between them, we accept there are, but these are temporary differences. We can overlook them because we have something that never changes.’

‘What do you think the West wants from the Muslim world?’

‘That’s a big question,’ Abdullah said, leaning back a little.

It was nearly dark outside and more glasses of tea arrived. ‘I think they realise,’ Abdullah said, ‘that Islam has an ideal system with the power to make their political and cultural system as a whole go back. Islam has that advantage. It is the unique system with that power. Other systems, Buddhism or Taoism, they don’t have that power because the world system can easily turn them into empty boxes. But Islam still has that power because you cannot change it. For example, if you want moderate Islam, you just make yourself far from Islam, but Islam is still there. You cannot do anything to it. If you obey its orders, you’re a good Muslim. If you leave it, it’s your choice, but you cannot change it.’

For a moment I wondered if the unchanging aspect of Islam that Abdullah seemed so proud of was also the source of his frustrations. After all, it meant living in another still more complete system, the ‘world system’, that reached into so many aspects of his life and with which he could never be at ease as long as he believed in Islam the way he did. I was grateful for his formulation, ‘the world system’. It was like shared experience between us; Islam was his response.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘This “world system” that you and I are part of, many things come from it, your phone, for instance . . .’

I was looking round the room for other things to mention when he stopped me. ‘Everything,’ he said, with fresh pain in his voice. ‘Everything.’

‘Right. Everything,’ I repeated, my eyes fixed on him. I felt I had to tread gently now. ‘Has anything of value come out of it?’

They talked among themselves. I sensed they understood the question well, but were now picking their way through the rubble of our conversation.

‘Marlboro cigarettes,’ Oskan laughed, ‘and technology are OK.’

Abdullah had thought harder about it. ‘No, actually,’ he said, ‘this is a big issue among Muslim intellectuals. There are many discussions on the subject and, no, it is not so easy to say that technology is OK. For example, let’s talk about cinema. The Persians have made many good films. Now, maybe that’s OK. By doing that we may stand up against the system by representing our ideals.’

I was about to interrupt him, to say that most of the Iranian films he had spoken about actually stood
against
the Islamic regime, when he introduced a more interesting idea.

‘But some other people say we have to discuss the camera itself, not the films. Before making good films, we have to discuss the camera itself. Good or bad? We are not interested in the product, we are interested in the camera.’

‘What’s the problem with the camera?’

‘It’s something Western civilisation made. We have to discuss that camera. What does it represent?’

His words chilled me. I thought I heard in them a desire to take the world apart, to have it sanctified in some way by the faith. At the same time, I admired his consistency, the way in which he felt it was wrong to profit from the ‘world system’ while guarding yourself against its values. Few thought so hard about the issue or cared so much about falling into hypocrisy as Abdullah did, but I couldn’t imagine any closed completeness pure enough for him. The world couldn’t be put through an Islamic filter: that kind of recasting, like with Fatih Carsamba, could only ever be cosmetic.

He must have seen my discomfort because he tried immediately to console me, supplanting the hate that had risen in him moments ago with reason. ‘There was a time in Turkey,’ he said, ‘when people could not wear turbans and fezes. They had to wear hats. At that time, we discussed whether it was OK to wear turbans or not. It’s a very important discussion. There are things that are a symbol of a culture, and if you partake in them, you give a picture of your cultural side.’

‘Why is this ownership so important? The West has borrowed from the East, things have gone back and forth. Why must you reinvent everything yourself ?’

The irony in what he had said was that for centuries Islam absorbed a great deal that was outside the faith, from Greek medicine and philosophy to Persian architecture, but only at the end of our conversation did Abdullah explain why the faith today was saturated, its cultural circle closed, almost as if American culture, having taken in yoga and Italian food, was to say, ‘No more.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Yes, definitely. I don’t know what to do. OK? I don’t mean that we’re going to leave everything that comes from the West. That would be ridiculous. I don’t mean that. I’m saying that we have to think and discuss everything that we believe and have today because . . .’ The words failed him, ‘. . . because we didn’t do that till today,’ he finished a moment later, in a voice that almost broke.

A long, silent moment passed between us. Then, recovering himself, he spoke again: ‘We need to discuss everything and maybe we’re going to create a new structure. I don’t know if we will, but what we need to do is to discuss everything from the beginning, from start to finish. We need to do that.’

Histories swept away, hidden under laminates like Turkey’s dogmatic secularism, produced men like Abdullah, who were not content to be told to conceal their religion and wear European clothes. He was studying the past, ‘the big Islamic culture’ that Atatürk rejected, learning the languages that Atatürk sought to cleanse modern Turkish of, wearing the clothes Atatürk banned; and he had had to pay a price.

‘Growing up, what did you and the people around you think of Atatürk?’ I asked.

I received the standard embarrassed smile that this question produced in religious people. I pressed Abdullah for an honest answer and assured him that it was not for a newspaper article. ‘Of course it wasn’t so good,’ he said at last. ‘We weren’t talking so much about the man . . . In my family, you mean?’

‘Yes. Just growing up, in school, at home.’

‘I would go to school, and Atatürk was in school, just in school. Outside there was no Atatürk. It’s difficult to describe. There are some things you don’t say but you understand.’ Abdullah grew up in a conservative neighbourhood and, briefly, I imagined him in a playground like the one I had seen, a cemented patch of secular life surrounded by men and women of faith.

He complained about secularism: ‘It is being used to create a new population, to push Muslims out of the system, and I think they have succeeded on a certain level. For example, if today a religious man, the prime minister, for instance, reaches a high position, it is something we must focus on, something bad. Muslims in Turkey are still out of the system and trying to get in. All the changes in Turkey are coming from the top. They don’t ask people if they want these changes.’

Abdullah had suffered at the hands of the system. He came, like Erdo
an, the prime minister, from the religious Imam Hatip schools. He was penalised for this in his college entrance exams; his marks had been docked. It hadn’t occurred to me until now to ask him whether he had even wanted to study religion and Arabic.

‘There is an ironic story about that,’ he said, ‘We were meant to write fifteen choices of faculties we wanted to join. Theology was thirteenth on my list. The first was commerce. I was nineteen at the time, not an age when you evaluate things properly, but after entering the theology faculty, I realised that it was the best faculty for me.’

Commerce! I balked. Abdullah, so full of rage against the system, might have been climbing its rungs, drawn in by its rewards. Cast out from that system, he now wanted to be a researcher in the Islamic studies department.

It was late and I rose to leave, but was detained by one last question. It had arisen because I felt at odds with someone I liked. ‘You say Muslims have to develop their own system,’ I asked, ‘separate from the “world system”. Why is it not possible for there to be a “world system” that Muslims could be part of ?’

‘Let me tell you a story,’ Abdullah said in reply. ‘If a Muslim girl marries someone who is not Muslim, we say that’s not OK. She cannot do this. But if a Muslim man marries a girl who is a Person of the Book, that’s OK. Jewish people criticise us for allowing our men to marry Jewish and Christian girls, but not allowing our women to marry Jewish and Christian men. You know what the reason for this is? We accept all their prophets, all their books, we don’t say anything bad about Christ, but they don’t accept our Prophet. They don’t accept our Book, they don’t accept our religion, they don’t accept
our
system. That’s the difference. I think that Muslims have to be at the top, at the centre of the system. We have to determine all the things in the world, otherwise we won’t be free ourselves. That doesn’t mean we will destroy other cultures. No. We want to be at the top so that we can realise what has been ordered by Allah, to make it real in this world by our own hand. We believe that that is the right thing to be done in the world.’

He stopped, and I thought he felt bad that the goodwill between us had evaporated again, but he went on anyway: ‘For instance, a Christian may live here with us but not like a Muslim. He may live here, but we have to be dominant.’

I left Abdullah and Oskan on that cold, wet afternoon, in the cafeteria on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. I was taking the train to Damascus the next morning and had to pick up my tickets.

Abdullah was also planning a trip to Syria the following summer. I wanted him to go; he had asked about Pakistan and the level of freedom its people enjoyed; I wanted him to go there too. Turkey and Pakistan had had similar histories: strong, politically involved armies, a coup every decade and the execution of a sitting prime minister, but Turkey had gone one way and Pakistan another. I felt that travelling in the Muslim world might produce new respect in Abdullah for what his country, outside its Islamic commonality, had achieved.

Pakistan shared an important link with Turkey. When it gained its independence in 1947, carved out of a diverse, pluralistic society, it became, as Turkey had, what it had never been before: an almost pure Muslim state with fixed borders. But while Pakistan, intended as a secular homeland for Indian Muslims, re-asserted its connection to the great Islamic past – even importing Urdu as a suitably Islamic national language – Turkey, founded as a secular state for Turks, broke its links to that past.