A New Project

After reading the Quran together with my friend Nureddin Öztaş a few months ago and reporting about it in a blog (with comments of the devout Muslim Nureddin) we both now will read a piece of the New Testament together and write about it in a new blog . Since last week we read the Gospel of Mark, print it off in sections and write some brief comments.

I am sorry that everything is still in German. My English speaking readers should nevertheless know that a project like this is possible and on its way.

My hope is that not only the specialists of the Christian-Muslim dialogue take interest in our blog. The old St. Mark's text might, if you read it in a mutual effort with Muslim and Christian glasses, contain something useful for all who look for new information about an old wisdom.

Synchronization

Our travelling group consisted of a German-Turkish family (parents and two boys aged 10 and 12) a young married German Turk who travelled alone and eight Germans with German ancestors. Sitting in a bus for long hours together means to synchronize one’s desires to eat, drink, sleep and stop for a bathroom. It all went well, even though there were some habits to tolerate that might at first sight seem odd to part of the group.

The first problem was the regular Muslim prayer, five times a day. The prayers early in the morning and late at night could be done in the privacy of a hotel room, but especially the prayers at noon and in the early afternoon fell regularly in times when the group was on the road or visiting a tourist site. Sometimes Nureddin and Murat, the two men that prayed all the six prayers every day faithfully just stole away from our tour into a mosque or went to a side room when the group was having tea. We know they were praying and never had problems with delays through prayer times.

A second problem was Nilüfer’s the woman’s habit to wear a headscarf and relatively heavy clothing in a sometimes rather hot weather. The other women in their easy T-shirts or thin blouses obviously suffered with the poor girl and her heavy religious burden. Even if Nilüfer joyfully declared that there was no problem with the heat, a certain unspoken question remained: who is right and who is wrong with the respective clothing?

If a woman has to shelter herself away from the sexual desires of men than how can the other women so openly display their bodily features? And isn’t a headscarf a clear signal to a man: do not look at me, better even do not talk to me? If all man would carry weapon against thieves you would feel like a thief among them after a while. If women come in helmets and armours against male desire you might sometimes feel a kind of guilt.

Now, I know Nilüfer long enough to know she is not in arms against me. I had long talks with her and sometimes showed her my friendship by spontaneously highfiving her (which is not shaking hands, what she normally avoids among other believers). I came to the conclusion that wearing this or that kind of Muslim clothing is not a matter of administrative regulation (“no” in German schools or Turkish universities, “yes” in restaurants, public places etc.). It is a very personal decision and inevitably causes trouble to the woman who decides. She knows that the heat under a headscarf can be burdensome, she knows that maybe her sister will decide differently (and people will ask about the difference), she knows about the looks she gets in a typical “German” surrounding, say a restaurant.

She knows the problems, so I do not have to tell her my problems with her clothing, if I have any. My job is it to synchronize her life with mine, to make hers possible as other people make my life possible. Synchronization also means to make a Muslim friend feel at ease with my alcohol drinking habits. I came home with the decision to drink a little vine every now and then in front of Nureddin and Murat - let them understand how a wise use of alcohol is part of the joy that my Christian faith grants me.

The Open Society tolerates a huge bandwidth of different lifestyles. There are people next door to us with a very different set of ideas what life is all about. We make room for them, sometimes even enjoy that life is more colourful with them than without.

The Gülen-movement is a great help in all of these synchronizations. All the Gülen-people I met were well educated men with a good measure of success and wealth they had achieved. The rhythm of their world, our world, is clearly given by modern information technology, tough time schedules, the six-days-week of the industrialized world. If they would turn to the local clergy of the villages or towns they came from, they would never get an advice how to live as a Muslim in a world like this.

Here comes Fethullah Gülen in, as a guide. His is the world of Enlightenment as it came after 1700. He encourages his followers to accept the modern world an conquer it personally for their optimism, compassion and faith. And they repeat in a Muslim way what the Swedish novelist Per Olov Enquist has told about the Christians from the town of Halle / Germany around that time: that Enlightenment and a pious Renaissance are two sides of the same medal. The “Pietists” of August Hermann Francke lived side by side (though not always without tensions) with the leading philosophers of these days. And they also founded a huge social work, just like Gülen founded his schools and tuition organizations.

I came home with the steadfast desire to help people synchronize their lives with mine. Getting older I will need a lot of synchronization, too. So maybe my strategy will pay for myself.

In a rich man’s house (Șanlıurfa)

Mehmet and his wife Mehtap own a flat of 200 square meters on the fourth floor of a new apartment building in Șanlıurfa. An average German couple would look jealous at the kitchen equipment, the rich carpets and the huge flat screen in the TV room (and the second, only a little smaller, in the kitchen). The couple and its three children obviously enjoy displaying its wealth and it can do so without being angered, as in the Turkey from 1971 that I remember, by bad roads leading to the house, poor gardens and a general feeling of disorder in front of one’s door.

We found fine solid roads even far east in Anatolia, the automobiles sheltered by security rails against accidents. The Aut0bahn-like roads that connected the mayor cities in the South East had toll-stations where you paid a cheap fee for travelling. We found a vivid but nevertheless comparatively well ordered traffic in the down town areas. Traffic lights were everywhere, and they were, again others than in former years, respected. Above all we found, most visible of all, an enormous amount of new buildings under construction. This is a country on a giant leap forward into a completely modernized economy.

Our tour guide’s interest in historical sites and old buildings lead us most of the time to the inner cities with their old bazaars and small shops. They looked like the Turkey I had remembered. But driving into town we would pass supermarkets, mainly run by the French Carrefour but also by Migros and others. We saw Burger Kings and signs of all the big global firms that deliver their goods to the Grand International Bazaar.
Ömer told us about his conversion to the Gülen-Movement 9 years ago. He was looking for something deeper, something that his wealth could not buy. Now he is glad to be member of a vivid community, many of them, as I guess, as successful as Ömer and as welcoming to new international connections as he is.

Serving a crowd of 14 guests and 5 family members a rich dinner he and his young sons did a great job. There was nothing left of the old Pasha-mentality that Old Turks often display. This was a modern man, and a pious one.

Digging Gold (Șanlıurfa)

Turkish Schools are players in a Premier League of competing institutions that try to bring a maximum number of undergraduates through a tough national test system, similar to that in France. Every year a statistic of those students is published that qualified for the best places in the countries universities. And it is no longer the noble Robert College in Istanbul that ranks as number one with the highest number of qualifiers, like a Turkish kind of Eton. Other schools from all over the country have taken the first ranks.

Some of the newcomers pride themselves that their students come from the poorer regions of their hometowns: gecekondus, shanty-towns built in a fast illegal effort over night and tolerated by a law that gives squatters a right to stay where they successfully claimed a piece of ground for more than 24 hours.

The Gülen-movement knows about the human gold that can be found in these gecekondus. Their teachers visit the home of each child regularly and help poorer families to keep children at school even if the father’s little business requires the 10 years old son’s permanent presence. They sometimes just buy him out from his father if he is considered to be gifted enough.


Education is a good that private tutoring programs are competing for. In Șanlıurfa a big advertisement on a house front proudly showed the top four kids that were brought to university through such a particular tutoring program. The Gülen program that we saw (photo on top, okuma salonu meaning "reading saloon") equally displayed brass trophies with the names of the students that run particularly well.

Maybe statistics will soon show that a gecekondu is not a bad place to start an academic career from. The shanty-towns obviously are not a place for drugs and crime but stations of hope that a hard working county family soon leaves for one of the TOKI-apartments that the Turkish state subsidizes for those that sell their illegal squatter’s right back to the state and exchange a brand new flat for it.

Once you have learned what a gecekondu is you immediately see them everywhere at the outskirts of bigger towns – and also see how many of them are gradually torn down and replaced by big apartment structures, often four or six in a group, eight stories and more high. The white gold that lived in the gecekondus, human gen capital, is transferred to better dwelling places.

And it changes the face of the cities. We were told that oil and the big water dam projects rapidly improved the economy of Eastern Anatolia. But it obviously would be a dead wealth like in many Arabian States if it was not combined with the brain power of all these many young people that crowd the streets here.

Turkey is digging for white gold. It calls shepherds from the villages and sends their children to university; it welcomes poor farmers and soon gets skilled laborers in exchange. If the Germans only knew that the same raw material was washed to its shores, too!

New Posts

I wrote a new post about the different stories the Quran and the Bible tell about Job / Eyyup and another one about the Arameans around Mardin and their old Jesus-like language. I put them under the dates of October 20 and 22 to keep a timely order.

Dear Dr. Erkan Saka with his much visited blog in Istanbul put a link to my blog. This is kind of an honorary Ph.D. in the blogger world...

Turkish Friendliness

The most interesting thing in Turkey must be, as judged from the questions it gets and the attention it attracts, the person of the visiting tourist. Turks are curious people, especially the children.

I saw it back in 1971 when I worked in an Istanbul bank and it again amazed me these days: how they all keep a polite distance to the stranger in their midst, a great formal respect and nevertheless a charming openness towards him and a fine and noble way of keeping themselves proud of their own person, their heads and minds high up all the time.


Turks also have a natural talent to serve. I love the way in which the waiters in a restaurant or tea shop serve their customers. Some of them may be school boys, I guess it from their age and from the often casual things they wear. In smaller shops many of them are not professionals, maybe they are working for their family. In general, many shops here look a little bit over-employed, you almost never see just one man working alone, he would always have one or two companions as if labor was a thing you have to share compassionately with your neighbor.


The boys and sometimes girls serve you well and have a good look for what you need. But they are never devout, never showing you that you are from a better class, only because you can by afford to buy the things that they serve.

They keep a straight tenure, they look as if they love themselves, be aware of a hidden dignity in everything they do. You never see them roll their eyes about a nervous customer or reply impolite if offended - a typical German waiter's disease. They behave as if their own professional quality is a value above all others and beyond every doubt.

Turk be proud, work and trust! is one of Atatürks famous words. When I saw the noble looking and fine featured young man in Șanlıurfa cleaning the men’s restroom without the faintest visible awareness of doing a “low work” I had an idea whome he was following. Maybe he will be the town mayor 20 years from now.

Overflow of impressions

Our journey via Nimrod Mountain and Gaziantep (and safely home some hours ago) went on so fast that I could not follow writing everything down. I will use the coming days to look through my fotos and write down what is in my memory an on my mind.

There is an overwhelming impression that I have seen something excitingly new. Let me calm down to write more about that.

I will put some new posts under older dates to keep them in a timely order.