Gündüz Vassaf | My Religious Upbringing

   Looking back on the occasion, it seems curious that in a country predominantly Moslem, in a city filled with some of the greatest mosques in the world, my first awareness of religion was through the then Archbishop Athenagoras. However, my story is not that different from the  other children that I grew up with. Our parents,   the first generation of the republic, did not practice religion. They were the bureaucratic elite, doctors, engineers, lawyers,  academics…Although our birth certificates, which served as an identity card, all had   Islam written next to religion, it meant no more to us than the name of the district in which our birth was registered.

   From my childhood I  have an image of someone praying in a house that we had visited. I found the prostrating motions that the person went through while mumbling to himself not only bizarre but also a bit eerie. I finally met religion in a more formal sense in Ankara when in the third grade we all took a course called religion (dealing only with Islam) which met once a week. There, we memorized a prayer or two. But still, this was no different than memorizing poems about Atatürk in  Turkish class- the prayers and poems both equally distant, both a tedious part of enforced   school life.

   I was 11 when an Islamic identity was given to me. It was not in Turkey but in Boston. After having moved to the U.S, I was enrolled in the sixth grade at a school in Arlington, MA. My image of the U.S from abroad was a country with cowboys and Indians, every child with a bicycle, blond girls my age who  even kissed their boyfriends, a swimming pool filled with orange juice, and heated streets in the winter.

   What I did not expect was that the school day would begin with not only a salute to a flag, but also with prayers expressing homage to Jesus. Every morning a fellow student would get up before the class and read a passage from the Bible followed by the whole class reciting by heart the Lord’s prayer. Mrs. Penwarden, my teacher, did not want me to feel left out. Having found out that the Turks on the whole are Moslems, she checked out a copy of the Koran  from the public library. From that day on,  each school day in our class would begin with not only a reading of the Bible but the Koran as well. In the eyes of the school  and for the first time in my life, I was a Moslem.

   Life back in Turkey where I returned to attend an American school,  Robert Academy,  once more brought me back to a more secular setting, albeit grounded in Judea-Christian culture.  The Book of Job made an impression on all of us. As teenagers  we were titillated with the song of Solomon. We knew Greek mythology almost by heart and learned to appreciate modern Western literature abundant with biblical illusions. The same was true for the country’s other top  elite schools in Istanbul. It never crossed our minds or the minds of our  educators  for the Koran to be studied as literature. Islamic culture  was for closed minds and backward people. There must have been some classmates who fasted during Ramadan, probably those with scholarships, but we were not aware of them.

   I first became aware of Moslems as people  after graduating from high school in 1964.  Employed as a social worker in West Germany for six months, I traveled widely from factory to lodging, from  construction site to hospital, meeting Turks from all parts of Anatolia. Separated from their families and homes, what held them together both as a community and individuals  was their sense of religion. In the same sense that  I had experienced the U.S as a Christian country, for the first time, I now  saw the Turks  as a Moslem people.

   They, were not the people I and my peers knew while growing up in Istanbul and Ankara.

   Since then  nearly fifty years have passed.

   In the course of that time my experience with Islam has followed a zigzag course, a consequence of both my personal development and political events.

   As a university student in Washington, D.C. in the late ‘60’s I was an active participant in the anti-war movement. At the same time, I did something, which accepting as they were, would have shocked my parents and their generation. I and my Turkish girlfriend reinforced our national identity by fasting, both of us for the first time in our lives,  a few days  during the month of Ramadan. Anti-imperialism in our politics somehow meshed with flirting with a religious identity.

   In the 70’s I was back in Ankara studying toward my Ph.D.

   They were violent times. The killing of  our students and colleagues became routine. During the mandatory funeral services at mosques, it was the faithful who prayed for them. Standing slightly apart from the congregation, we did not know how to pray.

   I know began to see religion not just as a faith but also as a part of a greater whole interacting with many aspects of our daily life and intellectual thought. I felt pulled by contradictory forces, the effect of which I feel even more today.  

   My sense of democracy as an adolescent, based on U.S.`s understanding of the separation of church and state and the freedom of religion, rebelled when I realized that the Turkish state, which claimed to be secular, feared religion so much that it controlled it through an elaborate bureaucracy. The government not only employed the imams as civil servants but also determined the contents of their sermons in mosques. I was further appalled with the realization that it was only one particular group of Moslems, the Sunni who were promoted by the state.

   But then, when I read the New York Times today or listen to the White House, I am struck by the fact that in recent years they have begun to call  Turkey an exemplary Islamic democracy.  Many Turks, and especially the present government, have also  assumed this identity.

   Why?

   The answer probably lies in many factors including the politization of Islam in the cold war, reaction to a stringent secular  state control over religion, and a cultural rejection of Western values often associated with decadence.

   At the height of the cold war, whenever there was a call for more democracy by Turkish students, unions and intellectuals, it was either the military or the mosque which stepped forth to brutally  crush such movements. Thus, I and many others experienced  Islam in Turkey as a reactionary force. My vision of religion as a belief system  shifted to religion as a political movement.  Pandora`s box having been opened, it was not long before religious elements in society organized themselves as a political party. To my horror, I saw crowds cheering at Atatürk Bulvari in Ankara, as a motorcade passed, with the head of the Islamic party waving a large piece of  cardboard cut in the shape of a key…the key suggesting that the  the  gates of heaven would be opened for us if we followed him.

But then, I fully supported that same Islamic party when it joined forces with a center left party to form a government. My peers and I were  also in  sympathy with the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran and  Humeyni when he overthrew the Shah, a symbol of repression similar to how the Chilean General  Pinochet would be regarded years later. Did we feel an inferiority complex not only to the West but also to Soviet and Chinese forms of Marxism when we thought that yet another road was  possible to a better future? Did we feel that Islam, with its traditional values, was pure and innocent while the West had become decadent and arrogant? Possibly.  If one goes back to not only  the Turkish but the world  press in those days, the Iranian revolution was compared even to the French revolution.

   Thus our perception of Islam had changed once more. We vacillated between being proud of Islam and embarrassed by it. By the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, it was the general consensus amongst the democratic countries that  Islam  was fighting for freedom.

   The same perception was reinforced when, most recently, another Islamic party in Turkey, with seemingly greater resolve than previous administrations, continued the country’s march toward becoming a member of the European Union. Once more democratic and Islamic forces had seemed to come together. In fact for some, one was indistinguishable from the other. But then, with incremental incidents, some of them violent, we have begun to witness the transformation of public space into that of an Islamic community. This has led to a staunch resistance expressed through mass rallies in major cities.

   Where do I fit in?

   I live on one of the Prince`s Islands. Last year I took an early morning ferry to the mainland. I had had no time for breakfast so I grabbed a “simit” before getting on the ferry. After settling on my seat I took a bite. It was Ramadan, the month of fasting. I felt uneasy. No one said anything or gave me a disapproving look. But at the age of sixty,  for the first time in my life in this country, I felt that I could be upsetting those who might be fasting. More out of courtesy than fear, I put the simit back in my pocket. Religion had yet taken on another meaning and for the first time intervened with my daily life.