23
Taner Edis (Turkey)
In my school days back in Turkey in the 1970s, I used to look forward to the religious instruction class each week. Not because I was at all devout-quite the opposite. Parents who so desired could opt their children out of the religion hour, and so I got to play outside for a while instead of enduring another lecture. Unfortunately, we usually couldn't get a ball game going, because only two or three of us out of a class of about fifty opted out.
Most kids who skipped religion class belonged to a minority faith such as the heterodox Alevi sect, or, like one of my close friends, Christianity. I was the rarest of the rare, going without even a nominal religion. In fact, I became somewhat notorious in school. Not only was I this half-American, equally fluent in English and Turkish, but I lacked religion. As kids will do, some of my friends pestered me about this. When a classmate preached to me about God, my sophisticated comeback was to ask, "Who's this `Allah,' the neighborhood grocer?" To this day, I wonder how I survived school without being beaten up even once. I suspect that what I said was just too bizarre, so the other kids figured I was just weird this way and then we'd go back to playing ball or something.
The blame, naturally, lies with my parents. Religion was simply irrelevant to our lives when I was a child. My father is a hard-core Turkish secularist, with no patience for religion intruding on modem life. My mother, who grew up irreligious in California, seems at most slightly curious about religion, mainly as something other people do. They might have some vague beliefs in some sort of higher creative power, but even today, I'm not exactly sure. It was not anything that mattered.
Ours was also a household my friends compared to a library. I did not grow up, the way many others did, in a home where the Koran was one of but a few books, given pride of place. Our Koran was a tattered English translation, one among many hundreds of other books, one I would not even have noticed if I hadn't turned into a bibliomaniac and started looking through my parents' books. We had many children's science books, brought from the United States, and some childrens' encyclopedias both in Turkish and English. I was very impressed with them, fascinated by how much I could learn about the world just from books. I had plenty of fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales to read as well, even a number of Christian-lite Christmas books, which my mother brought out every December. When my Muslim friends spoke of God and his angels, of the wondrous Koran, it seemed obvious to me that these were also fairy tales. I was somewhat perplexed as to the whole business of believing them, but I didn't give it much thought.
My immediate environment beyond the family didn't encourage faith either. Few of our relatives and family friends were visibly religious, and when so, they seemed very liberal about it. We might visit a family who observed Ramadan and its monthlong fast during daylight hours, but they would immediately serve their guests tea and pastries, with no suggestion that there was anything wrong with our eating. They fasted, we did not, and that was all. Most others in our circle were nominal, unobservant Muslims. They believed in God and that the Koran was in some way a divine message giving a good moral foundation, but they didn't read the scriptures or care about doctrine. They only darkened the door of a mosque for funerals and such events. Where I grew up, faith was a personal business and some cultural color. It was not something people evangelized about, and almost no one turned Islam into a political statement.
So I never believed. I saw no great incentive for faith, except to please people who were not my immediate elders anyway. Adopting some vague, watered-down cultural Islam remained a live option for me, and my brother, I think, had some leanings in that direction as a kid. But in the end, religion was not important, and it was no great struggle to do without it.
Of course, this was not the result of any mature reflection. But the miracle stories of the devout sounded implausible and pointless, I was always pigheaded when it came to accepting popular opinion, and, just as important, I did not have any clear communal loyalties. I was a lot more impressed with my science books. Today I find, somewhat to my embarrassment, that my basic reasons for infidelity are much the same. I have to struggle to make sense of the very idea of a God, and when I get somewhere, it also becomes clearer that such a supernatural reality is improbable in the extreme. I still am not deeply rooted in any community and its beliefs. And I am even more convinced that modern science, though tentative and ever changing, is our best way of learning about the world. Religion just does not compare. I would like to say that I fell out of faith after a long intellectual and emotional struggle, that I knew Islam intimately as a devout believer and still came to see that it was false, harmful, or both. Then I might have had a more compelling story to tell. Unfortunately, Islam never had any attraction for me, and as I had occasion to learn more, my skepticism only deepened.
Today, my attitude toward Islam is complicated. I admit I respond to apologetics with irritation, and seeing many well-educated people I know still fawning over the Koran always leaves me puzzled. It seems the sanctity of the Koran is obvious to most people who grew up Muslim, though a preposterous notion to me. When presented as a serious description of the nature of our universe, Islam seems about as thoroughly mistaken as one could be. And I don't mean just popular Islam-polished intellectual defenses of religion that erect philosophical walls around the faith to protect it from criticism are, if anything, worse. On the other hand, I am more ambivalent about the social role of Islam. Most people seem to do better with a mythic perception of the world, and I hesitate to say that understanding the world as a godless, natural place is always a good thing. I mostly saw a low-key, tolerant Islam around me when growing up. So, though I sometimes get fed up and start thinking Islam is a curse in all its forms, I eventually simmer down and remember that rigid, orthodox Islam is not the whole story.
And yet I find myself a minor critic of Islam. I can't contribute to, say, arguments concerning the origins of Islam. I don't even speak Arabic, and at least in English and Turkish translations, the Koran seemed occasionally poetic but overall one of the most mind-numbingly boring books I have ever read. But in the occasional article or Internet rant, I can at least remind readers that not everyone from a Muslim country prays five times a day, and that some of us go so far as to reject much of Islam. When orthodox Muslim apologists exploit postcolonial guilt among Westerners, I can point out that however precarious in social support, there is also a tradition of opposition within the Islamic world. Plus I recently completed a hook, The Ghost in the Universe,' in which I argue against theism, including its Islamic versions, in favor of a uncompromising scientific naturalism.
That I would join this argument is somewhat surprising, given my background. My parents were curious to find that I had developed an interest in religion, even as an opponent. This interest started in earnest when I came to the United States for graduate studies in physics and was intrigued by "weirdness"paranormal and fringe-science beliefs that lack solid evidence but are still wildly popular. Gods and demons, of course, are the strongest supernatural beliefs of them all, and I certainly considered them weird.
My interest in weirdness first touched on Islam in a serious way when I began looking into the religious opposition to the theory of evolution, which has flared up in Turkey in recent years. For someone with my peculiar tastes, spending a lot of my time reading material I consider the most appalling intellectual garbage, this was a gold mine. The creationists spin the most outrageously bad arguments and plain intellectual dishonesty together to defend their faith, all the while claiming to be truly scientific and borrowing wholesale from the Protestant creationists who infest the United States. This has to appeal to anyone with a dark sense of humor. Today I continue to observe and write about Islamic creationism with a morbid fascination.
But I must confess my motivation to begin feverishly reading about religion was not limited to intellectual curiosity. The time I left Turkey was also when Islamist politics was gathering steam. The comfortable, self-contained social world of the secular Turkish elites and middle classes was being invaded by a populist, urban revival of Islam. Ever since the modern Turkish Republic was founded in the 1920s, secularists either controlled or constrained the state, always wary of an Islamic reaction to modernization efforts. Since the 1940s, however, religious conservatism has increased in influence. In the 1980s Turkey caught up with the rest of the Muslim world, when Islamists forsook the long tradition of political passivity among religious conservatives and made Islam into a radical political option.
The Islamist ideal society would make life very hard for secularists, so we naturally perceived the new Islamism and the revival of all things Islamic as a threat. But Islamists in Turkey also adopt heavy-handed identity politics. Some of our most bitter battles are over symbolic matters, such as university students being allowed to adopt Islamic dress or not. So secularists often respond with a defense of a modern identity, reasserting the ideals of the early Turkish Republic. For some, this includes elaborate, if implausible, statements about how orthodox Islam, rightly understood, is compatible with modern life. "We are all good Muslims here" is sometimes the rallying cry. I don't have that option, so I have to claim some living space for myself as an Enlightenment rationalist.
So I read about weirdness, about religion, and remained continually fascinated with supernatural beliefs both as intellectual claims and in their political aspect. Of course, I quickly encountered Western views of Islam. Much of it seemed disconnected from what I knew-not just the bomb-toting fanatics stereotype but also the notion of tolerant, misunderstood Islam. In either case, I was seeing rather condescending portraits put up for various Western purposes. I do appreciate how the Jews expelled from re-Christianized Spain found a home in the Ottoman Empire, and I'd like this to be better known. I am disappointed to find European notions of the marauding, barbarian Turk are still there below the surface, and I hope that people will come to understand that jihad and conquest was not all the Ottoman Empire was about. But still, I'm not entirely happy when I see Muslim history being used as little more than an object lesson in tolerance for the benefit of Christians.
So in the more popular works I read, I kept encountering ideal types, various "true" Islams that did not do justice to what I knew any more than the claims of Muslim apologists. And even in academic books I often encountered not so much an orientalist insensitivity as a reluctance to risk offending Muslims, overcompensating, I guess, for earlier scholarship on Islam that made it out to be an inferior version of Christianity. Digging deeper, though, I found plenty of interesting material.
Learning more about Islam was also a process of letting go of some of my own myths. I used to think that Islamic doctrine was more coherent than that of Christianity, that orthodox Islam was open to free inquiry before its long period of stagnation, that we had solid historical knowledge about the birth of Islam. After all, Turkish secularists propagate these myths as well, hoping to help rationalize an Islam that is stuck in the premodern world. Even those of us who reject Islam, like myself, too often treat orthodox Islam as a package deal, completed in all essentials at Muhammad's death. It was enlightening to discover the much more ambiguous situation the best of our modern knowledge indicates. Finding how the religion had a complex history, still in the making, changed my perspective, even as orthodox claims to divine revelations appeared ever less plausible.
I also came to appreciate the depth of Islam as a civilization, however much I dislike its oppressive and obscurantist sides. Ataturk, founder of the Turkish Republic and hero of every Turkish secularist, was certainly audacious in trying to move the country toward Western civilization. In the space of just about fifteen years, he led an effort to radically change almost everything in Turkish society. The young republic adopted European norms in all public matters, from weights and measures to Sunday as the official day off. Turkey discarded the old Arabic script in favor of the Latin alphabet, and Ataturk even outlawed traditional Muslim dress and had people wear European hats instead of turbans and other traditional headgear. Turkey was to become a new Western nation, with its own lan guage and history, of course, and a private, liberal, emasculated Islam as a majority faith rather than a remnant of Christianity.
Yet knowing the depth of Muslim civilization and the commitment orthodox Islam inspires, I now also wonder if Ataturk's ambitions were completely realistic. Since his time, we have maintained some Western institutions and a secular elite, but all in all, Turkey is still uncomfortably caught between the modern and the premodern. We have McDonalds and trash TV, but most of our population is either peasants or removed from peasanthood only by a generation or two. Our urban elites, knowing what was a smart move for getting ahead in the world, adopted a private, liberal Islam. But elsewhere, for the large majority, religion is still a matter of communal allegiance, and dissent is still betrayal.
I now teach physics in a small Midwestern university, and comparing Turkey to the United States does not make me much more optimistic for the future of Turkish secularization. I think the idea of God is radically mistaken, but belief is amazingly robust. And the legacy of the European Enlightenment is culturally too thin. And so I see that here in America as well, God reigns supreme. Infidels have breathing space, though, because it is a pluralist country with many gods, and because we have become individual consumers instead of peasants. This is hardly an inspiring social scene, but I think I'll stay. At least here, it's much less likely that some Islamist loon will decide that I'm an enemy of Islam who deserves to be punished.
Though being shot is only a remote possibility, it isn't just an idle worry. In the last two decades, some of the most forceful Turkish critics of Islam have been either assassinated or forced into exile. Some in the Islamist press have targeted critics, printing names, addresses, photos. They do not explicitly ask that the traditional penalty against apostates-death-be carried out, but no doubt certain hotheads get the message.
I have some of the books written by the murdered critics. They seem uneven. Many of them wrote intemperately, even angrily. They sometimes lacked sophistication, and tended to emphasize the worst in Islam. It's easy, I guess, for popular criticism to end up as a mirror image of religious apologetics, especially when a writer falls out of faith through an intense personal struggle, and begins to think the religion that shaped much of his life was nothing but a lie. And if he comes to see Islam as an ideology that enslaves whole masses of people, that gives even more urgency to his writing. I don't have that level of personal anger when I approach Islam, but I'd like to see room for passionate attacks on Islam in Turkish culture, as well as a more quiet rejection. Though sometimes their arguments were obscured by their vehemence, I thought the murdered critics made some very good points as well. They could have been part of a public discussion Turkish culture would have greatly benefited from. They were silenced, though, by bombs and bullets.
Of course, the fringe element of Islamic terrorists does not represent the vast majority of Muslims. Yet terrorism and orthodox Islam are not entirely disconnected. It takes only a few rapists to make women fear going out at night, reinforcing a culture where women are thought to be in need of male protection and supervision. All too many in Turkey, I suspect, thought the murdered critics only asked for it with their provocative writings.
This became even clearer with the Salman Rushdie incident. Though Turkey is liberal compared to most of the Muslim world, The Satanic Verses was banned there, too. My mother wanted a copy, so I smuggled one in on my next visit. It was dismaying to see how even in Turkey, far from the a_vatullahs, Rushdie was regularly condemned. Pundits would denounce Khomeini's infamous fatxwa encouraging Rushdie's assassination, but they would make it clear how they did not condone Rushdie's actions either, sometimes going on to suggest less drastic ways of preventing his insult to Islam from circulating. I need not even mention what the Islamist press said.
At about that time, a group of secularist and Alevi intellectuals, including a well-known writer and notorious skeptic who spoke of having The Satanic Verses translated, held a meeting in a provincial hotel. Arsonists set fire to the hotel, and many were killed. Naturally, the culprits were never found, and those of the local populace who supported the violence suffered no consequences. In Turkey, this sort of thing happens every so often. It was just another episode of sectarian violence against Alevis, with some complete infidels massacred in the bargain.
Criticizing religion, I have found, does not go over well in Muslim culture. By this, I don't just mean that Islam discourages searching questions about its basic claims. That's true enough, but no different than just about any other faith. Sometimes I suspect, though, that Islam has an extra edge of defensiveness about it. After all, Islam was born with empire but shaped by political instability. And over the last few centuries Muslims have found their way of life repeatedly tested against an intrusive Western world, and have usually come out the losers. Perhaps, then, expressing doubt on basic matters, especially when outsiders can observe this dissent, seems to be an unacceptable display of weakness. When the community of believers faces crisis after crisis, another threat to its unity is the last thing it feels inclined to tolerate.
I'm not sure-that's all speculation on my part. Still, I've learned to be careful when arguing against the claims of orthodox Islam. Even Muslim aca demics working in Western universities can be very defensive about Islam, confusing criticism with insult. I don't know what to say. I might try and argue that one of the weaknesses of Muslim culture today is the limits it puts on criticism; but then, I am clearly not motivated to preserve the specifically religious aspect of Islamic culture.
Even at a more personal level, announcing not just passive lack of faith but active criticism is difficult. I worked on The Ghost in the Universe for a number of years, and naturally I would have liked to talk about what is something of a personal achievement. Strangely, though, I found myself having difficulty telling my Turkish friends what my book was about. Instead, I mumbled something about it involving science and philosophy, and told them they'd find out precisely what it was when it comes out. I'd like to see it translated into Turkish, if I could find the opportunity. I have an ego as big as anyone's-I like to see my work in print. But the Islamic revival in Turkey shows no signs of stalling, and sometimes I wonder if it would be such a good idea after all.
I get in black moods about Turkey. It's not news that the country's in bad shape, and that the secular nature of the state has eroded considerably in the last two decades. The Anatolian Enlightenment seems to have run out of steam halfway through; it now struggles against being swallowed up by Islamists on one side and the International Monetary Fund on the other. I shouldn't get carried away, though. Turkey's a volatile place where things can change quickly. If, for example, the European Union accepted Turkey as a member, this might change its prospects considerably. Acceptance would make economic sense for the Europeans, but the big snag is the cultural mismatch. Would the Europeans want to deal with a large population increasingly insistent on asserting an orthodox Muslim identity?
It might be significant that the example I just mentioned was a change in external circumstances. Internally, Turkish secularism seems shaky. It is true that secularized people have become more energized of late. In a land where even trivial acts can be political statements, attending a Western classical music concert can declare one's identification with Western culture, affirming the choices of the early Turkish Republic. Secularists are playing such symbolic politics with renewed vigor these days. But the political dynamism still seems to be on the Islamists' side. They set the agenda, they decide on the shape of the debate, and secularists react. And the least compromising secularists, the social democrats, have self-destructed as a political force. Then again, they were never popular favorites.
I'm not sure what Turkish secularists could have done differently. Perhaps, as conservatives keep accusing us, we kept insisting on imposing reform from above, losing contact with the real culture of the country. But then, secularists were never content to remain an elite, forgetting the impoverished peasantry. Some embraced socialism, most at least talked about the nationalist ideal of a confident Turkey joining the modern world in its democracy and prosperity. Rural Turks and recent urban immigrants, however, did not think much of those who presumed to speak for their interests, and thought even less of state-imposed modernity. They wanted prosperity, but by and large, they wanted to be prosperous as orthodox Muslims living in the land of Islam. With the exception of the heterodox Alevi minority, they rarely voted for the parties that claimed the legacy of the Turkish Revolution.
I'm starting to write like an academic-my prose is threatening to become bloodless, analytical, careful not to miss ambiguities in case a reviewer pounces on me. But I teach physics, not anything connected to Islam. So I have no incentive to spend much time thinking about Islam without some passion for the issues. So, I wonder now, what these days gets me fired up to oppose orthodox Islam?
There is, of course, my identification with education and the intellectual life. I'd like to keep religious influences away from the formal learning environment in universities. In particular, the pressures Turkish universities feel, and the amount of religion that has already seeped in, bother me to no end. Naturally, in a country caught between two civilizations, education is a highly political matter-the periodic American firestorms about canon and curriculum are trivial in comparison. Universities have become a battlefield for secularists and Islamists alike, and sometimes it amazes me that any learning gets done amid all the culture wars.
Secularists, no less than Islamists, play politics, trying to shape universities in their own image, but I don't want to suggest they are equivalent. An attempt to inject creationism into biology education is not the same as a political effort to keep evolution from being diluted. And, more important, a more secular vision must win out if a climate of open intellectual inquiry is to survive at all. Islamists always end up as fundamentalists. They would give us a scholarship in the traditional mold, based on transmitting received wisdom and protecting the faith from criticism. They would not promote an open engagement with the modern world.
So Islam, I think, is an intellectual nuisance. But again, this is a rather academic concern-it's almost like I don't want militant Islam to harm me and mine, and I do not care about the rest. Things may come to that. At this point, intellectual concerns do loom largest for me, at least at the surface. But whether I like it or not, no institution is isolated from the rest of society. Even in physics, someone has to pay for our computers and our instruments. So I can't just treat the ques tions Islam raises as invitations to an intellectual game, as items of weirdness for my collection. In the end, I find the full-blown orthodox Muslim community as imagined either by traditionalists or by Islamists to be a remarkably oppressive, closed society. I can try to escape the Muslim world or I can try to help those who want to change things. Usually, I have done some of both.
What really brings the issue home to me is the place orthodox Islam assigns women. It's no accident that the veil is always a flashpoint in the struggle between religious conservatives and secularists. In Turkey, the secular caricature of an ultraconservative is a man in medieval Islamic dress, with robe and beard, followed a few steps behind by multiple wives completely covered in their carsafs, all public identity erased. This, to secularists, symbolizes all the darkness, all the stagnation the Turkish Republic has been trying to leave behind.
Growing up in secular, middle-class neighborhoods, I did not see such scenes often. But when I did, it was disturbing. I would walk past a man exactly as in the stereotype, in Islamic dress, followed by black-clad nondescript figures with only eyes visible. I was bothered. I still am, especially when I see a short figure fully veiled, which means a daughter aged ten or eleven at most, who until a few months ago was free to play outside with her friends but now has to climb into a brown paper bag every time she sets foot in the street. I feel a gut-level revulsion in such cases, but curiously, also something like shame.
It continues. When I was in transit through a German airport and saw a Turkish immigrant worker family in Muslim dress, I was embarrassed to think that this was the image so many saw of Turkey. When I see Muslim women covering their hair in American universities, I am troubled again.
I am not entirely comfortable with my reactions. After all, a stock element in conservative Muslim literature is a heated denunciation of the modern lack of morals, evidenced by the half-naked women occupying the beaches. If I am dismayed to see women forced into, or, just as bad, consenting to a status that seems comparable to slavery, well, conservative Muslims are dismayed to see women volunteering to a status they see as comparable to whoredom. I used to give a hostile stare at ultraconservative families walking through our secular neighborhood. A university classmate's sister had to walk through a conservative neighborhood on her way to medical school. She ended up harassed to the point that she found it best to put on a head scarf when walking by.
To further complicate matters, many women among Islamists make a great show of covering themselves and recommending it to others. They don't seem forced into anything; they see a conservative role for women to be integral to a faith that gives them peace and meaning amid the chaos of modern life. Some of them are leaders among Islamists, even though their leadership is confined to "women's issues." Even in the industrialized West, most converts to Islam appear to be women.
I grew up among strong women, proud of the work my mother did, and my ideal is for men to live and work together with women as equals. But changing toward a society where the sexes are not segregated, where women have public identities, can be disturbing for both men and women. When growing up, a few of my friends took equality between the sexes as a given; my female classmates from college who entered professional life can't conceive of going around in a veil or being segregated from men in the name of religion. But then, many of my male friends never learned how to cook for themselves, sew, or clean a house. My mother made sure my brother and I could do such things, but we were exceptions. In my friends' parents' generation, the woman took care of the home, and no one thought to train the male children to do such things. My female friends work, but many still have to do all the housework.
Learning to live differently is hard, and no doubt many even among women find the certitudes of the old ways comforting. As elsewhere, Turkish women haven't begun to work out of feminist conviction but rather economic necessity; if they liked the accompanying measure of freedom, this was a side effect. Today, Turkish secularists nervously reassure each other that Turkey can never become like Iran, but I'm not so sure. Rigid gender roles keep men in their place as well as women; Muslim women can feel that with an Islamic separation of men from women, they would be protected from men violating the boundaries.
So I'm wary of denouncing too hastily how Islam treats women. Women's lives have a way of becoming battlegrounds for men, and I worry about pushing people around in the name of liberating women. In that case, perhaps the best I can do is to help, however modestly, to create an environment where women can decide for themselves, and help maintain a social space for those of us who do want to live modern lives.
But then, this does not quite work either. Personal freedom to choose and live according to one's identity seems wonderful, liberal, unobjectionable. Lately Turkish Islamists have been using such rhetoric often, claiming to defend personal freedom against an intrusive state that would impose secular lifestyles on all. But to many conservative Muslims, the very social climate supporting individual choice is unacceptable. It gives in to the modern, human-centered world, degrading the integrated community environment necessary for fully living out Islam. Without modern, autonomous persons who negotiate their differences within some semblance of a secular democracy, the whole notion of personal freedoms becomes too slippery. Even if I were to adopt the watered-down language of individual choice, shying away from asking how we might best live together, I would still be imposing my modern views on the debate.
I doubt there is a mutually acceptable solution to be reasoned out here. Moral condemnations fly fast and fierce on either side, but after all the talk, my interests differ from those of the Islamists. I'm not sure there's more to say.
Now, I don't want to reinforce the stereotype of the dour, inflexible Muslim who insists everyone should live according to Islamic law. Muslims can be more tolerant, at least those who are traditionalists rather than political Islamists. No uncovered Western tourist would be harassed when strolling through a conservative neighborhood; only a Turk, someone who should be a member of the community, faces demands for conformity. When I visited a Turkish village, they didn't expect me to conform to every community standard; they were very accepting of difference as long as it was clear that we belonged in different social worlds.
The secularized Muslims I grew up among were also very accepting. They lived modern lives; their part in the Muslim community was not so central to their identities. And so living together was no problem, especially since polite conversation stayed away from divisive matters like religion.
For that matter, many who start out conservatively learn that the different people they interact with are not all bad. I recently got in touch with a old school friend, by e-mail. He was one of the kids who didn't opt out of religion class; and in our conversation he remarked that he was surprised to find out, from my example, that not everybody was religious, and, contrary to what his grandparents said, going without faith did not automatically make a person a monster. So I seem to have contributed, in however small a fashion, to push him toward a more liberal Islam.
Yet I fear conservative, rigorous Islam will always lurk in the background, even if Turkey completes its halfhearted lurch towards social modernity. Even if the habit of understanding Islam an individual expression of faith spreads beyond the current minority, I wonder if this can work for long. After all, the Koran will still be there, held sacred by all. Some will decide to read it and take it seriously, and then they will find its premodern views are not so easy to interpret away. One of my friends once argued with me that the Koran was misinterpreted, that it did not allow women to be subordinated to men, and that there was no reason she should change her modern way of life. I didn't dispute her. I hope she keeps treating the Koran as a generic sacred object in the distance, revered but not consulted for God's commands for her life.
When I was a postdoctoral researcher in Louisiana, I became friendly with an Iranian computer specialist. He participated in a Koran study group, along with some other exiles from the Iran of the ayatullahs and some other Muslim families from various nations. The men typically worked in science- and technologyrelated fields. I expressed curiosity about their group, and visited their meetings a couple of times. The people there were all quite modern; some of the wives were Americans who had converted after marriage. None of the women covered their heads. The group's informal leader, a physics professor, was greatly impressed with Rashad Khalifa's 19-based Koranic numerology, and he would generally take charge of interpreting the passage chosen for each day after it was read. In keeping with Khalifa's views, this group generally rejected the prophetic traditions, insisting that the Koran and the Koran alone was the basis for Muslim faith and practice. The Iranians especially put a political coloring on this; they were prone to suspect the traditions harbored too many later fabrications designed to give clerics power-hence opening the way for criminals like Khomeini.
Interestingly, however, their attitude toward the Koran was as fundamentalist as any I've seen, and they almost always adopted the orthodox interpretations continuous with the traditions they ostensibly rejected. In many ways, they were like a Muslim version of an early Protestant sect-scripturally fundamentalist, but also sectarian and individualist, trying to assert independence of the wider community and tradition.
This sort of group is not unique; many in Turkey are also exploring ways to be Muslims without getting under the thumb of leaders of Sufi orders or that of the traditional religious scholars. Perhaps the current Islamic revival will produce something like the Protestant Reformation. In fact, after I started thinking this way, I found some Western scholars of Islam seriously discussing this possibility. I don't know-history does not repeat so easily, and I suspect in Islam it's much more difficult to break from the ideal of a unified overall community in favor of individualism. But in the long term, I hope something like the Reformation does happen. At first, the clash of rival fundamentalisms unleashed by individual interpretation would cause much misery. But if they would reach a stalemate, as happened in Europe emerging from the religious wars of their Reformation, the Muslim world might develop a similarly pluralist consensus about public life. We might get a modernized Islam with roots going deeper than the secularized elites in Turkey.
This would be wonderful. I don't expect most people will come to live without mythic perceptions of the world, without supernatural hopes. I would disagree with a Protestant Islam as strongly as before about its gods and demons, its claims of transcendent realities. But I could at least live in its social world.
I would be terrible as a political leader. Even as I wistfully hope for an individualist Islam to prevail, ambivalence about modern life creeps over me. Even someone like myself, a perpetual outsider to any organic community, has to feel some sympathy toward desires for a community that goes beyond a collection of individual consumers.
About a year ago as I write this, my brother and his wife had a son. They decided to name him "Bora." Talking to them, I found out that the current trend among secular Turkish professionals was to choose very short names for their children, names that could easily be pronounced in the Western world. The prospect for many of these kids is to become yuppies in a global economy, unlike the many graduates from nonelite universities who will face difficulty getting decent jobs, and who quite likely will find an outlet for their frustrations in Islamist politics. My nephew could end up living anywhere in the world-even now, many of my friends are scattered around the globe. I only visit Turkey once every couple of years.
Now I. and people like me, can easily survive, perhaps even thrive, in such an environment. But is it any surprise that many others might consider it a nightmare-our rootless wandering, our lives where claims of a transcendent purpose come as a distant echo we don't know what to make of? We contribute a small Turkish flavor to an indifferent modern culture, but how many of us can really feel at home?
Recently I visited Turkey in between semesters, after an absence of many years. It was Ramadan, and on a warm winter's day I got together with a high school friend I hadn't seen in nearly twenty years. We met at an outdoor cafe by the Bosphorus, ordered our glasses of Turkish tea, and caught up with each other's lives. It was lovely weather, with a great seaside view, on a weekend. Ordinarily, we would not have been able to find a seat without a lot of luck. But the rows of outdoor tables were deserted except for one other. These days, even middle-class citizens of Istanbul are a lot more observant of the Ramadan fast. This includes many socially modern people who want to demonstrate they are good Muslims as well.
My friend is a medical doctor, I a physicist. We move with ease in the secular realm, even the Western world. We not only use cell phones, we know how they work. When we discuss politics, the notion of conforming to a divine law is alien to us. As we sipped our tea, gazing at the scenery, I noticed an imposing old Ottoman fountain behind us. Unlike many left to crumble in back streets, it was clean and in good shape, and the inscriptions in the old Arab script were gilded. Probably to present something attractive to European tourists. Neither of us could, of course, read the script-Atatiirk's reform adopting a Latin alphabet happened long ago. We, true children of the republic, stand at a remove from Islamic civilization.
The waiter who served us was fasting. I'm not sure I was much closer to his world than to that of the Ottomans. Just as the religion classes of my childhood, so with the culture of my land of birth. I have opted out.
NOTE
1. Taner Edis, The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002).