Like a verse: the child washed up on the shore

For those with eyes to see, there is a great deal around us that can stir our minds and consciences, remind us of our responsibility toward what is happening, and wake us from the heedlessness in which we are drowning; a great many things are happening. I think the most important thing that exhausts our astonishment and our sense of responsibility is our ingratitude.

Every moment we live is a miracle in itself, yet after a while we begin to regard it as something that happens of its own accord, as a gain that belongs to our own property. We suppose that the breath we exhale and the breath we inhale are "already" ours. Unless we live through something that makes us grasp the truth of "There is no fortune in the world like a breath of health," we go on imagining that everything is in our possession.

Yet every breath we take is a great miracle granted to us, just as every breath we give out is. We suppose that many of the blessings bestowed on us are from ourselves, until the moment we witness the great truth, the great miracle, that makes us realize we are a "nothing."

We suppose everything is ours, and so when we share, we count it as giving what belongs to us and we throw it in people's faces. There is nothing to be thrown in anyone's face. God bestows on us, and He wishes to test whether we can give to those in need from what He has bestowed on us, from what we ourselves need.

When events that shock us once begin to repeat every day, they become routine and lead to a kind of habituation. Until murders evolve into massacres and massacres into inhuman genocides, they accustom us badly, hardening our hearts into stone.

And then an event takes place, one that is no worse than all the others, but that slaps us in the face with all the distortion contained in them all, in all its splendor and all its horror, and shames us; it makes us, whether we want it or not, witnesses to the event.

If you like, you may call it a sign (ayah).

That sign lays everything bare and throws everything plainly in our faces. It lights up the darkness around us and shows oppression to be oppression, and it also reminds us of our heedlessness in the face of this oppression, of the responsibility from which we have fled until now, and of what actually needs to be done.

So far more than 400 thousand people, among them tens of thousands who are each like an Aylan Kurdi, and many of them in far more horrific ways, have lost their lives to barrel bombs, sarin gas, direct bombs or bullets. All of it took place before our eyes, yet none of it stirred the conscience of humanity; none of it reminded us, as Aylan did, of the horror of a child's death and the responsibility it places on us. Children die every day in Syria, in Iraq, in Myanmar, in Libya, in Yemen. As the wretched victims of the basest calculations...

These calculations are made by human beings. By people who, in great ignorance, suppose that the world will remain theirs forever. Those who make and carry out these calculations draw their courage from other people, who do not stop them when they overstep their limits to a great extent, who raise no voice against them, who begin to regard their transgression and tyranny as a right of theirs, and who gradually begin to see their oppression and massacres as the normal outcomes of the balance of power.

Almighty God first offered the trust that was given to human beings to the mountains, the earth and the heavens. All of them shuddered before the weight of this trust, were frightened and afraid, and refused the offer, saying they could not bear it. Only the human being accepted this trust, because the human being is ignorant. The human being thinks he deserves everything, thinks he deserves everything in excess, thinks he has a right to everything, and this is how he drags the earth into corruption. He speaks of human rights, humanism, contemporary values, and beneath all these ornate concepts he skillfully hides his own arrogance of self-sufficiency, his own pride. In the shadow of these ornate concepts, heaps of rights violations, crimes against humanity and massacres take place, and he can bring out all the contortions of rationalism to find an excuse for every one of them.

Yet there comes a moment when a photograph that throws all this oppression in humanity's face throws at the human being, like a sign, all his hypocrisy, his crime, his ignorance and his helplessness.

The photograph of the child's body washed up on the shore lays bare the whole human drama behind it, the deaths of more than 400 thousand people in Syria, the indifference of the civilized world to this, and the disgusting blindness of those who remain blind and deaf to everything happening in the world for the sake of protecting their own comfort and convenience.

Of course, even this moment ultimately enlightens only those who are able to take heed. A sign lights up the darkness and throws the truths in a person's face, but even this is no guarantee that it will put an end to some people's ignorance. Indeed, the sign increases even more the heedlessness, the blindness and the stubbornness of those who do not wish to take heed.

Those who for years have criticized Turkey over the Syrian refugees, who, when they came to power, placed sending the Syrians back to their homes among their proudest election promises, can now find a way to strike at the AK Parti government once again over the Aylan who washed up on the shore. The shamelessness they display is exasperating. They make one ashamed of one's own humanity.

Aylan, with his tiny lifeless body, must have given an unforgettable lesson to the discontent that the hosting of some 2 million refugees, under Turkey's open-door policy, in contrast to a Europe that closes its doors to refugees, to the most painful human dramas, so that its own comfort may not be disturbed, has so far created in certain segments.