Reading Ramadan, reading in Ramadan

With all its splendor, beauty, blessing, meaning, and its sovereignty above the times, Ramadan, after an 11-month interval, has come again and settled into the most esteemed place of our lives. As it does every year. As it comes every year to cleanse our soiled world, to gather our scattered lives, to revive meaning that is on the verge of being lost.

The existence of the month of Ramadan, with its unfailing arrival, its manner, its tempo, its presence, is by itself one of God's greatest favors and bounties to us, His servants.

It repairs the world which, were it left to us, we would long since have pulled the nail out of and thrown away, makes it livable, and then departs as it came, of course with a sorrowful farewell. Ramadan has an arrival that no one can remain indifferent to. It has a dominion whose existence and effect are felt in the very depths of their lives both by those who like its coming and by those who do not.

There have been those in the past who envied this dominion, those who tried to dilute it, to set up partners to it, and there have been excesses to suppress its atmosphere. The existence and activity of each of them remained, and will remain, like the buzzing of a fly.

Because no human will established Ramadan. It is the axis of the order that the Lord of the Worlds established for this world.

That is why one cannot simply say "Ramadan" and pass on. It is the month in which the Qur'an was revealed. The best way to comprehend Ramadan is undoubtedly to read the Qur'an more, to reflect more, to be more intimate with the Qur'an. The Qur'an is the guide of our lives, so our interest is not to be confined to a single month, but anyway Ramadan is not a time confined to a single month.

The month of Ramadan is for the Muslim a month of training whose effects and consequences extend to the entire year. The training we receive in this month becomes a mold of our character. In the remaining times we live with the lessons we draw from it. One of the most important lessons is the deep awareness that we live in this world together with others. Ramadan has an aspect that opens up the individual who, in the ordinary flow of life, has become entirely squeezed into his own selfhood. In this world you have your worry, your worries, your concerns, but there are others too, and be sure theirs are far greater worries than yours.

Forget your own worries a little and attend to the worries of others. Get out of the dungeon of selfhood whose keys are in your hand, open up to the world.

In its historical dimension, fasting is an act that binds the first human and the last human to one another; in its geographical dimension, it is a global experience that at the same time binds together and makes common hundreds of millions of people spread across every part of the world. The liberating dimension of this experience, which brings a person into being as a human, is worthy of every kind of contemplation.

Ramadan is perhaps one of the most important pillars that remained after a series of whirlpools and storms this country has lived through in different periods, and that ensured its revival.

It would be fitting for the history of Islam or Islamism in Turkey to be read also as a history of Ramadan experiences.

For quite some time I had been waiting for who would do this important work, which I had been thinking about.

The relationship between the arrival of the months of Ramadan in winter or in summer and the course of secularism debates in Turkey was not a question to be underestimated.

Beyond all ideological debates, the Ramadan experience is a habitus that resists in the name of Islam, in defiance of the purges that secularist practices pursue against all institutions. Everyone lives these experiences but a proper literature of them was not made, they were not given voice. I remember what an anthropologist named Llyod Fallers wrote on Ramadan experiences in Turkey, publishing in 1974 under the title "Advent Ramadan" an observation he had made in the sixties. As far as I remember he was making a comparison with the Christian Easter experience. Even so, the text was as academic as it could be.

Dr. Necdet Subaşı, whom we know more for his academic works and of course especially for his strong observations on the everyday religiosity of the people, with his "Zamanın Behrinde Ramazan Hikayeleri" (Ramadan Stories at the Edge of Time) has produced, in my view, exactly the best example so far of the literature that was being sought. The book is a narrative of insatiable flavor about what an ordinary family experienced at different ages regarding iftar, sahur, fasting, tarawih, fitra, zakat, and before and after tarawih. I can say that reading Ramadan also through these stories gives a distinct feeling, to the taste of living it.

Ramadan is the month of the Qur'an, and of course the activity that comes to the fore with the Qur'an is reading. Reading is in itself an important level of existence that has become identified with Muslim existence. That is why the book begins with Read. In the name of God...

One needs to read the Qur'an, the book of the universe, Ramadan itself, ourselves, one another, our Lord. As we read our Lord we also read ourselves, or vice versa. As we properly read ourselves we read our Lord. All readings, when done properly, open a right path to the Lord.

I would have liked to make a list of books to be read on the occasion of Ramadan. But Subaşı says in his book that what he suffered from most in the past was the older brothers who recommended books in lists. Let me not have closed the way to the recommending of his own book. Apologizing to him, I am only sharing my impressions.

Subaşı's literary performance seems as though it will give a better idea of his academic performance, and stand out more.

The book "Ramazan Hikayeleri" is in fact the first of five narrative books. With "Tedavüldeki Kitaplar" (Books in Circulation), published by Tezkire Yayınları, he again tells, with the same style and the same literary performance, his own personal experiences of the books that a generation read and that shaped a generation's thought, feelings and world of meaning.

From Necip Fazıl Kısakürek to Sezai Karakoç, from Minyeli Abdullah to Said Nursi, from the books of Şule Yüksel Şenler to Sayyid Qutb's Fizilal and his other books, from there to Mustafa Necati Bursalı, Kadir Mısıroğlu, Mawdudi, Ali Shariati and all the other principal books, it is an extremely original narration, through personal experiences, of how and by what simple touches an Islamist world of mind was shaped, influenced and rebuilt. Each of these books and authors has probably taken a very similar place in the biography of most of us. From these experiences, in which everyone can find something of themselves, whoever wishes can derive a history of Turkish Islamic thought or ideology in the Republican period, and whoever wishes can find guiding signs for their own inner reckoning.

What I have said applies also to "Yaz Dediler Anı" (They Said Write the Memory), published by Otto Yayınları, which is in fact the first of five books. I think the fourth book of the quintet has also come out, but I have not yet been able to get it. We will wait with curiosity for the fifth too.