Reading history in Ramadan

Ramadan is the time of fasting... The time of giving (infak)...

A practical atmosphere of education in which people remember that besides themselves there are other people too, and that these people also have needs, troubles, pains and sorrows, and realize that relieving these troubles and sorrows is their own responsibility... An Arafat-like setting in which people thus get to know one another and share one another's state...

Many features of Ramadan could be listed, but one is far more prominent. The month of Ramadan is the month of the Qur'an. It is a period of time that contains the Night of Power (Laylat al-Qadr), on which the Qur'an was revealed and which has been declared better than a thousand months.

There are great wisdoms in the fact that which night this is has not been disclosed, and that, according to one narration, it was made known to the Prophet but later made to be forgotten.

In this way, man is prevented from mastering time and taking it into his palm so as to parcel it out, and is prevented from sharply separating one time from other times in terms of worship.

The Night of Power may be anywhere within the whole month of Ramadan. We shall seek it. To seek it, we shall try to live and feel every one of our nights as if it were a Night of Power. We shall attune our ears to the voice within us, we shall attend to the signs and verses (ayat) occurring outside us, and we shall be in complete vigilance against Satan, against our ego, against every kind of temptation that might lead us astray.

Ramadan is the month of the Qur'an. So we shall read the Qur'an abundantly. We shall both recite it and plunge into deeper reflection on its meaning.

We shall read the Qur'an like a letter that our exalted Lord, who created us and whose mercy and compassion toward us exceed anyone's, took us seriously enough to send to us personally. This Book is a book that does not distinguish anyone from anyone else, that addresses everyone, human being, woman, man, child, adult, elder, Arab, Turk, Kurd, Circassian, non-Arab, Easterner, Westerner, Northerner, Southerner, separately and at the same time.

Whoever reads with all his heart this guide, which comes from his Creator who knows him better than anyone and owns him more than anyone, will not lose. As he reads, he gets to know his Creator, and as he gets to know Him, he knows himself even better. He knows his place and mission in this world. He knows that in this mission there are also many people who bind him to previous generations and to other geographies.

Ramadan is a time in which we must concentrate on the Book and on reading the world through the Book. That book commands this in many places. "Travel through the earth and see what was the end of those before you... Those before you were also seized by many an empty path like you."

In fact, to see the events we live through as events detached from the past, from history and from human universality misleads us greatly. It inevitably leads us to a history.

The famous sociologist Philip Abrams asks, at the beginning of his book Historical Sociology, "Try asking some serious sociological questions about the contemporary world and see whether you can answer them without going to history."

Those who ask "What business does Turkey have in Qatar today?" did not, for example, hold back, when the opportunity came, from asking the same question about Syria, about Sudan, about Africa, about Myanmar. By doing so, aren't they imagining a Turkey without history, without roots and without sociology? In the end, the model of society they offer cannot go beyond being an ill-omened model of society.

Yet when we heed the command of the book and travel the earth and examine the paths that communities before us have traversed, that is, when we go to history, what we see is, on the one hand, the repetition in many respects of what we live through, and on the other, man's incredible ignorance in all of this emerging as a lesson. How much continuity the roles in the most recent Gulf crisis show with the roles distributed in the divisions that took place a hundred or two hundred years ago!

There are those in the Arab media who liken the embargo and siege applied to Qatar to the embargo applied to the Companions of our Prophet by the polytheists of Mecca. Yet, in response, when the Prophet's uncle Abu Talib, who protected him against the heavy reactions he met from the polytheists while performing his mission of Messengership in Mecca, died, his other uncle, Abu Lahab, who was hostile to him, had to take the Prophet under his protection. Now, when the grandchildren of the same Arabs try with united hands to strangle one of their own, they do not even allow one of them to protect him.

These parallels with historical events will inevitably be drawn. The intensity and pain of the events lived lead one spontaneously to look for a similarity in history. Thus, alongside the dimension of lessons, the dimension of consolation in history also makes itself felt.

THE RAMADAN CLASSICS RELIGIOUS PUBLICATIONS FAIR

One needs to read more in Ramadan.

First the Exalted Book itself, and then what that Book says to read.

One needs to read about what happened to those before us as one travels the earth.

One needs to stop by the Religious Publications Fairs, which have become one of the indispensable practices of the months of Ramadan, and look at the new books.

It is said that, surprisingly, interest in the book fairs is very low this year. One needs to question what caused an incredibly large difference to emerge even between last year and this year alone.

A decline of interest in books or in the book fair is not a good omen. Though those following the process speak of the difficulty of the days having grown too long and of setting aside time for the fair between iftar and tarawih, whatever the case, there is a serious problem.

The bond between Ramadan and the Qur'an is a bond that cannot be broken even if we wished.

But one must not stand by and watch the bond between Ramadan and book fairs weaken either.