The death of a friend is different: in memory of Gıyasettin Sim

The death of a friend turns out to be different from all other deaths. Perhaps it is the most shattering herald of our own death. It takes away a piece of your life. An important piece. It takes away an important piece not only of your life but of the very meaning of life.

When we say friend, it is not a figure of speech, not a lazy description. It is in the most expressive sense of the word.

A friend is a witness to your life; sometimes you feel you live what you live for him, for people like him. The friend's view of what you live and do becomes an important motive for your doing or not doing many things. In what you do you feel the friend's eye, his gaze; he becomes a partner of your existence, another eye within you, another watchman over your conscience. What the Sufis call rabıta in fact has such a meaning: the state of being in continual connection with a friend, a wali. Before the notion, in its degenerate form, that the sheikh holds over the disciple a power attributable only to God, the matter has an entirely human dimension: Believers are each other's wali, each other's friend. The friend's eye and ear are within you; he is a witness to you, a support, a backing, a protector, a guardian. All the more so if this friendship is bound, in its beginning and its end, to friendship with God, and heeds His pleasure and love. Without even realizing it, you give account to the friends who have taken a place within you for what you live, you seek their approval, you heed their liking.

We were relatives, true, but we had not met as relatives, Gıyasettin and I. After meeting in our high school years, indeed after having advanced our acquaintance considerably, we learned that we were related. His mother and my mother, moreover, were both closer relatives and very close as childhood friends. But the friendship that developed further afterwards had very little to do with our being relatives. In fact, thanks to our friendship, our mothers, who had drifted apart when they married, met again years later and assuaged their longing. But it lasted a very short time; his mother, in the grip of an incurable illness, passed away after a long, arduous treatment. He had never seen his father anyway, and now he was also orphaned, alone with his sisters.

While studying he also had to work, both to support himself and to support his siblings. We worked together. Having to work during our school years brought us even closer to each other, bound us, sometimes added partnership to our companionship, adding a much deeper and different dimension and very rich memories. Later I advanced in academic life and he in trade and business life.

His distinctive way of trading and getting business produced, with his personal characteristics, an almost unbelievable success story. He had a success that did not fit at all with his character, which conformed to no official format. For a long time he kept his own accounting entirely in his head. Although his memory was very strong, in a dispute he never dragged the matter out, and moved on by immediately accepting the other party's claim. This was not because he disdained hiring an accountant, but because he was extremely hyperactive and had no energy to waste time on details. Although his way of doing business at first glance gave an impression of looseness, his extreme industriousness, an activity far beyond a person's endurance, his sincerity, and his making very wise decisions at very critical moments covered this gap, and let him keep growing his businesses without getting into serious trouble.

Though recently, again by a conscious decision, he had begun to downsize, and had transferred or closed many of his stores. He explained the reason as devoting time to himself at last. He explained this decision thus: If I stop now, I will not have time enough to spend what I have earned. Where will we take it, it is not worth wearing oneself out so much.

For Gıyasettin, who began his working life as a street peddler and opened more than a hundred stores, supplying all these stores' products from his own production, moreover, work was never the only thing. While working he knew how to enjoy himself and to spend a significant part of his earnings in the way of God. Whoever reached him, he tried to meet their need; wherever there was an orphan in need, he tried to rush to him. This was a motive given by having grown up an orphan. When the FETÖ people asked him for scholarships for students, he politely declined, citing this reason. "When I was a student, I easily found a scholarship, but when I was not a student, no one knocked on our door as an orphan. As a principle I give my aid not to scholarships but to orphans," he had said. Although he declined them, the scholarships he gave to students of his own choosing were also beyond count.

He helped, as far as he was able, orphans, widows and needy people who had lost their homes and relatives in war and taken refuge in Türkiye. He personally filled his own transport vehicles to the brim and tried to deliver them to people in need.

Despite such a business volume, he never used a penny of credit, never took or gave interest, and had no dealings with banks other than money transfers.

He was never absent from conversation gatherings, but when the topics deepened intellectually he showed his unease. The Qur'an, religion, what God wants of us are not that complicated. When one goes too deep, quarrels also increase. He would put forth an attitude to the effect of: Do not ask more of me, what I understand is enough for me for my righteous deeds; and indeed he rushed to works of charity more than anyone. In this way he protected himself, in his own way, against being among those who are too clever, who drown the matter in intellectual debates, who in the end fall into hilafu cedele and lose the real goal.

Gıyasettin Sim had been undergoing Covid-19 treatment for 15 days, in intensive care. For someone as hyperactive as him, 15 days in an intensive care room with no contact with his wife or friends must have felt like 15 years.

Anyway, Gıyasettin grew up an orphan and began life with considerable disadvantages, but in his last times he had reached the point of being able to shrug off worldly things significantly. When he passed away, he left serious advantages to his own children behind him. A human story worth taking as a lesson was the most important inheritance he left.

Our part in this story was to witness his sincere, heartfelt, unreckoning, selfless, friendly faith and righteous deed. May my Lord the Exalted receive him with His infinite mercy.