How much could Ramadan tell us about ourselves?

We bid farewell this year too to the month of Ramazan, a month of mercy and forgiveness as much as a month of contemplation and self-reckoning. The month of Ramazan, which makes contemplation and self-reckoning obligatory for all believers for a whole month, is a great grace and generosity from God. For it is destined that, amid the cares of this world, a human being drifts, to one degree or another, away from God, from other people and therefore from himself. This is an unavoidable feature of human sociality and hence of existence. By making an opportunity to return to oneself obligatory for the believers, even if only one month a year, God did so not in order to burden people but so that they might return to themselves, mend and heal themselves, and attain unity, tawhid.

The Qur'an we read guides us so that we may conduct this contemplation of ours, this return to ourselves, and the tawhid within being, in a healthier way. Nitpicking objections of the "but who actually manages to do this?" kind have no place here. Even those who do not do this knowingly or willingly, merely by following the form of the thing, somehow receive their share of the mercy and abundance of Ramazan.

Yet there are also those who resist so that all this mercy and abundance may pass them by, who choose to be without a share. This too is a character the Qur'an describes to us at length. Nothing can be done for those who resist their share, who keep their hearts hard, their eyes blind and their ears deaf.

WHAT DOES HOSTILITY TO ARABIC EXPRESS? GUILT OR ENMITY?

We have also witnessed plenty of hatred toward refugees from certain people who have passed themselves off to the people of this country as artists and made a market for themselves among those who do not know better, and from professors who savor being counted as scholars among ignorant people who likewise do not know better. That they do not even feel the need to hide that, behind their merciless, insensitive attitude toward refugees, there is in fact a hatred of Arabic is, in this country, an ignorant audacity. What, I wonder, does Arabic remind them of when it turns up in front of them here and there? The Qur'an? Why does the language in which God, who created them, last addressed humanity disturb some people in this country?

What is this flight from God, who created them and who owns their being, their bodies, their sustenance, everything about them? How far does it go?

Sooner or later they will be seized by God; in all likelihood their last prayers will be made in that language, and the last exhortations will be given to them in that language. If they had a grain of brain, a little artistic sensibility, a little consciousness of a man of science, they would try to be a bit more at peace with that language. We are not even going into the relationship of the history and culture of the country they live in with that language. Nor into the fact that the economy that keeps their well-run livelihoods turning also requires something of this kind of multicultural experience.

The world we live in is a world of multiculturalism, and this requires different cultural manifestations not only in Turkey but in every country that is open to the world and says "I exist in the world." Artists, scientists and politicians ought to be the people who know the world best, but they either wander around blind in the places they go, or forget what they saw when it comes to Arabic.

Another possibility: do they remember the crimes committed for years in this country against Arabic and against the Islam that Arabic represents? These crimes were never properly accounted for, nor faced. Or are they living the syndrome that European modernism lived through at one time, the syndrome of a god they believe they have killed rising again? Do they see the prospect of the evidence of a crime thought to have been committed flawlessly spilling out uncontrollably and incriminating them? Does Arabic throw in their faces the murders they committed against this country's values, its faith, its history, its ancestors? Or is it that, with the carelessness of a modernist, an Enlightenment devotee or, worse still, the most dissolute hedonist, it reminds them of the God whom they have fancied they "killed"? What is it?

WILL THE TADAMON MASSACRE FOOTAGE OPEN THE EYES OF THOSE WHO SAY "LET'S SEND THE SYRIANS BACK"?

In the opposition to Syrian refugees, which in many people also manifests itself as hostility to Arabic and to Islam, a shocking reminder is being made these two days to forgetful minds. They are in fact all well-known, shameful, inhuman acts of savagery. A video published in The Guardian by a former Syrian soldier merely reminds us what kind of hell the Syrians, whom we are annoyed to have spoil our view today, fled from.

In the footage, people with blindfolds and hands tied behind their backs are made to run toward a pit dug in front of a construction building, along with car tires, and are made to fall in, and shot in mid-air. One by one, people are killed this way on top of one another, criminally, mockingly, with beatings. Young and old alike. Then, when the pit has filled up enough, it is set on fire with car tires and other fuel; after the bodies of the people in the pit have been turned to ash, it is covered over with asphalt.

The deaths of hundreds of people in this way have been recorded in 27 such videos.

These recordings are in fact a reminder. There are earlier records of hundreds and thousands of events like this. For a person who has seen the 55 thousand photographs, belonging to 11 thousand people, that a photographer in the Syrian army, code-named Caesar, smuggled out in 2014, forgetting is more than enough to strip him of his humanity. All of those people had been killed, one by one, through systematic torture, while held in detention in the hands of the Assad regime, that is, while detained under state custody.

A treatment worse than that inflicted on the Jews in Nazi Germany. That those who did it live even a single day in this world is a harm to humanity, yet today this criminality governs Syria with the support of Iran, the USA and Russia as well.

Today in Syria the same regime continues the same practices. These are the images that depict most clearly what in fact happened to everyone who vanishes without a trace in Syria every day.

When those who say "let's send the Syrians back" advocate sending people to such a hell, they display the same mind and the same lack of conscience as these criminals, and they are in effect saying that they aspire to complicity with the Assad regime.

Do they not say that, to the question "how will it happen?", the first solution that comes to their empty minds is to go and talk to, to reach an agreement with, Assad?

Never mind that as well: do these conscience-dry people not say that they belong to the same nation as we do, and that they are doing all this in order to protect this nation?

They neither know this nation nor have anything to do with it.