Do you know what I will say?

What makes a human being human, and advances him on the journey of humanity, is the level of his openness to hearing things, to learning from what he hears, and to changing himself from what he has learned. But we all know that a person does not always hear, that if he hears he does not learn, and that even if he learns he does not turn it into action.

What is it that makes this difference? In the process that runs from whom we will hear what from, to what we will learn from what we hear, to what of what we have learned we will put into action, we display our own difference. We have an ear, and whether we want it or not, it makes us hear certain things. Between what we hear unwillingly and what we hear "knowingly, willingly, seeking it out," which sound, whose word, reaches what part of us and how far?

"How should one prepare for the coming of the other? Is the other, as other, not precisely the one for whom one is not fully prepared? Does preparation not rescue the other from his otherness, that is, if we are prepared, then is what comes not the other but the same, precisely what we were expecting? Does real hospitality toward the other not require having a certain unconditionality, which means that one is prepared for everything, that is, in fact not prepared? Is the only preparation sufficient for the coming of the other to confess that we cannot be prepared for what is to come? Then how can one be (un)prepared, that is, how can one be prepared for the advance of someone for whom we can never be prepared?"

These questions of John D. Caputo are rather admonishing questions asked about how and how much we are prepared for the Other, in fact for the friend, for his coming or for his calling to us. For some reason these very questions remind me of what Nasreddin Hodja does in his famous thought-provoking anecdote. The anecdote begins with the question that the Hodja asks the congregation one day when he ascends the pulpit in the mosque: "Congregation, do you know what I will say to you today?" The congregation is bewildered, a question they had not expected at all and to which they give no meaning. How would they know? Just so, they say: "No, Hodja, we do not know." On this answer the Hodja looks over the congregation and says "Good, then I will not tell you." The congregation is thoroughly bewildered. Should we have said we know? Was the Hodja not there in the first place to tell us what we did not know?

Anyway, another week passes, the congregation and the Hodja come together again, and the Hodja, on the pulpit, after looking around again, repeats the same question: "Congregation, do you know what I will say?" The congregation is again bewildered, unprepared because they never expected a repetition of last week's event, but, as a reflex in everyone at that moment, thinking that if they give last week's answer the Hodja will not speak, they all say at once "We know." On this word too the Hodja says "Good then, since you know, there is no need for me to tell you." The congregation is thoroughly astonished. This time they have been eagerly awaiting the week after, because, thinking that one who repeats twice will surely repeat a third time, they have made their preparation.

When the Hodja again ascends the pulpit and asks "Congregation, do you know what I will say?", the congregation thinks it was right to prepare. Just as it had decided, some say "We know" and some say "We do not know." But the Hodja's answer has not changed. This time, saying "Good then, let those who know tell those who do not," he again descends from the pulpit without telling anything.

According to İsmet Özel too (Speaking in Hard Times), by this act, performed for three weeks without telling anything, the Hodja has in fact told a great deal. Those who come to the mosque without knowing at all what the Hodja will say from the pulpit, what he might say, are people who have no idea what they are seeking and who have turned the whole business into routine. Whatever the Hodja tells, since they know nothing to begin with, they will hear nothing and learn nothing. Their communication with the Hodja is not the communication of a person ready to receive a friend who is coming. Here, whatever the sermon in the mosque says, it will not change the lives of a congregation moving in its own routine. There is no point in wearing oneself out by telling them things, saying things they do not know and will not know.

Those who say "We know" have also known beforehand and bought what the Hodja will say. The Hodja will not be able to say anything new that will change their lives. More precisely, even if he says it, the congregation will not perceive it as new. They will take that knowledge or counsel into the frame of what they knew beforehand, and grind it down within what they knew. There is no need whatsoever, nor importance or meaning, in lecturing in this way. It is in any case impossible for those who think they know everything to learn something new from others.

Rather than being caught between those who, by saying they know nothing, display a passive or indifferent resistance to receiving anything new, and those who, supposing they know everything, transform all the knowledge and counsel that comes into their own limited knowledge and kill it, leaving the two alone with each other is in fact not a choice.

In any case, the communication of ordinary people with one another consists of this kind of non-communication. The Hodja, with an ironic expression, shows this situation in which people already find themselves. How open are those who come to listen to the Hodja at a set hour each week as a traditional routine to really knowing or hearing anything?

In an interview conducted outside a mosque after Friday prayer, of the dozens of people who answered the question about what the imam had said in the sermon that day, only one or two remembered and said what the sermon had been about. It is entirely normal for the Hodja not to feel friendship from people who listen to him with this indifference or resistance, but by expressing this in this ironic way he has told them in the most striking manner even though they are not ready to receive anything.

Lending an ear, as a good intention, to the one who opens his mouth to speak is the minimum condition of conversation; if we are not in that conversation gathering by compulsion, and especially if we have gone to that gathering willingly and prepared as to whom we will listen to, perhaps we will listen with all our soul and try to catch what is said.

When we decide to read a written text and take it in hand, we are perhaps a little freer as readers, but in this reading too there is generally a good-faith "desire to understand" that we are expected to display. That is, whether oral or written, this communication requires a minimum of friendship.

For good reading and writing there is a minimum of friendship, a certain warmth and mutual understanding, a wish to understand and to be understood, and this exists.