The last days of Ramadan in Mecca

You could not read the piece you should have read in this column on Monday, because I could not write it. In Mecca, where I have been for some time on the Ramadan Umrah, once the last ten days are entered, the tempo of life speeds up so as to leave room for no other occupation. I was going to continue my contribution to the debates on tolerance and forbearance that I entered in my last piece, but seen from here and from this tempo, many things take on a different meaning, and of course it was not possible to produce a piece from within this tempo. Since the subject has come up, let me pause the tolerance debate and tell you about this place.

Since it has not been definitively communicated to us which night in Mecca and Medina is the Night of Power, the whole of the last ten days of Ramadan is treated as the Night of Power. A distinct program is followed on these nights. After the long tarawih prayers, in which one juz' is recited every night throughout the whole month of Ramadan and which continue until 11 at night, the tahajjud prayers, which begin at one in the morning and last about two hours, lock you into the Masjid al-Haram. With the magnificent recitation styles of imams such as Abdurrahman Sudais, Dr. Maher al-Muaiqly, Abdullah Awwad al-Juhany and Ibrahim al-Shuraim, a juz' of the Holy Qur'an (20 pages) is read in each of them, and these tarawih and tahajjud prayers turn the whole of social life in Mecca and Medina into a tremendous bustle focused solely on worship. The city worships, as a city, wholesale, as it were. Under the heavy heat of the day, even in the simplest movements from place to place, it is impossible not to get your share of that sun. If you enter the tawaf area, which is relatively less crowded in that heat, you have to go into the hour of iftar thinking only of water.

The Masjid al-Haram turns into a place where perhaps the world's largest tables are set in the fastest manner and likewise can be cleared in the fastest manner. For millions of people, the iftar table is laid in a span like half an hour, and as you can guess, the taste of an iftar that begins with every kind of date and with zamzam exists nowhere else in the world. After a short time like ten minutes, that table is cleared and the evening prayers begin. After the evening prayer is performed, those who wish, individuals and groups, begin to set up those tables a little more privately among themselves. The atmosphere of these tables is then wonderful in its own way. Food brought from homes, to which everyone contributes in his own way, is shared. Meanwhile everyone has a right to everything his eye can see, and takes that right whenever he wishes. It is ordinary for someone from the next group, or someone passing between them, to ask for something that tempts him at your table; as for you, it is not even possible for you to think of refusing. You of course have the same right.

These tables are at the same time like a magnificent and enormously large-scale symposium where every kind of conversation can be struck up among different peoples and people of different races, and deepened as much as one wishes. A symposium in which no one feels the need to prove his career to anyone, where only sincere feelings can be expressed in the most modest way possible. Sometimes there are fusions between groups, in some cases only between individuals... There is probably no other place in the world where people can bond so easily and plunge into the most sincere conversations. We talk with people from Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bangladesh, Iraq, Syria and Yemen both about Islamic understandings and about the problems in their own countries.

Since we are from Turkey, the subject first brought up is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and, of course, themes related to Turkey's return to the Islamic world. The names of Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül form symbols through which a tremendous sympathy toward Turkey is felt. A Kuwaiti businessman says, "In the past Turkey meant nothing to us; it was a country not worth taking notice of, but now we follow every step Turkey takes with interest and great appreciation." Another, when their names are mentioned, immediately opens his hands toward the Kaaba and prays for Erdoğan and Gül with great sincerity. We witness scenes of this kind very often. From here we can clearly see that behind Gül and Erdoğan, and quite a lot behind Davutoğlu, there is tremendous prayer support from the Islamic world.

After a conversation in which we had actually delved into the state of Egypt and its probable future with an Egyptian activist-intellectual, Osman Ören, the deputy for Siirt, in his Siirt Arabic, asks the question "what can we do for Egypt as people from Turkey." The man, assuming a jokingly serious air, answers without any hesitation, "you can lend us Erdoğan for three years." We laugh, but in the meantime he draws our attention to the fact that the movement in Egypt has not yet been able to produce a leader.

In an earlier piece I wrote on the occasion of another Ramadan Umrah, I had mentioned a mind-boggling construction effort being undertaken in Mecca. This construction continues unabated, and according to the model images posted on the notice boards, a few years from now we will have seen a very different Mecca. For this reason Mecca currently has the appearance of a complete construction site. In Mecca, where with each passing day a greater demand for hajj and umrah journeys arises, the intense tempo of worship becomes all the more toilsome as these construction works make it harder.

Meanwhile we are arriving at a Mecca from which no trace of history remains. Of history, it seems, only the Kaaba remains, and this symbolically expresses history's participation too in the tawaf around the Kaaba. By showing, through tawaf, annihilation in Allah's existence, and that the only one who remains in this world is Allah, the Possessor of Majesty. Might a message come out from here to a world in which historical monuments are sometimes valued to the degree of a fetish? And if it does, what would this message say? In my view this too is a subject worth discussing.

May your Ramadan Bayram be blessed.