Becoming brothers while being enemies

As every year, the Blessed Birth of the one and only human being who is to be taken as a model by people in every respect is being celebrated these days with various events. The Presidency of Religious Affairs comes to the fore in the events, but the Blessed Birth has increasingly become a social phenomenon that every segment of society claims as its own, takes part in intensely, or organizes through its own efforts, with activities such as conferences, symposia, mawlids, charitable aid, greetings or conversation gatherings.

The Blessed Birth is not celebrated with such great participation and excitement in other Islamic countries. One reason for this is that love for the Prophet has a distinctive weight in the understanding and feelings of Islam of the Turkish and Kurdish peoples. I had earlier conveyed a statement on this subject by a Saudi woman sociologist: since the Turks probably did not know Arabic from the beginning, they could not establish as strong a communication with the Qur'an as the Arabs; instead, what they heard and learned about the personality of the Prophet affected Muslim Turks (and Kurds) more at first. That is why love for the Prophet gained a greater weight among the Turks in their understandings of Islam and in their lives. We had noted this as an explanation not to be underestimated but undoubtedly open to debate.

I especially included the Kurds in this explanation made for the Turks. Because if what that lady sociologist said about the Turks is accepted as true, it is possible to say exactly the same thing for the Kurds.

In recent years in particular, the extraordinary enthusiasm with which people take part in events organized for the Blessed Birth of the Prophet, whether by Diyanet or by the civil society organizations here, in cities where Kurds live in large numbers, deserves extraordinary attention. Every year hundreds of thousands attend the Blessed Birth events held in the squares in the name of love for the Prophet. This year, in the separate celebrations held in Batman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa, the Prophet is being commemorated with speeches in Turkish and Kurdish and with mawlids.

These highly attended and enthusiastic events undoubtedly have news value, but the media's indifference to this subject, in not covering it, probably deserves to be a news story of its own.

The day before yesterday, another Blessed Birth event, broadcast live by Dünya TV, which broadcasts in Kurdish in Gaziantep, took place at the Mustafa Kamil Ocak Stadium with tens of thousands of people attending. Participation in these events is quite high all over Turkey, but in the cities of the Southeast Kurdish participation is visibly higher. This participation truly deserves serious sociological assessment.

THE RELIGIOUS ASSIMILATION OF THE KURDS

In their political sensitivity against assimilation, the Kurds appear until now to have underlined their language more. Yet one dimension of cultural assimilation is religious assimilation, and in this the Kurds suffer not only from the policies of the state but also from those of the secular-socialist Kurdish organizations.

While the Kurds' ethnic identity was being underlined, attempts were also made, in the course of the struggle, to reduce their relationship with their religion, which is the principal element of their identity. A significant portion of the Kurds therefore felt a double secularizing pressure from both the state and the organization.

Yet Kurdishness has throughout history been an identity as identical with Islam as Turkishness at the very least, and the secularization of the Kurd is no less an assimilation than his Turkification.

Truly, ethnic identity enables people to bring it to the fore more than their religion, and to put distance between themselves and other ethnic elements even when they carry the same religion. That is why all nationalisms largely need secularization as well. Consequently, while Kurdish nationalism opposes the assimilationist policies of Turkish nationalism, it too sees resorting to a religious assimilation as inevitable.

The attitude the Kurds display today toward the Blessed Birth celebrations is in one respect like a reaction they display against this assimilation. But in another respect it is the result of the sensitivity toward the Prophet that already exists among the Kurds having found an occasion for expression.

BROTHERHOOD

Every year the Presidency of Religious Affairs selects a different subject on which the Blessed Birth events dwell. Last year the subject of 'compassion' was treated. Compassion was treated as a dominant discourse in the Prophet's life and sunnah. The subject chosen for this year is 'brotherhood'.

It is known that the President of Religious Affairs does not leave brotherhood at the level of a dry 'national unity and solidarity' discourse. He has underlined many times before the importance of mutual respect for the law so that brotherhood can work without problems. The tremendous verse in Surah Al Imran is a verse of a miracle that takes place in every era and can be witnessed by all: 'Remember God's favor upon you, that you became brothers when you were enemies to one another.'

This is an experience to which one who has truly tasted the sweetness of faith is never a stranger. Indeed, to become brothers with people we regarded as enemies is a hard-to-believe event in a culture where it is accepted as a norm that people are wolves to one another, but Islam is precisely the name of this experience. A miracle from the midst of real life, one that everyone can easily live and witness. Provided only that the eye of the heart is open.

It is this miracle that gave rise, from Umar, who had come to kill the Prophet, to a star Companion of a quality for Muslims to take as an example. What insurmountable obstacle is there today to living this blessed miracle?

Looking into the mirror that the Prophet holds up to us, should we not seek those obstacles in our own selves?