The Ramadan drummer: what a mysterious coming in a child's mind

In those days there was no way to announce the iftar time other than the call to prayer. No iftar cannon, no television, no radio. Even in that time when seconds flowed as slowly as hours, the iftar time arrived with the adhan being recited, and we had only the bismillah to dive into that ice-cold water. Four or five glasses of water in a row, gulping, until we were satisfied. Being satisfied is not possible, of course. With that excess water consumption, right from the first moment our stomachs would swell and we would stop eating, with a heavy nausea or pain. Of course, our extreme eagerness to instantly relieve our longing for water prevented us from drinking it in a controlled way.

In the months of July and August in Siirt, the roofs in the evenings are like the living room or salon of the house. All of life passed on the roofs. So the iftar tables were also laid on the roof. My late father would bring the watermelon he had carefully bought beforehand from the market, soak it and put it on the wall of the roof, waiting for it to warm up a little.

I say he had chosen the watermelon carefully; I used to think that no one could choose a better watermelon than my father. For him, choosing a watermelon, picking a good watermelon, was a special expertise that brooked no rival. No one could choose a better watermelon than him, that is all. When choosing a watermelon he would bring it to his ear and tap it a few times with the back of his finger. At that moment he was doing the most serious job in the world. After testing the watermelon at length like that, there should have been no chance that the watermelon he chose would turn out not good. But it happened. It was exactly at that moment that the curse he hurled at the watermelon seller became a separate source of joy and amusement for all of us. There was no guarantee with a watermelon; thanks to that we learned early. In fact, the unpredictability of the watermelon formed a metaphor for marriages. A spouse chosen for marriage is like a watermelon: you take, or recommend, with all your expertise and your foresight, predicting that it will turn out well, but there is always the possibility of a surprise.

Because in Ramadans that fall in summer months the time between iftar and suhoor is very short, life for men passes entirely outside. Most of the shopkeepers who fast during the day are open at night, especially after tarawih, and do their business until suhoor. With the stools the tea houses spill out onto the outside, onto the sidewalk, even into the street, people experience Ramadan in a different way, with conversation, with companionship, perhaps with draughts, backgammon or card games. In between, peddlers wander about, selling simit, halka tatlı or nuts, which become a snack between iftar and suhoor. Thus the Ramadan nights, when the three main streets of the city were full of people on chairs spilling out of the tea houses, made the city feel like a complete festival for a month.

Men would come home with the suhoor. Years later, Halime Toros, in her book of this name published by Vadi Yayınları, told of these arrivals in a very beautiful story (Sahurla Gelen Erkekler, 1994). Perhaps they would come to sit directly at the suhoor table, perhaps those coming earlier to wake the household who would prepare the suhoor. But of course, rather than the men coming from outside with the suhoor, being woken by a Ramadan drum is one of the loveliest events of Ramadan nights.

In the time when I first experienced Ramadan, I got to know our Uncle Tahir, who pierced the darkness of the night first with the sound of the drum and then with the sound of footsteps, as the hero of the nights. The drummer who at first began as a distant sound to us and then slowly, as he approached the house, we heard more loudly. What a mysterious arrival that is in a child's mind. To wait for the sound coming from afar in the pitch darkness and utter silence of the night to slowly come all the way to the front of the house. It is as if the one arriving is not a drummer but an envoy calling from the heavens. Because my father had given him instructions during the day, when he came in front of our house he would slow down, play a little longer, then with a sudden move, still playing his drum, begin to move away.

To receive the drummer properly, one had to be asleep and to have been woken by his sound. But what if, despite all his playing, we could not wake... Because we went to bed late, and he came right after we fell asleep, someone else was needed to wake us from deep sleep. This would be either my father, coming with the suhoor, or my mother, who in any case got up early and began preparing the suhoor. They woke us not only for suhoor but also so that we would not miss the drum that came piercing the night. The sweetest entertainment of suhoor times.

Our drummer had no manis. In any case, he was not talkative or show-loving enough to recite them. In Siirt, drummers in general did not have a tradition of reciting manis as in other provinces. He produced from the drum the sound needed to wake people for suhoor, that was all. Nowadays generations are deprived of that drum sound because the alarms, firmly settled in everyone's home, even in the phone in their pocket, suffice to wake people for suhoor. It is tragic that culture sees the drummer as a superfluity and gradually renders him functionless, putting other instruments or habits in his place. A clock alarm or any other method can get a person up for suhoor. But is it not a harbinger of some lost faculties or relationships that we now see as noise that drum sound thundering through all the streets at that hour of the night?

Aydın Aktay expresses in more tragic words what has happened to the Ramadan drum in particular, and to Ramadan in general, in the increasingly secularized urban environment: "The drummers play, strangely, a tradition peculiar to the Muslim neighborhood in mass housing areas, on the boulevards of cities, in the centers of secular lives, without courage, hesitant, cautious, fearful. Always anxious about the wrath of some modern madman, of a secular. Fearing the anger and fury of the civil servant who has to get up for work. The same civil servant is also bothered by the sound of the call to prayer. To the people of the city Ramadan is perhaps excessively disturbing. Among people belonging to different religious identities and sentiments crammed together in the same urban spaces, Ramadan is not received with a common feeling. Ramadan seems to fall upon the place it comes to like a strange bomb."

Is it that much? Surely not. This may be only the image of Ramadan from another camp. Yet Ramadan, despite all these grumbles, continues each year to build its own world, having the last word.