Ramadan is the host, we are the guests

After the drummer's performance, which reached its peak in front of the house with his voice coming from afar in the pitch darkness and utter silence of the night, slowly faded away, no one was left with the grogginess of having been woken from sleep. I have no business with nostalgia, so do not take this as an ode to the old Ramadans, but this was an awakening very different from being woken by a clock alarm, surely...

With the suhoor we would eat shortly, a very demanding day of fasting awaited us. Everyone in the house fasted, the whole month. Of course, once small children reached a certain age, they too, having started with the "half-day fast" (tekne orucu), joined the fast fully at a very early age.

Iftars were held on the roof, suhoors inside the house. One reason was the difficulty of serving suhoor upstairs at that hour, but another was that the silence settling over the night at suhoor time was such that it made privacy hard to maintain. Even the smallest sound could be heard from the neighboring roofs at that hour. Moreover, in houses that the daytime heat had made unlivable, it was not possible to stay inside in the first hours of the night. To sleep on cool beds on the roof until suhoor, under enchanting, glittering starry skies, watching the movements of the starlight, is also a magnificent thing.

Toward suhoor the insides of the houses had cooled a little, so suhoor meals could be eaten comfortably inside. It was even possible to finish the rest of one's sleep downstairs so that the morning sun, rising over you, would not force you to get up early. The more privileged, of course, were those who had spread their beds on the part of the roof where the morning sun did not rise. Because the coolness of the pre-dawn hour added a completely different quality to sleep. But if the sun had struck you, for you to continue your sleep

was not possible.

As far as I can remember, everyone in the city fasted. Those who did not fast were known in society anyway. No one did anything to them, but they were seen as base people. All the restaurants of the city were closed during the days of Ramadan, taking a month-long holiday. There was one open restaurant, something like a club. Its windows would be covered with newspaper, and those going in and out would enter scanning their surroundings as if entering an organization's den. Those entering from outside were seen as entering a place of sin. But we had never heard of anyone being beaten by others for not fasting, not even for a single day. It was as though not fasting was not something the mind would accept in the first place,

so thoroughly adopted,

so thoroughly taken for granted,

so thoroughly absorbed into the culture was it.

The Republic had reached into many areas in our city too, with the alphabet change, with education, with secularism, but it seems it could do nothing to Ramadans alone. Perhaps we only think so, looking back from this time. How were Ramadans lived before the Republic, what changed with the Republic? Unfortunately there remains no place, no memory that keeps a record of these.

In the month of Ramadan, mukabele is recited in all the mosques. In some mosques after noon, in others after the afternoon prayer, people would rush to the mosque and listen to the book the imam recited, following it in the Mushaf or not.

Of course, Ramadan nights were a great occasion in which people socialized far more. A festival that everyone felt to the marrow of their bones, from which no one could step outside even for a moment, but at the same time an act of worship. Today we cannot say that the socializing effect of those Ramadans has completely disappeared even amid the cares of modern and fast life. In fact, in modern times the socializing dimensions of Ramadan have given rise to quite different habits, institutions and organizations.

In the mirror of Ramadan everyone lives their own experience, and everyone has their own perception. What I tell under the heading of Ramadan in a child's perception may be my personal experiences that many people share. I resorted to a narration through which one can trace what kind of cultural and mental software the Ramadan that began in Siirt with the mélédé fire installed in a child's mind. This can also be considered a documentary contribution to the question of what kinds of forms some of the symbols of Islam in Turkey have been able to produce by meeting and synthesizing with culture.

Of course, Ramadan is not lived the same way everywhere, and in the same place it does not continue to be lived the same way with the flow of time. It can take different forms in different places, and these forms, these traditions, can be abandoned or changed over time. But Ramadan continues its existence with its own constants, like all the other constants of religion.

For example, there were no iftar tents set up by municipalities or by some philanthropists in the past. There were none even in my university student years. I think it is a tradition that developed from the mid-nineties onward and gradually spread across the whole country. Then religious publishing, book fairs. The sociabilities formed around books and cultural life took shape within a short time and entered among the new routines of Ramadan.

Meanwhile, even in the worst conditions Ramadan continues to manifest its own constants. But undoubtedly the forms change, and some cultural styles and traditions disappear. Of course, the traditions that are abandoned or the traditions that newly emerge are not forms belonging to the essence of Ramadan. Even if there is no mélédé, even if it is not marked with suhoors on the roofs, even if it is not with festival-like cultural or social forms that keep people in the tea houses until suhoor, Ramadan continues, and will continue, to be lived by producing new forms according to the conditions of each era.

We say Ramadan has come, but in fact it is not Ramadan that comes. Ramadan is one of the constants of this world, the owner of the house. It is the time and place, here for thousands of years, in which the Qur'an that gives us direction was revealed and fixed. The ones who are transient, the guests, are us.