The breath you take is forbidden

When I sat down at the keyboard there were a great many subjects to write about. Gaza ties all words in knots in our throats and imposes a state that leaves speech wholly inadequate. We say Hasbunallah, hasbunallah ve ni'mel vekil, ni'mel mevlâ ve ni'mel mesir.

On the other hand, there are the echoes of an operation that has been awaited for months.

The people who committed one of the most comprehensive acts of espionage in its history, one of the greatest betrayals, against Turkey will finally be brought before the judiciary. No one objects or doubts that a crime exists, but when the suspected perpetrators of this crime were brought before the judiciary, the whole of the parallel structure's media and political limbs going into collective defense produced a situation that gives the entire structure away and reveals the structure's involvement in the affair. While displaying total bravado in the structure's embracing of the suspects, a state of confessing theft arises.

In fact no other evidence is even needed; the perpetrator and the crime are plain as day. Even so, the shamelessness in the poses they strike drives one mad. What stories, what stagings, what waves, what half-baked dramas! Before you know it, the violators of private life have turned into heroes of freedom and of the "lawful morsel." In their social and asocial media, this great usurpation of authority committed against the Turkish people is being presented as if it were something marvelous.

The information gathered from eyes and ears, through the violation of the private lives of hundreds of thousands of people, makes unlawful not only your morsel but your breath. You have been caught red-handed, you have been disgraced before the nation, you have no face left to show among this people, you have no standing left in the country. Perhaps from now on, out of respect for the blessed month of Ramadan that has just passed, and using the holiday as an occasion, the most meaningful thing you can do is to apologize to this nation and to repent to God. It will be hard, very hard, to establish trust again in this world, but God accepts repentance.

Instead of pushing at the door of God's mercy, you are still pursuing intrigue and trickery. Hasbunallah...

On another side there is a Ramadan that has come and gone, and today is the holiday. Holidays need to be comprehended, to be felt in the depths of our consciousness.

TIMES WHEN TIME CANNOT BE TURNED INTO CASH: RAMADAN AND THE HOLIDAY

Another Ramadan has come and gone from our lives, from our span of life. Every year, when its time comes, it arrives and settles in the midst of our fragmented, broken-up lives. In an instant it brings together and unites those fragmented lives, perceptions and experiences. Everyone certainly receives it in their own way, from where they happen to stand, but when it comes everyone puts themselves in order.

No one can ignore it, no one can act as if it did not exist. Even those who are not glad of its arrival certainly feel its presence in some way. It stands there somewhere as a concrete intervention from the divine realm into this world. It is reflected, in its aspect of mercy and abundance, upon the poor and the friendless.

Under its spiritual climate people feel to their very marrow that they are not alone, that what they live through is not peculiar to them. Ramadan is an experience in which a person builds bridges to God, to other people, to members of other religions, to the past and the future, and thus feels that he has risen above time. The same experiences are being lived at the same moment all over the world; its name is fasting.

Moreover, this experience, lived all over the world, has been lived since the most ancient times, since the first human being. What is more, this experience will continue to be lived until the last human being. This feeling, which leads a person to feel himself a particle of one great existence from the ancient past to the future, envelops him with a consciousness of tawhid in which only God remains behind. However much a person resists, this consciousness is engraved in the depths of his soul as a sign (shi'ar), and from there it affects life and behavior in one way or another.

That is why the shi'ars must not be neglected, but even if a person neglects them, God has in any case placed them in the human world in a way that cannot be uprooted. There is prayer, there is pilgrimage, there is sacrifice, there is the call to prayer, there is the veil...

Each of these shi'ars stands somewhere there. Whether we take part in them or not, they continue to carry out their rulings. They have, as it were, an existence of their own. Almighty God continues to protect His religion with these shi'ars as a door of mercy and compassion for people. When we take part in them, we find in them our own enthusiasm and our own joy, which are constantly present in them. We find life with them. Do we make a contribution to them? We surely do, but ours is not something to be flung in anyone's face. On the contrary, God is grateful to us for keeping these doors constantly open to us.

And so Ramadan, when it comes, no one is in a position to tell it not to come. It comes and settles in the midst of our lives. Everyone has, and has had, a share of Ramadan. Even those who are heedless toward it certainly feel it in some way, and even those who adopt a stubborn indifference toward it cannot escape becoming aware of it. In the worst case, through its aspect that determines all time and the calendar and affects daily life, it keeps reminding you that it is there, that it concerns you, that it is vitally concerned with you and your existence.

And then it goes...

It goes having once more reminded us and taught us that God is there, that He is the Lord not of some of us but of all of us and of all the worlds, that He is closer to us than we are to ourselves, that He is more compassionate toward us than we are to ourselves. But it goes in order to return again. Whichever of us has the span of life next year will meet it again. May God grant us to prepare to meet it better.

Ramadan will return again. That is why, as a gift for beginning anew, it leaves a holiday behind it. The holiday is the feast of beginning anew. Of returning to the start, but changed, having covered ground, in one's life or in one's gains...

Life is an experience that moves forward. No one can fully return to the beginning, in fact. When everyone returns to the same point, they return with many things changed in their lives and their burden increased. When a person experiences Ramadan again a year later, and its holiday after it, he finds the opportunity to measure from where to where he has come. People close, every year at the holidays, the differentiation between their own lives and the lives of others. Whoever we are and whatever job, profession, age or gender we have, we return to the place where all humanity meets and gather there.

I remember having written before. There is no room for relativism at the holiday. Everyone may have different experiences and different worlds of meaning, but at the holiday no one needs a debate about his own role. Everyone takes part in a play whose meaning and script were written and staged long ago by someone else. "Everything falls into place at the holiday. The balances and relations of life are restored. I am not sure of the semantic relation between iade (restoration) and iyd (holiday), but their phonetic closeness is no coincidence, and moreover the fact that this restoration is accompanied by an enthusiasm, a joy, is perfectly in keeping with the nature of things."

The holiday is therefore a restoration. The restoration of the point where we began, of what we lost, of our authenticity, our ikhlas, our sincerity, our purest state.

Moreover, even in an age when time, like everything else, is seen entirely as a property (commodity, cash), Ramadan comes and goes again every year to remind us, to teach us, that neither property nor time belongs to our own disposal.

The existence of holidays is a mercy and abundance, pouring forth into existence, that points the way to humankind, always inclined to lose its way. May this mercy and abundance never be lacking from you.

May your Ramadan Holiday be blessed.