My (earnest, irate) thoughts

The first thing I noticed was the color of the tomatoes. Selvi Anne had spread a breakfast feast for us on her round wooden table — chopped hard-boiled eggs heavily salted and peppered, diced cucumbers, large black olives, white cheese, golden honey, creamed butter, crusty bread and tea in tiny glasses with no handles. The tea was a beautiful rosy color, made from loose black tea in an ancient double kettle. But the chopped tomatoes were this insane scarlet color, the juice and seeds the kind that drip down your chin.

In my husband’s parents’ tiny kitchen, they have everything they need. The table is shoved next to the stone wall, between an antique turquoise Frigidaire and an open door. The room is completed with a sink carved from a room-length marble countertop, and wooden cabinets. Four short wooden stools are the only chairs, and meals aren’t necessarily eaten together at the table; rather, family members wander back and forth between the small rooms, or eat in shifts. A gas stove and a stainless steel sink are in the next room. Breakfast was unremarkable for the others, one of thousands of breakfasts they’ve chewed during the real purpose of meals — overlapping conversations. For me it was different.

Left out of the vast majority of conversations — Turkish people love so much to talk that the novelty of attempting English and laughing at themselves soon wears off and is replaced with rapid-fire exchanges in their native language — I was free to devour everything in sight. I ate, and ate, and ate, stuffing myself to the point of extreme discomfort at every meal. And I felt sorry for myself for being left out and not understanding what they were saying, though I did try to hide that. Turkish people worry and fuss over guests enough as it is.

All that eating gave me plenty of time to ponder the many differences between Turks and Americans. The modern Turkish people, descended from the nomadic tribes of the central Asian steppes, are curiously both eastern and western. Turkish people are found in Uzbekistan, where their almond-shaped eyes and glossy hair look Asian; eastern Turkey, where their features are dark; and the Aegean cities, where they are blond with light-colored eyes. Their lifestyle, coming from their early contact with Islam, is decidedly Middle Eastern, with the cultural preferences for modesty and privacy, and their society’s strong emphasis on traditional families. But they dress, enjoy meals and take vacations like Europeans. Yet they are not individualistic like Westerners, and are concerned with others in their thinking and behavior like those in the East. Like the shame cultures of Asian peoples, and the Japanese proverb: “the nail that sticks up is hammered down.”

I spent much of my time in Turkey thinking about the way cultures evolve over centuries, and how religion shapes that evolution. And when I returned home, I started reading a book that explores the theory of Jesus (peace be upon him) traveling to India during the “missing years” of the Bible, and again after he escaped crucifixion. Some texts suggest he lived and died there as an old man, being influenced by and influencing eastern religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism. It is, as it sounds, totally fascinating.

The book talks about how Westerners tends to view themselves as separate from God. As an American, I realize now that I had accepted this mindset completely, and subconsciously.

The Age of Enlightenment represented, in part, a rejection of the Church and its doctrines, especially those that were deemed incomprehensible, unbelievable or irrational — doctrines such as the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. With the exception of those philosophers who adopted Deism, most Enlightenment philosophers rejected religion altogether. That rejection was, however, more a rejection of Christianity and its specific doctrines.

This rejection of Christianity by European philosophers served to distance them from religion in general. This was ironic, because both the Church and the European philosophers — ostensibly at opposite poles of the religious/spiritual spectrum — had separated mankind from God and God from nature, the Church doing so as a matter of doctrine, and the Enlightenment philosophers doing so as a rejection of the supernatural. (”Saving the Savior: Did Christ survive the Crucifixion?” by A.B. Salahuddin, p. 81-82)

Like a typical Westerner, I even thought my conversion to Islam was entirely logical, not spiritual. In fact, I prided myself on this. I thought my decision was a reflection of my very rational rejection of irrational dogma in favor of a religion that made sense. And, in part, it was.

But my decision was also a spontaneous rejection of the flat-out wrong notion that spirituality is necessarily nonsensical, as well as a gradual acceptance of the interconnectedness of all things — man and nature and God. When I read “God is closer to you than your jugular vein” (Qur’an 50:16) I felt a spark that slowly grew into a new perspective. I felt like a child again, looking at the world in wonder and awe. Thinking about a bee making honey, for example, I could be lost for several minutes, pondering how a tiny insect spends its entire life making a delicious substance it personally will never use. I thought about its role in the divine play where all creatures are connected: Bees make sticky, sweet honey that humans eat; honey is delicious, and it also has curative properties, particularly for chest infections; bees work for God by working for man, and they are either content in this role or unaware of it. And how Western man, despite all his intelligence and progress, happily uses the honey but doesn’t ponder where it came from or why it’s there, and even may take a secret, evil thrill in killing a bee — not because it poses a threat, but because he can.

Unlike in Eastern religious philosophy where the presence of God in nature was never threatened by the introduction of ideas to the contrary, where humankind has always been viewed as an intimate part of nature, and where it is understood that a deep relationship exists between humans and nature and God, both Christianity and Enlightenment philosophers succeeded in excising cognizance of these relationships from the psyches of many Europeans, Christianity doing so through creating an external God, and Enlightenment philosophers doing so by rejecting God altogether. (Ibid., p. 82)

It sounds daft, but this made me feel better. Unlike every other book I’ve ever read that explores why Western philosophy is wrong or at least incomplete, this is the only one that doesn’t make me personally feel like an idiot. At least my perspective came from somewhere. At least we can understand why the Western world has gone this route.

This, in turn, led to the idea of nature as purely a resource to be used without regard to how that use might impact humanity, especially in the long run. As a result, science generally proceeded along the lines of a utilitarian notion of nature that precluded the idea of incorporating spiritual insights into the scientific method. (Ibid., p. 82)

The past several centuries have been dominated by the mechanistic thinking of the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the privatization and commodification of nature and man; detachment and isolation from the natural world; and a near pathological obsession with creating a secure, autonomous existence, independent of the forces of nature…

Analytical and rational modes of thinking, mechanistic views of nature, reducing phenomena to purely quantifiable standards of measurement, the neutrality of science, knowledge as power, self-interest as the motivating force in history, the invisible hand of the marketplace, and utilitarianism are among the critical intellectual assumptions that, together, provide a unified schema for the modern notion of an autonomous, secular existence. (”Biosphere Politics: A New Consciousness for a New Century” by Jeremy Rifkin, p. 2)

This more succinctly explains the Eastern notion of Western blindness. It scratches the surface of why the American-European rape of nature occurred and continues to occur, why our brand of capitalism has gotten so ugly, why fascist emperors continue to rise to power in our hemisphere, why science is hell-bent on conquering death and other things beyond human control, and why so many Americans and Europeans self-medicate, trying to ignore their soul’s longing for more than their brain can acquire, attempting to sidestep the human search for enlightenment.

And for me, it answers a question I’ve had for some time — why *all* my intellectual Christian friends, raised with viewpoints and philosophies similar to my own, have spun towards one of two directions: toward a rational atheism, or toward Eastern religions and philosophies. Several friends have even merged Eastern philosophy with Western religion, bothered by either extreme. And now I can better understand my own gravitation toward Turkish Islam, a perspective that is both Western and Eastern and satisfies the, I think, human need for both.