(Photo: Jerome Taylor)
For New Year's 2006-2007 I was invited by the Turkish daily Vatan, along with a number of other European reporters, to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid ul-Adha - known as Kurban Bayrami in Turkey.
The festival is immensely popular with Turks but this year's celebrations were even more remarkable because for the first time in 64 years, Eid ul Adha fell on New Year's Eve and as Turkey is the only Muslim country to really celebrate theWestern New Year, a double party was planned.
It was a day of incredible contrasts that revealed Turkey's wonderful split personality - Islamic and secular, modern and traditionalist, European and Asian.
Vatan asked me to write an article for them outlining my impressions of the festival. Below is what was translated into Turkish by them and published on 4th January 2007.
By Jerome Taylor in Istanbul
Published Vatan, 4th January 2007.
Seeing the incredible celebration that was Kurban Bayrami over the weekend reminded me of a similar eye-opening experience I had recently that helped me to question the inevitable preconceptions we all have about each other's cultures and religions.
Two months ago I was fortunate enough to be able to take part in another highly significant religious ritual. I had traveled to the deep south of India’s Dravidian heartland to report on Tirumala, one of Hinduism’s holiest temples and a place all Hindus are expected to visit at least once in their lifetime. On average, 40,000 Hindus journey to this ancient temple every day and the authorities claim it rivals Mecca and the Vatican on the sheer number of devotees making pilgrimages there each year.
The temple is perched high up on a forest-clad mountain and throngs with all the colour and vibrancy one would expect from such a popular spiritual meeting place. To my surprise, one of the first people I met once I had reached the temple enclosure was not a Hindu. His name was Zafar and he was a Muslim pir, a Sufi teacher who had made a journey of over 1000km to visit the shrine of a Hindu god. It was not the first time he had done so.
The temple of Tirumala, I learnt, is in fact visited by a number of Muslims every year and even has wealthy Muslim businessmen who donate to the authorities that run the shrine. The Hindu priests there recognize all religions and it is one of the few significant Hindu temples to allow non-believers into the "inner sanctum", the central part of the temple complex that houses the god's idol.
What Zafar's pilgrimage reminded an outsider like myself is that religions are not monolithic entities and that the more one explores different cultures and religions, the more apparent this is. Religions are, in fact, remarkably syncretic systems and more than able to assimilate different beliefs and traditions when they cross paths. In India, a country where the majority of the population is Hindu, many Muslims are happy to embrace some local worshipping customs and the exchange is often both ways. Many Sufi shrines are equally popular with Hindu pilgrims.
The chance meeting of the Islamic and Gregorian calendars over the weekend that enabled Turkey to celebrate Bayram and New Year together is another example of where different belief systems or cultures can more than happily accommodate each other, even on the same day.
Geographically positioned at the entrance to both Europe and the Middle East, Turkey has always been in the fortunate position to act as an ambassador for both cultures and as a result has, in Istanbul particularly, some of the most cosmopolitan and historically varied urban spaces in the world.
Clearly New Year is not a religious belief system comparable to Islam and Hinduism, but it is still a deeply held cultural tradition in Western society that dates back centuries (Britain first began celebrating the Jan 1st New Year in 1752 but the tradition can be traced back as far as Roman times). And as Europe increasingly turns away from its own Christian festivals, it is the secular cultural traditions which will ultimately come to replace them and are therefore what her people hold dear.
What I was most struck by over the weekend was Turkey's ability to hold two very different but equally symbolic celebrations on the same day. This year’s Bayram was undoubtedly a day of complete contrast. The soleful cry of the muezzin’s first call to prayer could hardly be further removed from the deafening Turkish pop music that rattled through Taksim Square long into the early hours.
To start the day with the beautiful words of the Eid ul Adha namaz, spend the afternoon watching families commemorate Ibrahim's devotion to God with ritual sacrifice and then greet the New Year with the kind of beer-fuelled street parties that would give London's Trafalgar Square a run for its money is a truly enlıghtenıng experience. It shows the outsider that Turkey can happily be both Islamic and European. Religious and secular. Traditional and modern.
But why is such an observation important? For two reasons that I believe are now more crucial than at any other time in recent history.
The first is that since September 11, the West has repeatedly fallen into the trap of thinking of and describing Islam as a monolithic, unanimous entity, where agreement is guaranteed and consensus automatic.
The West’s understanding of the Islamic world is slowly getting better. After all, most people at least now know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a. But too often politicians and commentators try to view Islam - a religion with 1 billon believers from Morocco to Malaysia – as a single quantifiable and easily describable body. But like any religion, Islam cannot be neatly packed into just one box.
Turkey’s tolerant, generally liberal, brand of Islam, revealed by the way she celebrated Bayram this year, forces us to question those generalizations just like Zafar the pir did.
The second, I believe, is that to the average European it is the fact that Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country, and NOT economic or practical reasons, that many people remain unconvinced by the country's entrance into the EU.
Ask the London taxi driver or a Berlin baker what they fear about Turkey joining Europe and the reply, sadly, is likely to be that it is because Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country. As Turko-skeptic politicians rely on their voters, winning the European people over to Turkey is the key to assuring her entry into the EU.
This weekend’s double celebration is an example of how little Europe has to fear of Turkey not “fitting in” with the supposedly Secular (or Christian) Club that is Brussels. I hope the same ability Turks have to amalgamate Europe’s secular celebrations and the country’s own Islamic traditions will be reciprocated by the bureaucrats in Europe, but I am afraid of what will happen to the ritual sacrifices of Bayram should Turkey join the EU.
If I return to Istanbul in 20 years time and see that the sacrificing of animals has died out, I will be deeply saddened. Despite the undeniably cruel nature of the kill itself, I still have no desire to see a deeply significant tradition that dates back more than a thousand years disappear. Outsiders should not look at Eid ul Adha through Western eyes. They should see it as a symbolic commemoration of one man’s devotion to god and the desire of Muslims worldwide to emulate Ibrahim’s commitment.
What I hope this year’s Bayram, (the first to coincide with New Year for 64 years) has done is allow Turkey to publicly express her split personality, and to show her European friends that they will only benefit from embracing her closest Islamic neighbour.
Such an image, I have found, is one that pro-Europe Turks are keen to see publicized.
Walking back from one of the hedonistic street parties in Nişantişi on New Year’s Eve, I spoke to a 36-year-old businessman who had spent the afternoon sacrificing a young bull before heading back into town to welcome the New Year with raki and friends. “Europe may think of themselves as a Christian club but Turkey is not just an Islamic nation,” he said. “Maybe this New Year people will see a different side of Turkey. I hope it does not take another 64 years”.
I hope it will not be another 64 years too.
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