Istanbul (Deluxe Edition): Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

Author:Orhan Pamuk [Pamuk, Orhan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781524732233
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Many of these religious injunctions became confused in my mind with my mother’s rules (like “Don’t point”). Or, when she told me not to open a window or the door because it would cause a draft, I imagined that a draft was a saint like Sofu Baba, whose soul was not to be disturbed.

So rather than see it as a system by which God spoke to us through prophets, books, and laws, we reduced religion to a strange and sometimes amusing set of rules on which the lower classes depended; having stripped religion of its power, we were able to accept it into our home as a strange sort of background music to accompany our oscillations between East and West. My grandmother, my mother, my father, my aunts and uncles—none of them ever fasted for a single day, but at Ramadan they awaited sunset with as much hunger as those keeping the fast. On winter days, when night fell early and my grandmother was playing bezique or poker with her friends, the breaking of the fast would be an excuse for a feast, which meant more treats from the oven. Still, there were concessions. On any other month of the year, these gregarious old women would nibble continuously as they played, but during Ramadan, as sunset approached, they’d stop gorging themselves and stare longingly at a nearby table laden with all sorts of jams, cheeses, olives, flaky böreks, and garlic sausages; when the flute music on the radio indicated that the time for breaking the fast was near, they would eye the table as hungrily as if they, like the ordinary Muslims who made up 95 percent of the country, had gone without food since dawn. They’d ask one another, “How much more is there?” When they heard the cannon fire, they waited for Bekir the cook to eat something in the kitchen, before they too set upon the food. Even today, whenever I hear a flute, my mouth waters.

My first trip to a mosque helped confirm my prejudices about religion in general and Islam in particular. It was almost by chance: One afternoon when there was no one home, Esma Hanım took me off to the mosque without asking anyone’s permission; she was not so much burning with a need to worship as tired of being inside. At Teşvikiye Mosque we found a crowd of twenty or thirty people—mostly owners of the small shops in the back streets or maids, cooks, and janitors who worked for the rich families of Nişantaşı; as they gathered on the carpets, they looked less like a congregation of worshipers than a group of friends who had gathered to exchange notes. As they waited for the prayer time, they gossiped with one another in whispers. As I wandered among them during prayers, running off to the far corners of the mosque to play my games, none of them stopped to scold; instead, they smiled at me in the same sweet way most adults smiled at me when I was a young child.

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