Yesterday’s mid-day stopover in the village of Bozan had a pleasant surprise in store for me. I had been planning to just stop in at the mosque garden, resting up a bit in the shade and washing up at the mosque’s fountains.
On the way into the village, however, I met Yakub on the highway. Bozan straddles the highway, and Yakub was crossing from one half to the other when we met.
Yakub, 28, is from Bozan, population 700, but lives and works in the nearby township of Dazkiri, where I had stayed the night before. He is an accountant for the township there. Yakub is married with one child, a son who recently celebrated his first birthday.
At one of the village’s tea gardens Yakub and I met up with Yakub’s older brother and a friend of theirs. The four of us shared a couple glasses of tea and some get-to-know-you conversation. Then we all walked across the street to the mosque. They gave me a tour of the inside of the mosque, which I enjoyed, because when I go to a mosque I tend to stay outside in the garden where I can chat with people, wash up, sit in the shade, camp, etc.
People tell me I can freely enter the mosques, but I tend not to unless specifically invited, simply because to me it’s like going into someone’s home — you don’t just walk in unless specifically invited to enter.
In the mosque Yakub pulled out a Koran and began explaining some of its aspects to me. He reads Arabic, which gives him more direct access to the unfiltered word of God, since one of the central tenets of faith in Islam is that the Koran, in its original Arabic, is the literal word of God, not various peoples’ interpretations of it.
I will stay away from any deeper commentary on religion, since there are plenty of people more knowledgeable than I. I will simply describe what happened yesterday.
Yakub sung some verses from the Koran and then translated the verses line by line into Turkish. This pushed the limits of my Turkish, definitely.
It was abundantly clear that the subjects of Islam and the Koran were very important to Yakub. You can tell a lot about a person by listening to him or her talk about a subject that is important to him or her, regardless of what the subject is. How understanding of others is the person? How patient is that person? Does he or she expect others to hold the same views, and is there room in the person’s mind and heart for those who don’t? Stuff like that.
On the road I usually have these kinds of deeper conversations a couple times a week. Most of them are about religion or politics. My Turkish is not good enough to understand the finer points these people are making, but sometimes I think that’s actually an advantage, since it forces me to pay even closer attention to their body language. How much eye contact do they make with me? What’s their breathing like? If they touch my arm, how do they touch it? Stuff like that. These things tell me as much about a person as the words that come out of their mouth, perhaps even more.
I won’t go into the specifics of what Yakub said. I need some time to let it stew anyway, and there are another six months of conversations like this to come. I’ll aggregate them and mull them over and then comment on them in the books.
After our mini-lesson on Islam, Yakub and his brother and I crossed back over the highway and went to a lunch that was being held in honor of a wedding that was taking place that evening.
The communal wedding lunch I attended a week ago in another village had had religious overtones and purposes. This particular lunch, as Yakub explained to me, was simply a lunch to bring the village together, to feed the hungry, and to celebrate a major event. There was seating for about 100 people, and people came and went individually — there was not a set “start” and “end” time.
We ate chicken stewed in tomato sauce with green peppers and potatoes, rice, soup, salad, and bread. For dessert we ate helva, a paste made from various ground nuts, beans, or lentils and containing lots and lots of butter and honey.
Lunch eaten, the three of us went back to the tea garden, shared a couple more cups of tea, exchanged Facebook addresses, and then went our separate ways.