light gazing, ışığa bakmak

Monday, January 19, 2015

argumentar

uma das coisas que deixei de fazer de tal modo que um dia destes chego ao nirvana do pacifismo.

"I think we are all like him. When I say we, I mean the modern Muslims of the world, the moderate Muslims, or maybe the non-practicing Muslims of the world. Those who have been born to a Muslim family and have that identity given to them, the one we pass on to our children; not bothering to question it much... Especially if you are in a once-secular country like Turkey, you can live your entire life being a non-practicing Muslim. You have a Muslim identity; you believe in the goodness of the religion, but seeing how it is you are distanced from the currently practiced faith, caught in a dilemma between modern times and medieval practices.

We are trying to tell the world something, even with the last breath we take, we are sure of it; we are afraid, we are dying, we are injured; we have something to say. We want to cry it out loud...

But it is not heard. It hits the wall of terror. It kills us. We may or may not be wearing a French police uniform. The fact is we are not even near to being understood. We are lying out in the open. Neither our faith nor our adopted identity protects us. We are at the wrong place at the wrong time. Our own faith comes back and kills us directly, as a bullet in the head.

I think we are all begging for mercy on the pavement. I am not a religious expert. I am an ordinary person who still has hope that the religious identity I was born into will provide me with some spiritual support, at least at critical times.

I remember calling the name of Allah during the crack of doom moments, the 45 seconds of the hellish earthquake that struck Western Turkey in 1999, when the whole world was falling apart.

For the first time in my life, I was shouting God’s name. Nothing happened. The horror continued. The house was shaking like a train. I was begging God to save my child, me and my neighbor. Nothing happened. I started shouting louder, thinking God would hear me better if I raised my voice. My very young neighbor – we were all holding on to each other – was repeating “bismillah, bismillah,” Arabic for “In the name of God.” She later told me that it was the only holy word she knew (worse than me).

There seems to be no magical words or beliefs to protect us from the approaching terminator. We still believe - and keep on believing - in peace, in tolerance, in freedom of speech, in advancement, in developing into a better society.

I thought the police officer told the gunmen, “Don’t shoot me; I’m a Muslim, too…” But he was shot anyway.

When only a few kilometers south of our border, Yazidi women are sold in the market place as slaves, in 2015, in the name of faith; when innocent people are beheaded and we do nothing about these things, then this evil will come and give us a bullet in the head.

Our combination of moderate Islam and modernism is dead. "

um bom artigo de Belgin Akaltan.

falámos disto, falámos muito disto porque vale a pena falar. cada um nos seus olhos.


No comments:

 
Share