| that they can perhaps hardly be called absentee. How have the peasants of Anatolia avoided this fate, which has overtaken, for example, the fellahin of the Arab countries, who were until recently under the same political jurisdiction, the Ottoman Empire? Two important differences seem to explain the survival of peasant ownership in Anatolia. First, until fairly recently, perhaps three generations ago in Sakaltutan, there was no land pressure, and still is none, I understand, in many parts of Turkey. When a man was limited in the amount he ploughed only by his own and his oxen’s capabilities, his resources were adequate for subsistence, and there were even reserves, in the shape of surpluses and of animals to sell, which might tide a man over a year of failure, just as in 1950 and 1951 the richer families in Sakaltutan were able to avoid any real hardship, in spite of two bad years running. There was no need to go to the usurer. Secondly, the terrain would have made it difficult for town landlords to exercise their rights. It would hardly have been worth their while to make the journeys out to the villages in sufficient strength to collect back rents. Of course, taxes were collected from the villages, but in theory this was only one eighth of the crop, and had the support of tradition, and |
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| religious sanction. A third reason, which is sometimes suggested, that the land was too poor to be worth bothering with, seems to me unconvincing, since the absentee landlord is concerned with the margin between production and bare subsistence, not with fertility per acre. A small population on poor land might be as profitable as a larger population in a smaller area of more fertile land. In any case, any answer to this problem, if it is to be more than speculation, would require detailed comparative and historical research. |
| The attitude to debt in the village is characteristic of a peasant economy. |
| The villager does not budget by the week or by the month, but by the year. He thinks, not in rates of income or expenditure, but in terms of large lump sums, or gross quantities of produce. His main income arrives in one great pile at the harvest, and in normal years he then feels well provided. Moreover, his land represents a capital of large sums of money, and even his cattle may be worth thousands of lira. For this reason an apparently poor man is not frightened of dealing in large sums of money, and will find capital to marry his sons or to buy oxen, even when for weeks he has not had cash even for simple medicines. Equally, the villagers do not think of wages as a weekly income, from which point of view the earnings of a plasterer, £6 or £7 a week, are better than that of many peasants, and compare with rates of pay in Europe, but as a means of accumulating such large sums of money as a man may from time to time have need of. There is no question of meeting a weekly |
| outgo, since food and other basic needs for the year are met from stock, laid down each year at the harvest. Whereas, in urban societies of wage earners, the large sums needed for major purchases are broken down into weekly outgo by systems of hire purchase or building societies, the village converts a steady income into the lump sums which they bring home after a period of continuous and hard work in the town. |
| This way of thinking partly explains the rapid turn over of migrant |
| labour. If the family store is full, there is no |
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| fear of serious want, and as soon as immediate cash needs have been met there is no point in continuing to work. It also explains the apparent lack of concern about debts which at first sight seem enormous in proportion to the more or less permanent impecuniousness of the villagers. They are used to acquiring and to spending large sums, and they are not, for the most part, frightened by large debts. XIV RELIGION |
| 1. | The Problem |
| No department of human activity is more difficult to study than religion. |
| The word itself has such a wide range of usages, and evokes such different responses from different people, that what seems a truism to one person is likely to appear hearsay or lunacy to someone else. I myself do not feel qualified, either on personal grounds or by width of knowledge, to attempt a full scale study at present of the religious activities even of a small community such as the village I studied, not is this an appropriate place to do so. nevertheless, so all pervading is Islam in the life of the villages that no social study can omit it. What I shall have to say about this subject, I say humbly, not only because of my lack of Islamic scholarship, but more because I do not understand what religion is, and find it the centre of many baffling problems and experiences. However good one’s intentions, however aware one may hop to be of the danger, it is impossible as a Christian, even a doubting one, to approach the study of Islam without bias. How far this bias interferes with one’s work it is for others, not oneself, to remark, but it is bound, I think, to interfere to some |
| extent. The symbolism and the myths of Islam are so similar to those of Christianity that it is difficult to avoid comparison, and I often found myself thing that the Christian version is the wiser and profounder. It was not only my own spontaneous reactions that lead me to these irrelevant comparisons; the villagers themselves were intensely interested in my religion, and I was plied with question about it. They were always keen that I should become a true believer, and were always ready to cross examine me on my beliefs, and to join theological battle. These arguments I found embarrassing, since it was not always to my purpose to say what I really thought, nor indeed could I have done so - that would be hard enough to do in English. I did not find it easy, on the other hand, always to present a front in such discussion which both avoided flagrant inconsistency and earned their approval, or at least respect. The dilemma |
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| remains. To study the religion, one must partake of it. But to partake of it means either perjuring oneself, and submitting to a great deal of waste of time and practical inconvenience, for Islam is no easy religion to the true believer, or else facing constant theological attacks from which it is exceedingly difficult to escape with honour, and which inhibit observation and investigation. When an anthropologist studies the religion of a people which is peculiar to that people, it is essential that he give a detailed description of everything about it. But when the object of study is that practice in a fairly orthodox manner of a universal religion, the ground is cut from under one’s feet. To offer a detailed description is only to repeat what everyone knows, or what at any rate has already been adequately observed and published by others. In so far as I do offer descriptions of ceremonies, I must emphasise that they are based on what I saw, and on the explanations given me in the village. I make no claim to be an Islamic scholar. If it is redundant to offer a description in detail of ceremonies of universal practice, it is foolish to endeavour to give them any kind of symbolic or psychological interpretation in terms of the social set up of the small group studied. The meaning, interpretation, ritual significance, or whatever you call it, of prostration before God in the Islamic namaz is not something peculiar to Sakaltutan, or even to Anatolia, but is common to a vast number of different social units, which differ greatly among themselves politically, economically and culturally. Nor is it possible to discover and translate into ordinary language anything |
| called ¸¸religious experience“. No amount of doing namaz with the villagers will reveal what they feel when they are doing it, nor is there any reason to suppose they all feel the same, or even anything similar. For an understanding of religious experience we must turn not to sociological observation, but to the mystics, who generally tell us, plausibly enough that words are no help. ¸¸The Tao we discuss is |
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| not true Tao“.(1) |
| What I do propose to do should not then be considered as a |
| comprehensive attempt to discuss the religion of the village. I simply intend to outline the beliefs and practices, to describe how they learn about hem, and the extent to which in fact they observe them; to comment on the effect of these beliefs and practices on their behaviour in general; and finally to say something tentative about the village morality and theology. |
| 2. | Beliefs and Rituals |
| i deliberately chose for a first study an orthodox Moslem village. |
| Turkey belongs officially to the Hanifite rite of orthodox Islam, the most tolerant of the four great rites(2). The villagers are aware of the existence of these four rites, and proud of their allegiance to the Hanifite rite. The main ritual of Islam is the namaz. namaz consists in pronouncing of certain religious words in Arabic, the recital in Arabic of verses of the Koran, and in bowing once and touching the foreheads on the floor twice, in the direction of Mecca, to the accompaniment of religious recitation. One complete performance is known as a ¸¸raket“. Raketler are performed in groups of two, three or four, and the details of the ritual vary slightly with place in the sequence. It is essential that the details of position and gesture and of pronunciation be absolutely correct. namaz is done five times a day, a different number of raket being performed on each occasion, from four at sunrise to thirteen at bedtime, on an a half hours after sunset. Not every raket is of the same importance. Some are ¸¸farz“, ¸¸the command of Allah“, and are obligatory, some are ¸¸sunni“, ¸¸the command of the Prophet“, which are no more than highly meritorious. These two types also vary slightly from each other, mainly in that those which are farz are performed together, if several people are saying namaz in company, while the others are always |
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| said privately. In order to do namaz correctly, quite a considerable knowledge is thus necessary. Before namaz, or and kind of religious activity, it is necessary to be in a state of ritual cleanliness, by means of specified ablutions. The most thorough, which involves an overall wash, must follow sexual intercourse; the next thorough is required after defecation. Most Moslems perform these rituals immediately after incurring the impurity. The third kind of ablution frees a man from the impurity of urination, contact with blood, and other minor defilements. It involves washing up to the elbows, the feet and ankles, and the face and head, in a special formal way. Any visitor to an Islamic country is familiar with this procedure, for it is usually done publicly immediately prior to namaz. On Friday, at mid-day, all the village men gather in the Mosque, for a ceremony of worship, which involves sixteen raket, a reading by the imam from the Koran, and certain special prayers. The fifth and sixth of these sixteen raket being farz, are said all together, under the leadership of the imam immediately following the reading from the Koran and the special prayers. On some occasions some of the prayers were in Turkish, and a sort of sermon was read out bz the imam, which claimed to be based on the reading from the Koran. The imam who took over in the spring of 1950 dropped this practice after the first two or three weeks. Ali Osman, my chief religious informant, told me that to miss three Fridays running, without good reason, was so serious a sin that there was no forgiveness. Ramazan, the Islamic month of fasting, was observed in the village. Owing to a discrepancy between the lunar calendar ordained by Mohammed and the solar year, the Western date of the months of the Islamic calendar is eleven days earlier each year. In 1950, Ramazan fell in June and July. During Ramazan, a Moslem may neither eat, drink, nor even smoke, between sunrise and sunset. Coming as it did at the summer solstice when the days are not only hot and dry but at their longest, this prohibition involves real hardship. During |
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| Ramazan many of the villagers go to the Mosque for the final nightly namaz, where they do thirty-three raket instead of the usual thirteen, and during the month, the whole of the Koran should be read at these evening sessions. The end of Ramazan is marked by the Seker Bayrami, literally, the Sugar Feast, which is a special occasion for visiting and hospitality. There is a special form of namaz laid down for the morning of the festival. Ten weeks after this festival is the Kurban Bayrami, the Feast of the Sacrifice, when every |