| distinct in Islamic society. It is at once a revealed religion, and a system of law and government. though in practice this has not been true for a long time, the Ottoman Empire did continue to represent secular authority and to symbolise established religious authority. The head of its government was also the Caliph of Islam. Even now from the village point of view, and whatever the constitution may say to the contrary, the state is still thought of as the ultimate religious authority, the more so because the government, through a special office under the Prime Minister, controls the appointment of senior religious officials, and thus indirectly that of the local imams. Thus the great respect for government, and the acceptance of its actions, is at least, in part, a religious attitude, applied paradoxically to a government |
| XIV.6 | 235 |
| which claims to be purely secular. This attitude once again conflicts with the religious opposition to the westernising measures of the government. The conflict is not overt, because the respect for the government combined with the assumption of the impotence of the ruled to control it, inhibits those who disapprove of its measures from saying much about their disapproval. Occasionally, in references to international affairs a similar confusion between an Islamic and a modern secular point of view would be noticeable. During the period of the religious “milletler”, the self governing communities of common faith which existed within the Ottoman Empire, nationality and religious faith were not distinguished. In the Kayseri area, therefore, although the milletler had been abolished as political entities by the Young Turks (1907-1918), the social boundaries continued to be referred to in religious terms. In 1923, the government took the same line, holding that for the purposes of transfer of population, the criterion of Greek nationality was not language or “culture”, but simply membership of the Greek Orthodox Church. In this context “Turk” was precisely synonymous with “Moslem”. Several times in the village I met this usage. Were there any Turks in England? Used to this question, I began to explain about students at British Universities, but on this occasion I was mistaken. What the questioner had meant was were there Moslems in England. Once or twice I heard the outside world, especially Europe, referred to, in a very matter of fact way, as “gavur”, the infidels, and I suspect this is far commoner a usage when a European gavur does not happen to be present. Thirdly, the religious organisation of the village, and the behaviours based |
| on religious belief effect the economic and social structure of the village in practical ways not directly related to religious beliefs or attitudes. The Mosque is meant for worship, to be used by any believer who comes to the village. But it is more than that. It becomes a social centre of the village. Not only in a |
| XIV.6 | 236 |
| physical sense is the Mosque usually in an important and central site, it is the most obvious example of joint enterprise in which all the village shares, and it is the only place where all the village men meet together for a common purpose, regardless of personal or family enmity. To estimate exactly to what extent loyalty to and partnership in the village springs from common worship in a communally owned Mosque would be to ask a psychological question to which, as far as I can see, there can be no answer. But that does not invalidate my statement that this institution, which is ostensibly there to serve a purely religious end, does have an effect on the strength of village solidarity. In an agricultural community which does not have an unlimited supply of land, the social structure is bound to be greatly influenced by the system of inheritance of land. Equal division among children, or in some cases, among sons, is bound to make against the permanent concentration of hereditary preponderance of wealth in the hands of one family, since in one or two generations, a large quantity of land in the hands of one household may become a number of barely adequate plots in the hands of a number of agnatically related households, or land may even pass from the kabile altogether by female inheritance. The religious sanction which is felt in the villages to support this system of inheritance thus has profound practical consequences not in any way directly dependent on religion. This effect is further heightened by the Islamic emphasis on the duty of begetting children. The villagers show no tendency to refrain from wanting children in order that such children as they do have may be wealthier. Only when a man through poverty cannot feed his household does he begin to deplore the prospect of more children, and then not on their behalf but on his own. The operation of the equal division of land among children, combined with the continual effort to increase the population, is part of the explanation of the absence of rigid or formal stratification in the villagers. Families rise and fall from generation to generation, according to fertility. No one family or group |
| XIV.6 |
| 237 |
| of families can establish hereditary power or wealth under these conditions. Although the relation between the sexes is largely bound up with direct religious belief, the segregation and the higher status of men is reinforced by the operation and interaction of religious behaviour at the practical level, examples of which I have here been discussing. The segregation, and especially the prohibition of the attendance of women at the Mosque, is largely responsible for the religious ignorance. It is in no part of the religious commandments that women should be ignorant or religion, but at least in village society it is one of the results of segregation, which is directly commanded. But this ignorance, by the operation of religious values, is one of the main reasons why the men so despise their women folk, and their scorn of them in turn reinforces the segregation. |
| The aim of this section has been to demonstrate that almost every aspect |
| of the social organisation which I have endeavoured to describe in the earlier chapters is related directly and indirectly to Islam. It was my impression that for the villagers the most important characteristic of their society, and the one most resistant to innovation was their allegiance to Islam, and since their beliefs cover so wide a social field, they constitute a powerful support for the whole social order. |
| 7. | Morals. |
| To discuss morality without indicating in what way I claim to be using the word, is to open the path to misunderstanding, and perhaps to waste effort by saying things which might be given one of several interpretations. On the other hand to embark on any attempt to clarity my intentions is to land in philosophical controversy, and to commit myself to a digression far removed from the social structure of a peasant village. I therefore take the risk of being misunderstood, with a warning that my usage of the word is perhaps partly condition by some familiarity with contemporary moral philosophy. |
| XIV.7 |
| 238 |
| In discussions of morality, and I suppose in less academic usage, it |
| is customary to distinguish a set of specifically moral usages of words like good and right, not only from cases where these words are used to express aesthetic and sensuous matters, or matters of convenience and expediency, but also from cases where they are used of religious |
| matters. From this point of view, it is a matter of morality to decide whether a person’s behaviour is honest, unselfish, loyal and so on, of religion, whether it is pious and conforms to the behaviour laid down for members of the religious body to which the person belongs. I have found it characteristic of some moral philosophers that they assume the distinctness of the moral aspect of behaviour without investigation or question, and though I would not claim that the distinction I have drawn is consistently maintained in every day usage, it does seem to be a generally accepted and understood distinction in our society. |
| To speak dogmatically on linguistic matters at my present level of |
| Turkish studies is rash, but I formed a very definite impression that this distinction is quite foreign to the villagers. There are not two distinct, if interrelated, scales of assessment of behaviour, but one only. I said earlier that the most fundamental words of disapproval and approval are the religious words gunah and sevep. Moral actions and ritual actions are placed, it seems, in the same scale. To neglect ritual ablution is a gunah, and incurs the same kind of disapproval as beating one’s wife without cause, or cheating a neighbour. Of course, I do not mean that it incurs the same strength of disapproval. There is as much recognition of degrees of goodness and badness in the village as in other human society. But whereas I, for example, distinguished between the worthiness of the villagers in terms of honesty, generosity and loyalty on the one hand, and the degree of their piety on the other hand, and in fact noticed, or believe I noticed, a correlation between them, I doubt if the villagers make this distinction. They might say a man is honest but not very pious, just as I |
| XIV.7 |
| 239 |
| Might say a man is honest but not very generous, but they would not recognise piety and honesty as belonging to different and incomparable scales. |
| Whether I have expressed what I conceive to be the difference between |
| the relation of religion to morality in my own thought, and in village thought, I do not know. But that there is a difference cannot be doubted, and it seems to me to be one of great interest and importance. The village certainly think of moral duty as based on revealed religion. To the question of the moral philosopher “Why must I do what is right?”, they would unhesitatingly reply, “because it is the command of Allah”. The connection of morality with any particular set of religious beliefs breaks down on the empirical evidence that other societies not holding these beliefs have an analogous, if not identical, system of morality. The village reverse this |
| process. They believe, as is logically consistent, that societies which lack knowledge of orthodox Islam are entirely without morals. They account for the decent behaviour of some Christians, which they know directly, by their belief in and knowledge of the Incil, the New Testament, which thought they themselves never read (and could not understand if they did), they hold to be divinely inspired. But they frequently referred to minority groups within Islam, such as Alevi and Kizilbas, as being entirely without morality, especially sexual morality, because they have no book. The illiterate heathen, it is assumed without question, are completely without any morals at all. To return to the point which I have tried to make above, the absence of namaz, and of Islamic ritual in such societies is classed with sexual laity, dishonesty, and so on, as part of the general wickedness of such irreligious societies. All good behaviour is religious behaviour, and is good only because it conforms to the will of Allah, or to the instructions of those who are held to be qualified to interpret His will. |
| XIV. | 240 |
| 8. | Theology and Metaphysics |
| Islam provides for the villagers an answer to all possible metaphysical questions. Such questions as trouble western metaphysicians “What are we here for?”, “How did the world begin?” are either impious to frame at all, or are readily answered in terms of Allah. Allah made the world, and what he wishes to do with it he will do with it. Any suggestions in argument that Allah may be expected to conform to moral standards of conduct are repudiated with horror as impious. This attitude, incidentally, again confirms the point which I was making above that no moral order distinct from religious instructions is conceived. If Allah made the rules, He is above them, His conduct is beyond question or attempt at understanding. |
| People live in a real direct fear of Allah. They seem to rely on |
| His mercy, which is emphasised in Islam, for pardon for minor omissions, which are said to be forgiven weekly if one attends the Friday ceremony. But they are normally careful no to use His name impiously, and they often speak of the after life. The women, being more ignorance and more naÔve, take the fear of Allah more seriously, and will, on occasion, show signs of real terror of the after life. Allah is not thought of as a person who is reasonable and amenable to human approach. As far as we could learn, the only accepted way to induce the help of Allah in case of misfortune is to practice ritual recitation of appropriate passages of the Koran, or to attend at the Turbeh, the Tomb of a Warrior Saint, and to do there namaz and recitation. Direct |