But Only God Understands!

My military service was over, and I had returned to Germany again. Along with me I had brought a Quran in the translation by Osman Nebioğlu, which my mother had given me. I went to my workplace, both to say hello and to let them know I was back. New Year’s was very near. They told me that “they had assumed I would never come back, and that is why they had hired someone else.” More precisely, they politely let me go. They even handed me some New Year’s money. Anyone would surely be upset by such a situation. As for me, while I was only upset over why they had acted so unfairly, on the other hand I was also very glad. A job like that could be found anywhere. It was not a special place. But I had worked there since childhood, since I was 14, during every school holiday. Among them, the father, who was the real boss, always treated me kindly and with understanding. During my student years, while I went to school all winter long, the money I earned there during the summer holidays was very useful to me.

About a year after this polite dismissal, they called me back again, and I went, thinking that if they had some trouble I would help them out. I had assumed it was temporary. As it turned out, they wanted me to work permanently, but I did not accept. I was already working at another, half-day job. Besides, I did not want to go back to the old troubles either. I was one worker and all of them were bosses. All the heavy and dirty work of the workplace was on my back. Their homes were right next to the workplace. Their sons, who would go home for lunch, would sometimes get hooked on a film on television and not come back for two hours, and then, so the work would get finished, we would work faster than the machine. Before I went into the army, I had spoken with the father about problems like these. It was impossible for me to keep working at this pace until retirement. Saying, let them think it over and make a decision by the time I return from the army, I had parted from them. I had also told them that, if they let me go, so their conscience could be at ease, I would not seek any rights or anything of the sort. Because my aim was not to threaten anyone. I was in favor of both my own peace and that of others. It was actually for this reason that they had let me go, not because they didn’t believe whether I would come back or not. Their sons’ situation was certainly different from mine. But during the times he didn’t come, I would chop wood for the boiler room. Calling it “wood” is a bit of an understatement; it would be more accurate to say logs. Huge tree trunks. To keep it cheap, they would buy the thickest trees in the forest. And I was the one who had to split them so they would fit into the boiler-room furnace. That boiler had a mouth large enough for a thin person to climb inside. But when the trees were too thick they wouldn’t go in, and even if they did, they couldn’t be shoved all the way in. The inside was as big as an oven. In winter, during the 45-minute lunch break, I would eat my meal and, because it was warm, lie down there for half an hour or so. I regarded this workplace as sheer misery. It could quite fairly be called wood-hauling drudgery. Actually, at that workplace we made chipboard panels with genuine wood veneer for walls and ceilings. We accomplished this by putting ready-made chipboard through many processes. Before they went bankrupt, the work that about 12 workers used to do in a single day, we two or three people, working each day in a different section, would finish in a week. The chipboard had to pass through many sections and processes before it became ready. In fact, at the pace we worked, that job would have been finished in three and a half days. But, as I said, the boss’s son had, in his head, divided all the work into five workdays. He wouldn’t come, he’d come late, he’d get hooked on a film, and so on. During the remaining intervals, I was responsible for the entire factory. That is, cleaning up his mess, chopping wood, and a whole lot of drudgery work that had to be done. On Saturdays I would also go to the forest and cut the huge logs into slices about a meter long each, large enough to fit into the boiler. Then we would bring them to the factory. Later, those logs from the forest came straight in front of the factory by trucks. This was more comfortable for me and a saving of time for them. Working in the forest was much harder. I would sweat in the heat and strip off, and then the flies would swarm over me to suck my blood. On one occasion I nearly cut off my own leg. With a chainsaw in one hand, while trying to swat away that blood-sucking fly with the other, the saw slipped from my grip and shot in between my two legs. Had it come at an angle or in some other wrong way, cutting off my leg entirely would have been nothing at all.

When I finished reading the Holy Bible in one year, this was the job I was working. While working, a person also has plenty of time to think. I used to get very tired at work. A person could see nothing of life. Just work and sleep, work and sleep. Morale has a great effect too. I even know of times when the boss’s son came to work without having slept, straight from the discotheques till morning. As I said, his situation was comfortable in every respect. After all, he was fulfilling his responsibility toward his father. And the work got done one way or another, but how! I thought a lot, and I also got angry at this situation, wondering why they were piling so much on me. And yet, nobody said to me, “Why didn’t you do this or that?” There was no one interfering at all. And I couldn’t just pass the time doing nothing simply because that was the situation, could I? Some people do this job very beautifully. While working, they pass their time so calmly and comfortably that, without getting tired and without ever pushing themselves, this too is an art. Germans know this art very well. If we think logically, it ought to be so. Does work ever come to an end? If it did, then a person would be left unemployed. That is, there wasn’t much logic in my pace of working. I would go to work spotlessly clean from home. But that boy coming to work late, leaving me alone, meant that the drudgery work was about to begin for me. Splitting logs with a sledgehammer, I would sweat like water. My clothes would stick to me. Then, whenever he showed up for work, at that very moment I would drop it all and go back to working with him again. He rested and comfortable, I drenched in sweat with zero morale. But as I said, when I thought about it, I would say that if I were in that boy’s place I might perhaps do the same thing, and inwardly I would try to grant that he had a point. And even if, in terms of character, I might not do what he did, I still thought that most everyone would act like him. The men had hired me as a worker. I wasn’t working there for free, after all. During work hours one works. Well then, why was I getting angry, because the work was heavy? Who would take me on for easy work? In Turkey, when we were children, there were laborers and workers under my father’s command. As a child, I didn’t see those people as pitiable at all, or think how bad their situation was, and so on. Nor did it ever cross my mind whether they were being wronged or anything like that. That wasn’t something an eight- or ten-year-old child would think about anyway. But we possessed that spirit. Those people were from below, and we were from above. That is the angle from which the matter is viewed. Not only me, but everyone. In my young age I too was perhaps under the influence of that spirit in them. Why should the Germans be any different? I believe this, that sometimes they were better than us. Had they come to work in our country, like us, who knows what we would have done to them! But that generation left over from the war has passed, and in its place a new German generation, some of them coming from the east, has sprung up. Germany filled up with managers and employers who were purely self-interested, deceitful, lying without any shame, and full of hatred. Love had never been within them in any case, but there were things called uprightness and humanity. Now, from their courts to their lawyers, from their hospitals to their doctors, injustice, discrimination between people, hatred, bribery, and every kind of dishonesty are far more excessive. Well, where does this not exist? In a punishment that was to be given to David the prophet, despite the options placed before him, his plea to God when he said, “let me not fall into the hand of man” is such a wise request. (2 Samuel 24:10-14) Perhaps everyone understands someone stealing bread because he went hungry, but nevertheless that thief will serve his punishment. Well then, will those things the Germans did, which I am trying to show understanding for, remain forever unpunished! Just as all the other nations serve the punishment for the evils they committed unwisely, why should the Germans not serve it? We humans are on the earth, while the Lord is in the heavens. A day will come when everyone will give an account to Him; of this I am certain. (Ecclesiastes 5:2 and 12:14)

You have come to a country as the child of a foreign worker; what could you expect from them anyway? I think it would have been better if the Germans didn’t have this senseless hatred of theirs, too. They both brought in workers so that foreigners would do such dirty and heavy jobs, and at the same time they didn’t even want to see their faces, even on the street. They looked for very superior qualities in them. If I were to list the qualities they sought from foreigners: For one, all of their women had to be beautiful. They had to walk around in bikinis and, at the very least, make their men swoon inside. As for the male workers they brought in, they had to be very docile, clean, and also very honest, never telling a single lie. Furthermore, their heads had to work well, and they had to have talents too. Well, would people possessing all these qualities come to your country to do hauling and shovel dung? I always liken the Germans, or rather this type of person, to those Turkish girls seeking a husband in the marriage advertisements. I used to read these marriage ads a lot as a child, at ages 14 to 17. They came out once a week anyway. In those ads, the qualities sought from men were generally exactly as follows:

He should be handsome, tall, and an architect, engineer, or at least a graduate of a college, should have finished his military service, and should also own a car and a house. He should be jovial, witty, romantic, and not someone who splits hairs. He should not be at all attached to his mother and so on, and should be someone who loves only her!!!

All of these were the qualities the man she would marry should at the very least possess. As for herself:

Those around her said she was very beautiful. She loved outings, long travels, the theater, and music very much. In her free time she read books and listened to music. She also exercised and paid great attention to her figure. She wanted to share her life with a spouse she could lean on and trust!!!

Yes, all the ads are more or less exactly like this, or something similar. As can be understood from the ad, they only want to take, always to take. Both when describing herself and when sketching the model of the spouse she will have, she is always thinking of taking. These are the foolish ones, of course. The clever one doesn’t announce what she wants with ads and such; she has already found herself someone like that. And she knows very well where to find him. And once she’s had a child by him, then, how strange, incompatibilities suddenly begin. Whatever the man has, according to his means, whatever he has saved and earned over the years, the woman takes a large slice of that cake and leaves. After all, she has to look after her child! And the laws they call civilized only encourage those people to do this.

But with these ads, too, I used to think this: “Fine, the man should be such and such, all well and good, but in return for all these talents and qualities you demand, what are you offering him besides the thing inside your underwear? What sort of superior qualities do you have that the man should take you too? True, men too generally seek only one thing! If they are like that, isn’t it natural for women to be like this too?”

As I said, since the woman is of a weaker creation, so that she won’t be in need later on, her head works rather more toward her own interest. As for women who work and earn enough money, they either don’t marry or their marriages exist only on paper. And meanwhile, if a good material opportunity happens to come along, one has never encountered a woman who lets it slip. The matter isn’t only in German-Turkish relations and such, nor only in male-female relations; we humans are like this. With this example I wanted to emphasize how people think first and foremost of their own interests, and don’t value the person across from them at all, don’t even want to understand them. “What can I get”—that is the whole of their thinking. I don’t say “what does one give,” always what one gets. And even if one does get it, then they hate. Is humanity happy being like this? No, a person cannot say yes. The apostle James says this:

What is the source of the quarrels and the fights among you? Is it not from your cravings that are at war within your members? You desire, and yet you do not have. You go on murdering and coveting, and yet you cannot obtain. You keep on fighting and quarreling. You do not have because you are not asking. And when you do ask, you do not receive, because you are asking for a wrong purpose, that you may spend it upon your cravings… …That is why the Scripture says: “God opposes the proud, but he gives undeserved kindness to the humble.” Gospel—James 4:1-6. What do you say, don’t these verses put into words exactly some of humanity’s problems?

In Germany, before elections, in order to come to power, most politicians promise the evils they will do to foreigners. Most of all the parties under the name of “Christian”! And by foreigners they generally mean Turks. It’s not as if they’re going to mean the Frenchman, the Englishman, the American! For this reason alone they gather a great many votes and come to power. I always used to think to myself, “How easy the German politicians’ job is.” How many whoppers our Turkish politicians have to tell in order to come to power. “How can I fabricate a lie for this people,” the poor things nearly kill themselves! What is it the people generally like? One must find that, they figure, and then throw out, “I’ll make everyone a millionaire.” Did they really lie, though? At one time, with inflation, the value of money fell so much that even an eight-year-old boy shining shoes became a millionaire—true. In America the situation is somewhat different; there, if you want to become president, it’s enough to tell the American people, “Whom shall I make war on and bring you the cream of that place, and I’ll take less tax from you.” Let’s come back again to the Germans’ hostility toward foreign Turks. But are these hostile feelings of the Germans unjustified? Although hostility has no justification whatsoever, in them too there are of course some sides one can understand, some points one can grant. But you see, there’s no ease without trouble or problems. Solomon says this with his wisdom:

Where there are no oxen the crib is clean; but much increase is by the strength of the ox. (Proverbs of Solomon 14:4. In the new-translation Holy Bible this passage has been translated in an unintelligible way! The verse in the old translation is as I have written it, in a more understandable form.)

Do these Germans who pass for Christians not know this verse? And besides, if there were no foreigners at all, would the Germans be so very happy? Certainly not—and that, in fact, is the very side that angers me. Well, don’t the politicians know that this is how it is? Purely to gather votes, they exploit the people’s mistaken and evil hatred, and moreover give promises along those lines. And don’t think they fail to carry out those promises once they come to power. They carry them out with great pleasure, too. The German people are also sometimes like sheep. Stand on the road to his house and demand a road tax; the man believes you and pays without objecting. In short, what I mean is that they trust their rulers this much. Such nations are rarely encountered in the world. With us it’s exactly the opposite. Is some beneficial thing going to be done? First our people oppose it! Whether they understand it or not, once and for all they object. For example, are their rulers going to give them a throne of gold? Fine, but from them there comes an objection first! And they too have a point. The man has always been swindled, poor thing; how could he now look kindly upon the one giving him that throne? He’s afraid of what kind of stick might come out from under it. In the Germans the situation has come out reversed, that is, actually straight, but reversed according to us. However crazy and mad their rulers may be, they have always thought of the people’s interests! Like Hitler, who in the end burned the people along with himself, but never mind, they called it “an occupational hazard.” When I look at such matters with human eyes, I say they’re all in the right. When I look with the eye of God, in the light of the Holy Scriptures, I say they’re all in the wrong, full of evil, and mistaken. And that this is how it is regarding all the nations, God says so anyway.

“Come near, you nations, to hear; and you peoples, listen well; let the earth hear and all that fills it, the productive land and all its produce. For the LORD has indignation against all the nations, and rage against all their army…” (Isaiah 34:1-2) says God, and He also writes what will come upon their heads. A few more verses for you to look up and read from where you are: Jeremiah 10:1-3, Jeremiah 17:5

It is very easy to speak ill of people. And if it happens to be a Turk, speaking ill of him is easy too. I was reading a magazine handed out on an airplane. The writer was complaining that proper German isn’t spoken in Germany. The problem, as always, is again the Turks; the Turks supposedly know neither Turkish nor German properly. And the writer, seeing this situation, got angry out of the love of homeland he possessed. Those dishonorable writers of theirs, who get angry over all this, don’t stop at screaming at the top of their lungs, “Why isn’t Kurdish spoken in Turkey, why isn’t a state given to the Kurds, why are they being oppressed?”—they even put bombs in their hands and send those Kurds off saying, “Set these off in Turkey.” While living in Turkey, I never saw anywhere the kind of hostility shown toward Turks in Germany being done to the Kurds in Turkey. Rather, we see even worse things done to the Jews in films. You’ll strive to make sure those Turks are always the very last, whether in their schools, in their workplaces, or as a society, and then your love of homeland will well up, wondering why he can’t speak German well! I had written about what they teach us in German schools. And after all that, they go and stand up to America over the Iraq war, using human rights as a pretext. As if they themselves are very humane and compassionate, and will teach America humanity! And America is going to swallow that. They think they’ve got a Turk in front of them. In a disaster during a storm in America, supposedly only the whites and those with money were rescued first, while the blacks and the poor were left for last. Our German neighbor who lived next to us came running to tell me this news angrily. When I said, “I know, I know, and I know it best from my own experiences,” he understood at once and dropped the subject. He himself is someone I get along with and like. At that moment the Germans were in a rush to point to America as the culprit for this tension arising from their saying “no” to America over the Iraq war in their relations. Of course everyone sees and understands injustices, but not when they’re the ones committing them. These are the people who, against the splinters they cannot tolerate seeing in others, cannot see and pick out the beams in their own eyes. You hate the Turk, and whether in the workplace, on the street, at school, or wherever it may be, you think first of your own benefit at their expense and act accordingly—so why should the situation in America be any different? What is the difference between you? If the power he has were now in your hands, after the Jews you would invent soap-making and burning machines for the Turks. Though they have already begun to burn them, and evidently the time for the soap machines hasn’t quite fully ripened yet! America at least discriminates against no one except for the sake of its own interest. Whatever it does, its aim is interest, profit; can the same be said of the Germans? Among the people who, purely for the sake of senseless hatred, show the spirit of burning alive, annihilating, and waging wars of massacre against a person they’ve never met, even though they’ve seen no evil at all in that very person—where do the Germans rank in the world? No, this is the very thing he can’t understand. If he’s not on good terms with someone, he’ll now hunt for a fault in him. And America is supposedly some fool who doesn’t know these things!

The Turk came to Germany to do hauling work and put his child into German schools. I too went to those schools. I had written down exactly what we, who didn’t know even a single word of German, were taught. As I keep saying, these are of the sort who want to take a lot without giving anything. Perhaps you’ll say everyone does this; that’s true too, brother, but one shouldn’t take sides this much. Russians claiming to be German also came to Germany. And only from Russia? They came from Romania, from everywhere. These men speak German worse than those Turks. And these are Germans! The gates of East Germany opened, and people who had never worked retired with forged documents. Everyone in Germany knows this. Each of them had their teeth and their crowns done for free. The German health insurance funds went bankrupt. But no—no one mentioned these people with a single word. On top of it all, their economies were ruined supposedly because someone stood up to America. And for all of this too, it’s always the Turks who are to blame! The easterners aren’t like sheep the way the westerners are, either. Since they came from a communist regime, nearly all of them are quarrelsome and also inclined to dishonesty. And on top of all this, they still constantly complain about the western Germans. Again, not a peep. On the contrary, everywhere they’re granted priority. It’s always the poor Turks who are bad! And for years, without any shame, they deduct a solidarity tax for East Germany even from the wages of all those bad Turks. If the Germans’ own children bring home a bad grade in German class, the fault is again the Turks’! Indeed, so as to drive the Turks out, they’ve now practically raised a whole banner of every kind of vileness, with the backing of their laws as well. And in order to knead the people like dough and shape them however they like, in television programs they try to present as a problem why the Turks don’t integrate themselves into German society. Let them first integrate among themselves, with one another, so that we too may see and be ashamed. Let them first become friends with one another and get along, so that we may learn how they do it. But apparently the whole problem is the headscarf. Look at the magnitude of the problem! The Turks are supposedly ignorant. Well then, what were the Jews back in the day? Weren’t these same Germans the ones who burned them in furnaces there too, over “why aren’t there any ignorant men, workers, laborers among them”? They did the same things to the Italian and the Spaniard as well. Here I’m not defending the Turk either, but I’m saying, “where are these men headed with this hatred, again?” If America hadn’t invested in Germany after the Second World War because of the Russians and had a terrifying share in its recovery, today the Germans would be either a Czechoslovakia or, at best, like that East Germany. Let people fatten up a little, and see how very pleased with themselves they become. As for this anger of mine, it’s neither out of love of homeland nor out of hatred for the German, but rather over the hostility and injustices done to people. Whether he is German or Turk or American or even a Gypsy; a human is a human, and for the injustices done to him everyone will give an account to God before the judgment seat. (Ecclesiastes 12:14) Especially in the year 2008, after the policy pursued by Mrs. Merkel, the homes of Turks are burned every day, with children and all, alive, and it isn’t even made known to anyone. As the father burns, he throws his baby out the window from however many floors up to a policeman below, and by chance the policeman is able to catch it and the baby is saved. No picture, no stance, not a sound in the world. But let a hooligan Turkish youth beat up an old German at a metro station, and the German parliament rises to its feet! While the Turk is given 10 to 20 years in prison, in the arson of the Turks in Solingen, where nearly all of a whole family, together with their babies, died, the most that was given to those youths was 15 years. Now those men are outside and working as authorized officials in social institutions. The Turk, with the 20 years he got for the two kicks he threw, will have a hard time getting out of there. And besides, no one who burns Turks anymore is either caught or deemed to deserve punishment. This too is the Germans’ weakness as a nation. Every nation has all sorts of weaknesses. Whatever is experienced in history, they keep circling back and clinging to the same things again; the rest is whopper.

To return again to the subject of work, the jobs I worked in Germany were generally always like this. They were very hard, always had to be done with the body, and were worked with the morale given by the people I mentioned above. But when I thought, I always thought from both sides. I would both put myself in their place, and then put them in my place. One day I said to myself, “What is it you even want?” What, was it that, just because you work very fast and the jobs get finished, these men were going to say to you, come sit with us and have some tea or coffee? What would it have hurt if we sat down for ten minutes and chatted, like a friend, a companion? Again I would say “no” to myself. If they began to do such a thing for their workers, then that factory wouldn’t stay standing and many other problems would arise too, I would console myself. And the workers in question were just me; there was no other anyway. “As if by doing it the other way they kept it standing—they went bankrupt anyway,” I would also pass through my mind. (In fact, many years later I heard that the son had sunk their entire fortune, and that they had become enemies among themselves. The father, at 71, was getting up at five in the morning to deliver newspapers.) Even if I tried to defend them back then, I saw that I ended up in a dead end on their behalf too. That is, out of my anger and exhaustion, I was both speaking ill of the people I wanted to speak ill of and unable to speak ill of them. Or even if I strove to grant them a point, this time they always came out in the wrong. I would pass all these things through my mind to myself. As I said, the thing I can least bear is baseless hatred. The many such hostilities full of hatred and contempt that the boss’s son recounted, I never welcomed at all. Sometimes I wouldn’t speak at all, and I would let the sourness of my face show, too. They also saw it and were surely disturbed by this situation. The father was a gentlemanly man. Circumstances and troubles perhaps pressed hard on him too. “That’s my son, what can I do?” he would say.

Because I read the Holy Bible every day, I was also learning many of God’s beautiful qualities. In the end, while splitting logs, I arrived at this conclusion for myself: “Only God can understand me, and no one other than Him can, and I can only work in His service,” I said. With this I was in a way emphasizing a dream that could never come to pass. This was merely an ideal wish for me, that’s all. It wasn’t that, just because I was reading the Holy Bible, I had begun, under the influence of the subjects, to fancy myself a prophet or an angel or the like. And besides, how could a human ever see like God? God sees down to a person’s most secret feelings. No one is obliged to prove anything to Him. Because He already knows everything as it is. Before Him there’s no need at all for long, drawn-out proofs, disputes, defenses, or explanations. And this quality that I wanted, or that I awaited, existed only in God. In the book of Job it says this about God on this matter:

Even when you say you do not see him, your case is before him, so wait for him. (Job 35:14) As for us, there’s a notion within us that no one sees us, knows us, or hears us. Yet in the book of Psalms, called the Zabur, it again says exactly this:

Can the One who made the ear not hear? Can the One who formed the eye not see? Psalm 94:9

Trusting in God is a very beautiful thing. But if it is from the heart, sincere, and with love, it becomes eternal. I would come to understand many things later, in time. As much as I understood and learned, I felt within me a great love toward God. This love was something entirely different. I have loved my mother, my child, my wife, my friend, and other people and things I loved. These loves were always feelings that gave a person pain. What if something happens to that person, what if they fall ill, what if I lose them. Why is he doing wrong so plainly, right before my eyes? Why is he sad and there’s nothing I can do either? Why doesn’t he love me too? Why did he do me this wrong? Why doesn’t he understand me? A whole host of such misgivings and expectations give a person pain. And the most painful is when both sides feel a great love toward each other. Surely some unhappy event, one way or another, befalls those people, and everything ends in an instant. For example, a sudden accident, illness, prison, separation, war, death, and a whole host of other unimaginable things like destitution and misery slip in between. Then you go on burning. That fire within you doesn’t die out. When they brought word to Jacob that “your son Joseph is dead,” who knows how much that poor man suffered. In the Scripture it says, “And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted.” (Genesis 37:32-35) Are there people who cannot understand these feelings? Perhaps only among the people of countries in monetary wealth, and even that one perhaps doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to understand, because they too, out of fear that love will bring bitterness, are in an effort to kill off these feelings entirely. Moreover, they regard this as a success.

Loving God, however, is something entirely different. You have no worry whatsoever about Him. The only worry is, “What if I sin and forsake Him,” a person says. Yes, because it has always been like this. God forsakes no one. It has always been people who forsake Him first. This precedence always belongs to people, not to God. Thousands of examples could be given on this matter. That is, a person doesn’t fear at all that he will be forsaken. If there is a spirit of insecurity, it too is an insecurity a person feels about himself. A person says to himself, “What if I too do what they did and forsake God?” This too is a love full of pain, you’ll say. Yes, our world is not paradise, and in the love of God there are such pains too. But the greatest difference compared to other loves is this: that everything here is in the person’s own hands. That is, it isn’t unjust like the other loves. However much you value and cling to this love, that love gives you that much happiness. If you don’t forsake Him, God never forsakes you. And its most beautiful side is that He surely loves you. Whatever you may be, of whatever nation, country, culture, language, race, or sex of human you may be, He loves you. Because you are the work of His hands. He created you. You need never grieve about Him. You have no fear at all that He might make a mistake. Things like dying, falling ill, having evil done to Him, suffering, hating you for no reason, being unable to understand you, not hearing your voice, being ungrateful, and so on, do not apply to God either. In short, in the Quran it says many times “He has no partner and no equal,” and this word is a very true reality. There is nothing that is a partner to Him. How happy are those who feel, taste, and live this love.