Who are you?

The greater L.A. IVCF students had already had excellent cross-cultural training, but they received on-site training as well. One of the key components was meant to help them internalize the identity issue. At the top of the dry erase board was the question: Who are you? Are they Christians? Are they m-word? The answer to the first is some variation on “I am the follower of Jesus who is serious about his commands.” The answer to the second is an unequivocal “No.” The reason the students could answer this way honestly is that “m’s” (a word not to be spoken aloud in Turkey) are agents of the foreign state, and of course they are not that. The students practiced in groups asking and answering these and other questions. Over and over. It’s hard to reprogram your vocabulary, especially to remove such honored words.

What struck me so strongly was the irony about this phenomenon. Why should anyone in a secular country have to whisper about a religious identity? It is not as though believers were rejecting a different true religion—though of course, secularity is a form of religion. The journalist who wrote The Cross and the Star claims that Ataturk is Turkey’s god. I wonder how much all of this relates to the deeper identity crisis in Turkey itself. Situated at the crossroads of Asia and Europe, Turkey is caught between east and west, between modernity and reactions against modernity, between secularism (a significant component of modernity, at least in Ataturk’s mind) and religion. It wants the acceptance of Europe, the assurance that it is indeed modern, by way of E.U. membership. It treats its own Muslim peoples as second class citizens if they try to take seriously the Qur’anic worldview. Women are forbidden to wear headscarves, for example (though we saw them everywhere, walking close behind or in front of women dressed the way someone walking around in Kansas City would dress). One picture I took in Izmir captured this schizophrenia well, I think. The neon lights above one entrance to the huge market area, with its row after row of bridal shops displaying very western style gowns, the full range of consumer choices blatantly available, twinkled A-L-L-A-H. Are we religious or are we not? Is Islam just a cultural identity or is it a threat to western secularism? If Turks could answer this question, perhaps it would be confident enough in who they are not to be threatened by the identity of others. Perhaps then there could be a full and respectful dialogue over religious truth claims.