Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

Early on she learned that there was no fight more hurtful than a family fight, and no family fight more hurtful than one over God.

Anything remotely uncanny, even if only slightly out of the ordinary, Selma would attribute to a religious cause; and Mensur, to downright insanity. Peri, for her part, preferred to commit to neither.

Sometimes her own mind scared her.

Her outfit epitomized everything that he had always despised, loathed and confronted in the Middle East. The benightedness of the religious. The presumption that their ways were the best – only because they had been born into this culture and swallowed unquestioningly whatever they had been taught.

For Selma, Mensur’s manners embodied all that set her on edge: the condescension in his eyes, the finality in his voice, the righteousness in the tilt of his chin. The arrogance of the secular modernists.

Peri understood and accepted that some daughters were born with a mission: to fulfil their fathers’ dreams. In doing so, they would also be redeeming their fatherland.

The problem with praying, however, was that it had to be pure, monophonic. One consistent voice from beginning to end. But when she talked to God, her mind fragmented into a plethora of speakers, some listening, some making witty remarks, others expressing objections.

‘You know why I’m not that keen on heaven?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘I look at the people who’ll go there, those who pray and fast and seem to do everything they’re supposed to do. So many of them are full of pretension! I say to myself, if these chaps are headed for heaven, do I really want to be there? I’d rather burn peacefully in my own hell. Hot it is, but at least there’s no hypocrisy.’

Nowadays the society was divided into invisible ghettoes. Istanbul resembled less a metropolis than an urban patchwork of segregated communities. People were either ‘staunchly religious’ or ‘staunchly secularist’; and those who had somehow kept a foot in both camps, negotiating with the Almighty and the times with equal fervour, had either disappeared or become eerily quiet.

She had brought along a few of her favourite books, some in Turkish, others in English – Sadegh Hedayet’s The Blind Owl, Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Oǧuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.

In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering.

Was religion an empowering force for women who otherwise had limited power in a society designed for and by men, or was it yet another tool for facilitating their submission?

‘The prevailing question whether God exists elicits one of the most tedious, unproductive and ill-advised disputations in which otherwise intelligent people have been engaged. We have seen, all too often, that neither theists nor atheists are ready to abandon the Hegemony of Certainty. Their seeming disagreement is a circle of refrains. It is not even accurate to call this battle of words a “debate”, since the participants, irrespective of their points of view, are known to be intransigent in their positions. Where there is no possibility of change, there is no ground for a real dialogue.’

the American hedge-fund manager, who was determined to adhere to the maxim ‘When in Rome …’ although in this case the Romans themselves behaved as though they were not in Rome.

Religion fuels intolerance and that leads to hatred and that leads to violence. End of story.’ ‘But isn’t that unfair?’ Peri said. ‘There are many religious people who would never hurt anyone. It wasn’t religion that did this. It was pure evil.’

Russell noted, “The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.” ’

Certainty was to curiosity what the sun was to the wings of Icarus. Where one shone forcefully, the other couldn’t survive. With certainty came arrogance; with arrogance, blindness; with blindness, darkness; and with darkness, more certainty. This he called, the converse nature of convictions.

He had also introduced him to the works of mystics – Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Isaac Luria, Fariduddin Attar and his Conference of the Birds, and his favourite, Hafez.