Three Daughters of Eve

by Elif Shafak

It had always struck her as odd that so many Turks memorized Arabic prayers without having the slightest idea what they were saying. Whether English or Turkish, Peri loved words. She held them in her palms like eggs about to hatch, their tiny hearts beating against her skin, full of life. She inquired into their meanings – hidden and manifest; she studied their etymologies. But for countless believers, the words in the prayers were holy sounds one was expected less to penetrate than to imitate – an echo without a beginning or an end, in which the act of thinking was subsumed by the act of mimicking. In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering. Into her God-diary Peri wrote: Believers favour answers over questions, clarity over uncertainty. Atheists, more or less the same. Funny, when it comes to God, Whom we know next to nothing about, very few of us actually say, ‘I don’t know.’