Word: koran
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Squinting skyward last week, Turks looked for the new moon. When they should see it Ramadan would begin, Ramadan the mystic month in which the Koran was revealed to Prophet Mohammed. This year the first glint of the new moon had a special, dread significance. Turks had been ordered by their stern dictator, Mustafa Kemal Pasha who made them drop the veil and the fez (TIME, Feb. 15, 1926 et seg.), that beginning with Ramadan they must no longer call their god by his Arabic name, Allah...
...godly man, Dictator Kemal considers that there? is no reason why Turks should not call Allah by his Turkish name, Tanri. There is no reason except centuries of tradition, no reason except that Turkish imams (priests) all know the Koran by heart in Arabic while few if any have memorized it in Turkish. Strict to the point of cruelty last week was Dictator Kemal's decree that muezzins, calling the faithful to prayer from the top of Turkey's minarets, must shout not the hallowed "Allah Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is Great!") but the unfamiliar words "Tanri Ulndur...
When imams threatened to suspend services in the mosques and hide the prayer rugs, the Government announced that it was holding 400 brand-new prayer rugs in reserve, threatened to produce "newly trained muezzins who know the Koran in Turkish and are ready to jump into the breach...
...yielded. "Let them pray as they please, temporarily," he growled. Beaming, his Minister rushed off to proclaim the glad respite only a few hours before the new moon appeared. "On account of the general unpreparedness of the muezzins and imams," they suavely declared, "prayers may be offered and the Koran recited in Arabic during the present month of Ramadan, but discourse by the imams must be in Turkish...
...Istanbul 20,000 people shuffled into the great Byzantine Mosque of Santa Sophia on Ramadan's "Night of Power" to hear the first reading of the Koran, not in Arabic language of Mohammed, but in vulgar Turkish. The blood of the pious curdled. Many of the gaping crowd flouted tradition by wearing shoes. Photographers added to the sacrilege by setting off flashes. Although the Koran was for the first time intelligible to laymen, most of the crowd seemed under the impression that they were seeing a theatrical spectacle...