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to him. Speaking of Fatih Carsamba, he had said, ‘This is the only place we can live like Muslims so we have to protect that. If someone comes from outside, like a journalist or writer, he can cause problems for us. The police could come and break up the neighbourhood.’ Of his dress, he added, ‘I am dressed like this because the Prophet Muhammad dressed this way. None of our other leaders dressed like that, not Atatürk, not anyone else.’
    At the time, I didn’t appreciate how daring a remark this was. The cult of Atatürk was sacrosanct in Turkey and his forceful brand of secularism, backed by the army, could silence the boldest Islamists. For the man in the teashop to discuss him in disparaging tones, and to a fellow Turk, was a jailable gesture of defiance. It was an introduction to how important physical appearance would become over the course of my journey, especially in regard to Islam’s relationship with the modern world; it was part of the completeness of the challenge the faith presented. It had been a battleground for Atatürk and it was a battleground for the man in the teashop.
    The man had asked Eyup if I was Muslim. Eyup knew only the facts of my parentage and, though he was not a believer himself, he made a leap of reason that others around me would make for the next eight months: if your father’s Muslim, you’re Muslim. He might only have been trying to cool the situation, but he knew that the man in the teashop was forced to accept this information. This level of being Muslim was more important than anything that came afterwards, such as the actual components of your faith. It was primary, built into one’s birth and recognised by all Muslims, religious or not. ‘He is from Pakistan and is a Muslim,’ Eyup had said. The man, obligated by his religion to accept this, replied, ‘If you’re a Muslim, you know that this is how real Muslims dress.’
    Muslims living in a Muslim country with a sense of persecution. The link to the great Islamic past, and the cultural threads to the larger Muslim world, proscribed and broken. The modern republic of Turkey aspired to be part of the European Union. Turkey had been among the most open Muslim countries, but its secularism was dogmatic, almost like a separate religion. The state didn’t stay out of religion, it co-opted religion: it wrote Friday sermons, appointed priests and hounded people it thought to be religious out of the establishment. Why did it have to be so extreme? What threat to his modern, secular republic had Atatürk perceived in the Islamic identity?
    It was the army, along with Istanbul’s educated élite, who had enforced his aggressive secularism since the founding of the republic in the 1920s. At first people had obeyed, but in recent years, as migration from more religiously conservative Anatolia to Istanbul increased, people became emboldened, more sure of who and what they were. The radical hilltop, with its high street refashioned along Islamic lines, was the response of a few, but many more wanted to know why they couldn’t wear their headscarves. They set up centres of business and capital, ‘green capital’, to counter the power of Istanbul’s secular rich. The prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoan, was of their ilk. The city was full of women wrapped in Versace headscarves driving SUVs. Islam was coming in through the back door. The army and the bourgeois Kemalists eyed them with deep suspicion.
    But what was really meant by this reassertion of Islamic identity? What cultural wholeness had been lost and what would it take for the world to be whole again?

    I don’t know what my time in Turkey would have been like had I not met Abdullah. Months later, when I recalled his agony, so difficult to match with his plump face and soft manner – I never forgot that before he gave himself to the faith, before he was penalised for being from a religious school, he was almost a business student. And though he studied Arabic and