Turkish Muezzin Who Couldn’t Lie Is Exiled
The muezzin of a mosque in central Istanbul lost his position after he denied Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s assertions that alcohol was consumed inside the mosque during the Gezi Park protests.
Turkish might be a relatively lean language when it comes to the number of words in it (barely more than 111,000 words, according to the official Turkish Language Institute, compared to English which tops a million), but it is rather rich in wisely-quipped proverbs that have stood the test of centuries.
One such adage that I find especially relevant to current-day Turkey is, “The one who speaks truth would be expelled from nine villages.”
Depending on which segment of society you are focused on, you can replace the word “villages” these days with, say, “newspapers," "TV companies," "universities” and — given the most recent development — even “mosques.”
What does not change much is the motive behind the expulsions. In most instances, it is the authorities’ distaste for truth. And so it was in the case of Fuat Yildirim, the 44-year-old muezzin of Istanbul’s Bezm-i Alem Mosque.
