I am the last to be initiated, baptized if you will, when she dumps hammered silver bowlfuls of water over my head and body. One by one, the attendant unceremoniously removes our towels, rewrapping them around our waists, as if to put an end to any potential body shame. Then, downstairs, I follow two similarly clad women into a small white marble room, feeling a blast of heat on my face and the wetness of humidity. One by one, the attendant unceremoniously removes our towels, rewrapping them around our waists, as if to put an end to any potential body shame.Įquipped with a red and white Turkish towel and sandals, I head upstairs to the changing areas around the perimeter of the dome and strip down. Groups of women or men would visit the hammam together, indulging in a deep clean and lazing around over tea and a chat afterward.
Later when home bathing facilities were common, it morphed into a more social ritual.
Hammams were built as part of mosque complexes as a source of revenue, as well as to serve a need: cleanliness. But the extent to which his followers can be considered to be complicit in any plot, if there was one, goes to the heart of Gulenism.įormer members speak of an organization which seeks to control every details of its adherents’ lives.This is a ritual that goes back to the Ottoman period, when no one in Istanbul had their own bathtub. The question of the exiled cleric’s guilt remains unresolved for now, at least outside Turkey. They are not just large concerns: they include a local ice cream parlour. He shows some of the boycott lists that have been circulating on social media, urging German Turks to avoid businesses with alleged links to Gulen. My whole family is in Turkey and I’d like to visit them, but it isn’t safe for me now,” Celal Findik, the NGO’s director says. “I got threatening messages on my mobile phone, calling me a traitor and saying Gulen will be hanged. He works for Forum Dialog, a Gulenist NGO dedicated to interfaith dialogue. A German citizen born to Turkish parents, he says he feels more German than Turkish.īut now he is on the defensive.
He is one of the few Turkish imams in Germany who doesn’t work for DITIB at Berlin’s House of One, a project to create a joint place of prayer for Christians, Muslims and Jews. Ors says Turkey is now using DITIB to spread its crackdown against the Gulen movement into Germany. “President Erdogan may be a bad thing for Angela Merkel, for the Americans, but for his country and his people, for us, he is a hero,” Kadir Inonir, a worshipper at a Berlin mosque, which like almost every Turkish mosque in Germany was built by DITIB, the German wing of a Turkish government agency which also supplies the imams. We don’t want any traitors in our mosque or our city.” “Then they told my friend you’re not welcome here anymore. “A friend of mine went to pray at his regular mosque in Gottingen and some one started taking pictures of him with his phone,” Osman Ors, a Berlin imam and follower of Guulen says. Tensions between Erdogan’s supporters and Gulenists have become so bad that Angela Merkel at the weekend also called on Turks not to “import conflicts into Germany”. There are an estimated four million people of Turkish origin living in the country, including 1.5 million Turkish citizens. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.