Our host for the Turkey excursion is The Atlas Foundation of Baton Rouge, a member of the Fethullah Gulen movement. The foundation has hosted similar trips for Baton Rouge religious and academic groups as part of their cultural exchange mission to bring disparate cultures together.
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| Fethullah Gulen |
Making the trip with us was Tevfik Akbulut, a graduate student in political science at Southern University. Tevfik is an ethnic Kurd from the city of Mardin in southeastern Turkey. He is a director of Baton Rouge’s Atlas Foundation. He’s been in the U.S. since 2008, leaned his English through the Texas Intensive Language Program in Austin and plans to pursue a PhD from LSU upon completion of his master’s work.
On our trip we have met numerous followers of Gulen like Tevfik, unfailingly hospitable, always with a gracious interest in us and anxious to respond to questions we have about the cultural and religious affairs of Turkey.
As well as an interest in our culture, they also are interested in our nutritional needs. Twice a day in whatever town we happen to be, a group of local members of the Gulen movement join us for a meal. The Turks take great and justifiable pride in the diversity of the Turkish cuisine.
(For those wondering, we paid for the flight to Turkey and flights within Turkey (at a discounted rate I’m certain, having some feel for the cost of air travel). The Atlas Foundation paid for ground transportation, all hotels and meals, guides, interpreters, as well as admission to historic sites and other fees.)
The most elaborate and enjoyable of these excursions was in the town of Nidge, in the south central part of the country. “The countryside looks a lot like Arizona” several on our team note. Arid but not barren, the passing countryside sprouts modest mountain ranges with vistas that give meaning to the expression, “It’s out there where you can see forever.”
Our host families at Nidge surpassed anything that had gone before in both food and entertainment. We spent the night in their homes, but before that they had a mini-extravaganza laid on. The food is sumptuous. But the entertainment is the night’s real treat. It first features a children’s tableau of dances. There is also a demonstration of a traditional painting technique, Ebru art, based on the principal that oil and water don’t mix. The paints are floated on a watery liquid substance. Figures, primarily flowers, are drawn with a stylus which is stroked through the oily mix, a piece of canvas is floated on top of the surface of the mix, removed, dried, and voila a beautiful, in my case, orchid. We were all given framed copies of the work.
That was followed by a traditional reenactment of the marriage ritual of a young couple, the binding together with a scarf, and included the traditional after wedding dance where we joined in as part of the faux-marriage festivities.
Later we would spend the night in the homes of parents of the children of the school. Much additional chatting continued well into the night. In the case of the host family for me, Avery Davidson and Neil Melancon, it became a cultural exchange of an unusual sort.
Ihsan, the son of our hosts, Dr. Mustafa and Fatima Sahin, found a kindred spirit in the executive TV producer of the TWILA team, Avery Davidson. Davidson, a musician of note in his off hours, has a particular affinity for heavy metal music. So, it turned out, does Ihsan, particularly the group Iron Maiden. I can’t attest to this personally, because I had long since gone to bed, but I’m told they talked of all things heavy metal long into the night. Davidson bequeathed his Iron Maiden T-shirt from last summer’s Final Frontier tour in Houston to Ihsan.
You often find cultural exchange in the strangest forms; the unexpected coming together of like interests from opposite sides of the planet. Which, of course, makes the case for this outreach effort by Turkish natives now living in the U.S.
The patron for the night’s affair, Celal Avsar, has repeatedly met with Gulen and is a three-decades-long acolyte. When asked what he derived from the Gulen message he said, “I adopted his philosophy of life. Happiness comes from giving back, sharing.”
Avsar’s story is the classic of the self-made man. Now in his mid-70s, Avsar completed the 5th grade in Nidge. His parents moved from Nidge to Ankara where his schooling stopped. He began selling parsley in the local market in Ankara. You get the impression from speaking to him in his seventh decade that he was a real hustler in his youth. His business soon grew from just parsley to chestnuts, to apples, then his own fruit and vegetable shop. He soon increased his scope and became a produce wholesaler. In 1970 he went into the furniture business in Istanbul. He eventually built the Wal-Mart of big-box, retail furniture in Turkey. His children now run the business.
As a result of his association with Gulen, Avsar’s wealth became a means to a philanthropic end. In the early 1980s he began a small private school in Nidge, incorporating the philosophy of Gulen into the curricula. The school began with 13 students. Today the school is educating 700 students, grades K-12. An architecturally beautiful school, the night’s events honoring us were held in its dining hall.
In the closing years of a long and very successful life, Avsar has only one school diploma hanging on his wall. In the mid-1990s, he received an honorary high school diploma from a high school in Sacramento, California. The two schools are paired as sister schools and share numerous exchange programs.
* Former press secretary to Louisiana Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry.
Published on Larry Michaud's personal blog, 11 September 2011, Sunday
