My Name is Red Read Free Page A

elegance. He was giving voice to the dog, and pointing, from time to time, at the drawing.

I AM A DOG
    As you can doubtless tell, dear friends, my canines are so long and pointed they barely fit into my mouth. I know this gives me a menacing appearance, but it pleases me. Noticing the size of my teeth, a butcher once had the gall to say, “My God, that’s no dog at all, it’s a wild boar!”
    I bit him so hard on the leg that my canines sank right through his fatty flesh to the hardness of his thighbone. For a dog, you see, nothing is as satisfying as sinking his teeth into his miserable enemy in a fit of instinctual wrath. When such an opportunity presents itself, that is, when my victim, who deserves to be bitten, stupidly and unknowingly passes by, my teeth twinge and ache in anticipation, my head spins with longing and without even meaning to, I emit a hair-raising growl.
    I’m a dog, and because you humans are less rational beasts than I, you’re telling yourselves, “Dogs don’t talk.” Nevertheless, you seem to believe a story in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn’t possibly know. Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.
    Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a faraway land, a brash cleric from a provincial town arrived at one of the largest mosques in a capital city; all right, let’s call it the Bayazid Mosque. It’d be appropriate to withhold his name, so let’s refer to him as “Husret Hoja.” But why should I cover up anything more: This man was one boneheaded cleric. He made up for the modesty of his intellect with the power of his tongue, God bless it. Each Friday, he so animated his congregation, so moved them to tears that some would cry until they fainted or dried up and withered away. Don’t get me wrong, unlike other clerics with the gift of preaching, he himself didn’t weep. On the contrary, while everyone else cried, he intensified his oration without a blink as if to chastise the congregation. In all probability, the gardeners, royal pages, halva makers, riffraff and clerics like himself became his lackeys because they enjoyed the tongue lashing. Well, this man was no dog after all, no sir, he was a human being-to be human is to err-and before those enthralled crowds, he lost himself when he saw that intimidating throngs of people was as pleasurable as bringing them to tears. When he understood that there was much more bread to be made in this new venture, he went over the top and had the nerve to say the following:
    “The sole reason for rising prices, plague and military defeat lies in our forgetting the Islam of the time of our Glorious Prophet and falling sway to falsehoods. Was the Prophet’s birth epic read in memory of the dead back then? Was the fortieth-day ceremony performed, where sweets like halva and fried dough are offered to honor the dead? When Muhammad lived, was the Glorious Koran recited melodically, like a song? Were the prayers called haughtily and pompously to show how close one’s Arabic was to an Arab’s? Was there such a thing as reciting the call to prayer coyly, with the flourish of a man imitating a woman? Today, people plead before gravesites, begging for amends. They hope for the intervention of the dead on their behalf. They visit the tombs of saints and worship at graves like pagans before pieces of stone. They tie votive pieces of cloth everywhere, and make promises of sacrifice in return for atonement. Were there dervish sectarians who spread such beliefs in Muhammad’s time? Ibn Arabi, the intellectual mentor of these sectarians, became a sinner by swearing that the infidel Pharaoh had died a believer. These dervishes, the Mevlevis, the Halvetis, the Kalenderis and those who sing the Koran to musical accompaniment or justify dancing with children and juveniles by saying ”we pray together anyway, why not?“ are all kaffirs. Dervish lodges ought to be destroyed, their foundations excavated to a depth of seven