For most Australians, welcoming total strangers into your home to share a meal and talk about family, religion and your most deeply held spiritual beliefs would be, at best, an uncomfortable and, possibly, terrifying experience.
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For Turkish Muslims Fethullah and Handan Erdogan, it is an article of faith.
As part of the family’s Ramadan observance they invited a Canberra Times team to dinner in their southside suburban home on Wednesday night.
We followed in the footsteps of such previous guests as Senator Kate Lundy and Canberra’s Catholic Archbishop, Christopher Prowse.
The food, which reflected the Turkish family’s Mediterranean culinary heritage, was superb, the company convivial and the conversation wide ranging.
The setting could have been any of a multitude of comfortably furnished middle-class Canberra homes.
Shoes outside the door, an absence of pictures of people on the walls and a beautifully illuminated copy of the Koran open on a reading stand in the living room were the only outwardly visible signs the Erdogans are followers of the prophet.
Their sons, Seyfullah, 14, and Nurullah, 10, are well spoken and courteous boys any parents would be proud of. They divided their time between the ubiquitous electronic devices that are now a part of growing up and following the adults’ conversation.
Seyfullah is enrolled at Telopea Park, Canberra’s oldest school, and Nurullah attends Farrer Primary.
The family has lived in Australia for the past three-and-a-half years and Mr Erdogan’s work as a committed follower of US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen has taken them to many different parts of the world.
“We have lived in Kazakhstan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan and the United States (in recent times),” he said.
Mr Erdogan is the executive director of Bluestar Intercultural Centre, a Muslim outreach organisation established here in 2009. His mission is to encourage interaction between the Muslim and the wider community.
He and his close friend and fellow Turkish emigre, Ismail Eski, stress that while their faith is often linked to acts of terror and violence in media reports this is not an accurate view.
Random violence, the killing of innocents and the use of terror to achieve political and other goals is the antithesis of true Muslim belief.
“No Muslim can be a terrorist and no terrorist can be a Muslim,” he said. “The Koran tells us that if anyone slew a person – unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land – it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people’.”
Ramadan, the ninth month of the 354-day Islamic lunar calendar, is a moveable feast whose dates vary. This year it began on June 29 and will finish on July 27.
Ramadan is venerated as the month during which Allah revealed the Koran to the prophet Muhammad and imposes obligations on his followers to abstain from eating and drinking during the daylight hours, to give thought to the plight of the needy and to conduct themselves as righteously as possible.
Families are encouraged to read the Koran in its entirety over the course of the month. The Erdogans rise at about 3am to pray before breaking their fast before dawn.
Once the sun has set there is an emphasis on hospitality and outreach with believers expected to invite outsiders into their homes, to extend charity and also to spread awareness of their faith.
Mr Erdogan regrets that although Ramadan is celebrated right across the Muslim world and could serve as a bridge to bring the estimated 1.6 billion believers together, rifts and schisms cause widespread conflict and violence.
While the Sunni and Shiite divisions are the best known, there are other groups within each of the main sects as well as elements such as the Druze who have broken away from the mainstream of Muslim belief.
“I am the radical (Muslim),” he said. “I am the extremist in that I am trying to live my faith to the (extreme) limits of my ability (as a person). These so-called radicals (who practice violence) are not Muslims.”
Mr Erdogan and Mr Eski said that differences between races, religions and cultures should be embraced, accepted and celebrated; not used as an excuse for hatred and fear.
“The Koran tells us that had Allah willed he could have made all people into one community – but that he did not,” Mr Erdogan said. “It also says there is “no compulsion in (acceptance of) the religion; (that) the right course has become clear from the wrong’.”
Education is the only true way forward if ignorance, poverty and fear are to be eliminated. “You can’t solve problems by killing people. Period. We have to work together.”