As far as I could tell, I was the only man in the cell wrestling with my God. The others could not understand my anguish, my doubts, my cries to God. But I looked to him as a Father, and the silence and distance I was experiencing from him were deeply confusing. For my twenty-one cellmates, however, things were different. As Muslims they didn’t share my expectation that God would comfort me with his presence, that he would demonstrate his love by letting me hear his voice even in prison. They were used to Allah’s silence. They also believed this was their fate, decreed by Allah, and that following his rules in this time of testing would gain them favor on judgment day. And so they doubled down by throwing themselves into the rituals of their religion. These were serious Muslims, passionate about keeping the laws of Islam. Most of them had been so on the outside, and those who had not been became so in prison.
When I first arrived in the eight-man cell it was crowded, but at least it was possible for my eleven Muslim cellmates to lay out their mats upstairs in the sleeping area and pray together at the same time. Each of them was desperate to get out of prison and believed that the best way to persuade Allah to intervene on their behalf was to do all their prayers. When the others came and the cell was pushed beyond capacity, the only option was for the men to take turns. And so what started out as a thirty-minute prayer session five times a day became a rolling, intense nonstop prayer service.
It wasn’t enough just to offer the standard prayers five times each day, or even to offer extra prayers. Soon they were extending their prayer times with periods of singing, reciting the names of Allah. Almost as soon as one group finished, another would start. Several times a day groups would form to chant the Koran. They’d sit in a circle, seven or eight men at a time, and take turns leading, reciting in Arabic. Relatively few Turks can read the Koran in Arabic, but everyone in our cell could—and those who had not known how were busy learning. At some point one of the men suggested that they should read through the entire Koran out loud each week, and the task was duly divided up among the cell. And when there wasn’t a prayer or a chanting session taking place, the chances are that someone would be teaching others about the Koran.
Added to this, many of the men had their own personal routines. Someone read that reciting a particular chapter in the Koran fourteen times a day for a month, or repeating some prayer tens of thousands of times, would lead to release from prison—and so they set out to do this, on their bunks, in the courtyard, everywhere and all the time. Even in the middle of the night, there were usually some men who were fasting—and therefore sleeping during the daylight fasting hours—who would sit downstairs studying the Koran. There was hardly an hour, day or night, when there wasn’t some religious activity happening in the cell.
I tried to ignore it, but inside or outside there was no escape from the sound of people praying and reading in Arabic or discussing in Turkish the steps required to unlock Allah’s favor and secure their release.
I listened in silence one night early on as the conversation turned to Jesus. A couple of the men—who had already told me that I was the first Christian they had ever met—were talking at length about the failings of Christianity.
“The Bible has been changed,” one said. “Jesus did not die on a cross. There are contradictions on every page. Christians will never admit this, but the whole book has been changed over the years.”
“The Christians believe that Jesus, God, and Mary are all gods. And they deny that Abraham, David, and Jesus were all Muslims.”
“Okay!” I mumbled to myself as I got up from my bunk and went downstairs. “Do you want to know what a Christian believes? Will you let me tell you?”
They sat in silence, staring.
So I carried on. I tried to explain the Jesus of the Bible in a way they would understand. I laid out the differences, being careful not to say anything about Muhammad that would offend any of them.
They listened. Some were genuinely curious, a couple of them looked on silently, unhappy, almost glowering. After a couple of hours I could tell I had said enough.
It was a turning point in the cell. Now they knew exactly where I stood, that I was serious about my faith. Some of them tried to encourage me to accept Islam—they certainly joked about it a lot. From that point on, whenever someone came and asked questions, two or three of the others would drift over and start to argue with me, bringing the conversation around to a lengthy discourse on the glories of Islam.
Eventually I got tired of this. When I was asked to explain some point yet again, I would pick up my Turkish copy of the Bible. “Please, read this first,” I would say, pointing to a passage. “Then let’s talk.” If there was genuine curiosity or interest, I would be glad to answer.
Apart from Yilmaz, an older man on the bunk next to mine who read the whole Bible from cover to cover, most of them wouldn’t even touch the book.
But most of them would accept prayer. When someone was sick I would put my hand on him and pray for healing. One of the men who was unfriendly had an old problem with his leg, and he let me pray for him several times. In return sometimes I would hear my name mentioned in the daily prayer for deliverance.
THE RHYTHM OF THE PRAYER CYCLES and the constant droning of Arabic chanting wore me down. It was like living in a mosque—but with more religious activity than a mosque, and much more intense. La ilaha illalah, la ilaha illalah . . . I had heard the phrase “There is no God but Allah” chanted and sung so many times that it played on a continual loop in my mind night and day. Sometimes I thought it might be better to be in a solitary cell, just to get relief from this atmosphere that felt so heavy to me. I could still appreciate the way in which they were able to support each other, and I longed for the company of a fellow Christian in the cell—someone to pray with, someone to encourage me, someone to speak truth to me when my doubts started to scream. Norine was my lifeline, but I saw her for only the weekly thirty-five minutes. The rest of the time I was alone, so alone in my faith.
I’d lost Emin too. The other men in the cell were all public servants or small shop owners, and few of them had traveled outside of Turkey. Coming from a very wealthy family, Emin had spent time in the West and visited the US a number of times. Of everyone there he understood best the differences between my background and the others’, and in those early days in Sakran he was the one who helped me to see how the cell operated and helped the cell to better understand me.
Emin had been released in February. I was glad for him, but sad to see him go. When he left I felt even more alone. Worse, though, was the fact that I no longer had someone who could help explain my “strange” American behavior and thinking to my Turkish cellmates. Emin’s wealth and social position meant that the others listened to him. With him gone, I had lost my protector.
AS WELL AS PUTTING IN THE HOURS PRAYING, chanting, and studying the Koran, my cellmates were striving for ceremonial cleanliness. They had strict and detailed rules to follow so that their prayers would be acceptable. Along with washing in the correct manner before prayers, they also tried to avoid anything that would contaminate them and make them spiritually unclean. Most of the men in the cell were happy to leave me alone and ignore me, but for some, as a non-Muslim, I was a threat.
It started with food. Some mornings at roll call I would tear off a piece of bread from the end of the loaf to eat with some cheese before returning upstairs to bed. Sometimes I would throw away the last little bit of crust that I hadn’t finished. One morning, one of the men who always had his eye on me decided to take offense.
“What you are doing is a sin, Andrew.”
I ignored his comment and continued on back to bed. I knew he was picking on me. Every day the prison gave fresh bread, and at the end of each day the people in this cell quietly threw out all the leftover bread.
He said the same thing the next day. Again I ignored it and went back to bed.
The third time he caught me throwing a small piece of crust in the trash he turned to all the other men who had gathered for morning count by the guards.
“I would never throw that little bit of bread away,” he said to nods of approval from the others. “It is a sin and you must stop.”
“It might be a sin for you,” I said, “but it isn’t for me. Leave me alone.” I needed to draw a line.
He backed off a little, but within weeks a new issue surfaced. We ate our salads and some other things from big communal bowls, each man dipping his spoon in and eating straight out of it in the normal Turkish way. I noticed that people would avoid taking food from the corner I’d put my spoon in. Eventually the inevitable happened and I was told that I was no longer welcome to eat from their bowls and that they would serve me separately.
“Fine,” I said.
I was quite happy to eat off my own plate, but I did not like the reason for being excluded. There was a real mixture of attitudes in our cell. Most of the prisoners left me in my own bubble, and a few were helpful and even caring. One ex-policeman always offered me a hot cinnamon drink when he had his nightly tea, and a gentle schoolteacher who was an expert on the Koran cut my hair with the clipper our cell was allowed to buy. Kaya, a former police chief, often stopped by my bunk to give me an encouraging word. But there were some who treated me with suspicion, and their attitude began to infect others. They saw me as unclean and made me feel it.
Many of the men spent the evening and late into the night downstairs watching TV. Some of their favorite shows—each lasting up to four hours—were historical dramas that portrayed Christians as the evil aggressors always committing terrible acts against noble Turkish Muslims. The Christians in the stories were liars, treacherous, full of betrayal. During our years in Turkey we had good relationships with most Turks—we loved them, and on an individual level they were warm and welcoming to us—but I was very aware of an underlying animus toward Christians. Apart from this, for many years polls in Turkey had shown deep anti-American feeling, and it was growing.
Increasingly I felt singled out and isolated.
When someone said hard words to me I usually would apologize and remain silent. I tried to keep to myself and avoid things I knew would bother them. I was walking on eggshells. By late spring I wrote to Norine, “I speak maybe ten sentences a day. I’m trying to be invisible.”
HOWEVER INTENSE THINGS WERE during those first months in Sakran, the atmosphere became more charged when Ramadan started at the end of May. My companions poured themselves out in prayer late into the night. The only positive was the fact that since they were all asleep during daylight hours I got to walk the courtyard mostly uninterrupted.
As the month of prayer and fasting wore on, the temperatures started to rise. On most days it was over one hundred degrees, and on the day it pushed as high as one hundred and sixteen it was hot as an oven. The only windows looked out onto the courtyard, all concrete and walls, and we were in the middle of multiple rows of sunbaked cells just like ours. In the airless cell, crammed for some time now with more than twenty sweaty bodies, the heat became oppressive. I found that the only way I could cope was to strip down to my shorts and lie on top of my covers.
This did not go down well with some.
My bunk was at the top of the stairs, so anyone who walked up or down had to pass right beside me. One day, not long before the end of Ramadan, one of the men told me that I needed to cover myself up.
“When we walk by you on the way to do our prayers we see you. You’re distracting us and it’s making us lose our ceremonial cleanliness.”
I wanted to laugh out loud. “Why should you be distracted by me?”
“A man should cover himself from above the belly-button to the knees, Andrew. You need to wear long pants and a top.”
Even stripped down I was soaking my bed and pillow with sweat and had a heat rash on my arms. I answered respectfully, but held my ground.
“I suggest you not look at me when you go by. It is very hot, so I do not want to wear long pants. Also, I am not a Muslim, so I am not required to follow your rules for dress.”
The conversation died soon after, but the tension remained.
A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER, when several of the men had received bad news about their cases, they were talking animatedly in the courtyard. I was pacing as usual when one of them shouted at me. “You’re done for the day. No more walking for you. Stop!”
I didn’t stop. “I’m not in your way. Why are you giving me orders? What’s going on?”
“I’ll give you orders,” he spat. “You’re a hayvan!”
I stopped dead.
To call someone a hayvan—an animal—is a serious insult in Turkey. People kill each other over less. The guy wouldn’t stop either, repeating the word over and over, telling me that I was filthy and unclean.
I was convinced that he was going to attack me. Through blurry eyes I watched him, his arms waving as he shouted, his eyes bulging. I looked at the others, wondering whether they would either join in or hold him back, but everyone was silent.
I was so fragile I retreated back to my bunk—the only safe place I had. The sense of isolation welled up and I started weeping, feeling the heavy sobs erupt from my chest. I tried to close my eyes and ignore the feelings of loneliness and despair, but it was no use. I was weak and defenseless, not just physically, but emotionally too.
That night the cell had a meeting about me.
The men who had called me an animal apologized—only after being told to by the others—and then launched into a speech about my character flaws. “You’re a very selfish person, Andrew. You think you can make demands and have things your own way. Not anymore. It’s over. You’re going to do what we tell you.”
I heard every word he said, but I wasn’t thinking about change or the need for me to become more docile and accommodating to the group. All I could think about was that at some point, if things got much worse, the verbal attacks might stop. If some of the people in the cell decided to get physical with me, I’d be completely at their mercy.