My father grew up in Adana, not far from the Syrian border. His family was Alevi—part of Turkey’s Shia minority—and one of his earliest memories was waking up to hear his grandfather reciting the Koran in Arabic. My father experienced his first religious doubts at the age of twelve, when he discovered Bergson and Comte in an Adana bookstore, and read that religion was part of a primitive and pre-scientific state of civilization; he has been an atheist since his teens (read more)
(By Elif Batuman: Cover Story (c) The New Yorker)
