I have long been fascinated by objects. My passion took its most extreme form during the years when I worked feverishly on a novel that would come to be called The Museum of Innocence. This was not just a novel; it also culminated in the birth of an actual museum in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul… but let me tell you how I got there.
When I met Ali Vasib Efendi, he was looking for a job that would allow him to settle down in Turkey permanently after his long exile. He cared neither for the throne nor for political power; he wished only to be able to remain permanently in the country that his ancestors had ruled for more than six centuries. Someone suggested that he might find employment as a museum guide at Ihlamur Palace, where he had spent so much time as a child. The prince was very familiar with life at the palace and knew how to manage a museum; would this not be an ideal solution to his problems?
Upon this suggestion, the prince and all of us at the table began to imagine, in complete seriousness and without a trace of irony, how Ali Vasib Efendi might show visitors around the rooms where he had rested and studied as a child. He would walk away from the ticket-toting crowds, step over the line that visitors are not allowed to cross and sit once more at the desk he’d used in his youth. “Esteemed guests — this is how I used to study mathematic.” I imagined the joy of being the guide to the museum and one of its artifacts at the same time. This was the very first seed of the Museum of Innocence, both the novel and the place.
My “prince” would be an upper-class Turkish man who, separated from his beloved, spends years obsessively collecting objects that have some relationship to her, which he exhibits in a museum in a manner similar to Ali Vasib Efendi. But I wanted to write the story of this fictional man by collecting — and exhibiting — real objects and artifacts that would have been important to him.
I set out to do research. I sought out small museums in my travels, like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London or the Frederic Marès Museum in Barcelona. I walked the stalls of the overfull Çukurcuma flea market, and spent hours on eBay and its others. As I accumulated diverse objects, what I found most enthralling was the way in which objects removed from the kitchens, bedrooms, and dinner tables where they had once been utilized would come together to form a new texture, an unintentionally striking web of relationships. I realize that when arranged with love and care, objects in the museum — an odd photograph, a bottle opener, a picture of a boat, a coffee cup, a postcard — could attain a much greater significance than they had before. I had to put these strange photographs and used objects on my desk and re-imagine them as pieces belonging to the lives of real people.
Hence one of my favorite issues of Bidoun — Objects. Things in and out of context, more than the sum of their incongruous parts — a museum of experience. The dwindling days of Naguib Mahfouz, attested by his mysteriously meticulous white linen suit. The name of God, inscribed on a fish. A magical horn. A pack of cigarettes. A hole in one child’s heart, and what they filled it with.
Now more than ever, it seems, the divine is at work in the world. The evidence is everywhere, especially on the Internet and most especially in the amazing email-forwarding chains that can keep news of the miraculous alive nearly indefinitely. These phenomena are by no means limited to Muslims. There was the baby Jesus in the snail shell that was discovered in Tortuguero, Costa Rica, and subsequently put up for sale on eBay; and the “Virgin Stump” of Passaic, New Jersey, in which Mary’s visage, revealed in the grain of a newly exposed tree stump, was preserved, converted into a shrine for the devout and the curious. Christians have described the faith-quickening power of a two-inch-long Virgin composed of dark-chocolate drippings in Fountain Valley, California, and the face of Jesus himself in a twist of pasta on a billboard for Pizza Hut in Atlanta, Georgia. But Muslims have their own form of pareidolia, and, as befits a calligraphic culture with a somewhat vexed relationship to the visual, it is the text-image in which the divine manifests, the “word made flesh,” with Allah’s longhand the sought-after and perceived sign.
As it turns out, it’s fairly common for Allah to sign his creations. His mighty tag can be found in the froth of the sea and the pulp of the tomato, in the wool of the lamb and the rubber of the Nike. But one of Allah’s favorite mediums is certainly fish scale.
Allah-fish turn up with inspiring frequency in places like Jakarta, Manchester, and Dakar, on the fins and bellies of everyday fish, the words Allah or Mohammed beveled into the skin as some warped form of adaptive camouflage. For whatever reason, God signs “Allah” far more often than, say, “Al-Rahman” (Most Beneficent) or “Al-Mutakabbir” (the Tremendous) or “Al-Latif” (the Subtly Kind) or any of his ninety-six other, mostly more elaborate-looking, names.
Those minced words did not represent the views of the enthusiasts at the Allah-fish’s official website, where photos, testimonials, and videos were greeted with a generous outpouring of Sabhan'allah!s and Allahu Akbar!s. In June of the same year, a fisherman off the coast of Oman caught a rabbitfish signed by Allah. “I’m overjoyed at being the one to find this miracle in praise of Allah,” he told reporters. He sent the rabbitfish straight to the local taxidermist, where it would be preserved forever, Allah’s dead proof.
Just as Allah makes himself known in the skies and sea, so does Shaytan make waves in the aquatic underworld. Type “fish girl” into any search engine and you’ll find a grainy video of a girl who was turned into a fish after kicking the Qur'an. This sign is said to have originated in Dhidhdhoo, Maldives, though the origins of such viral videos are difficult to trace. In the footage, the fish-girl lies belly-up and vulnerable to the handheld camera that shakily follows the contours of her humanesque body, paying special attention to the orifices. The girl did not survive the transition, it seems. The corpse is the color of an artichoke heart, and its wispy fins look just like roasted leaves. She lies on a blanket-covered table with her rigor-mortised tail protruding over the edge. A Qur'anic cassette tape plays loudly in the background. We get a brief glimpse of a man bent over, examining the cursed girl. The video, which is variously titled “girl who Turn out to be a fish” and “Fish Girl: FULL STORY EXPALINED HERE!!!!” is like a lo-fi Islamic version of the Ray Santilli alien-autopsy video from the 1990s, right down to the bloated belly.
But the devil, it seems, is lazy, and his work is easily debunked. On further investigation, the fish-girl of Dhidhdhoo is actually just your run-of-the-mill guitarfish. In images and videos of these weird tropical fish, they flit about all slit-mouthed and crevice-eyed, and if you squint hard enough at its underside, a guitarfish could easily be mistaken for an anak durhaka (insolent child).
Luckily, since her miraculous birth, my cousin Aya’s ears have grown out. After the Allah stage, her ear unfurled into more of a classical cauliflower shape. And Aya has turned out to be quite the insolent child herself. All the early attention about her holiness seems to have spoiled her rotten. Aunt Berkah is just relieved that the ear’s divine message is gone; no more strangers begging to kiss or fondle her daughter anymore. Now that Aya is entering school, her ear is just an illegible echo, a smudge rather than a stamp or a squiggle, a sign no one would take for a wonder.