I am content with Islam as my religion. That contentment is built stage by stage, starting in the earliest years of a Muslim child’s life. I was socialised into Islam in a mountain village in Turkey, and Ramadan held a special place in that process.

In our small village house, Ramadan was not only about fasting, and fasting was not merely abstaining from food and drink. Those were the obligatory minimum in our eyes or, to be honest, in our mother’s eyes. Thanks to her, we learned at an early age that Ramadan was not a month in which you fulfil your duties and then feel relieved once it is over. Rather, it was something the whole house prepared for during almost half the year, and something the whole family missed, praying for its return, during the other half.

Turkish Muslims call Ramadan “the sultan of eleven months”. Mum would say: “A sultan cannot be a sultan for only one month. Every month should have a little Ramadan in it.”

This was not merely a theoretical statement. Mum used to fast now and then, usually on Mondays and Thursdays. One might assume that someone who fasted so often would be a thin woman. No, she wasn’t! She was actually the most generously built woman in our village. In her self-taught wisdom, fasting was, among other things, about “eating in congregation”, and we all know that when you eat in a group, you eat more.

Overeating was a direct result of the iftar visits we hosted or paid. Grandpa believed that if we had no guest at our table to break the fast with, our fasts would be incomplete. The alternative was to be guests at someone else’s table. That is how our iftars, the fast-breaking dinners, were. Relatives from far away would come to visit us; we would all wait for the iftar programme on the country’s only TV channel and join in the imam’s supplication on the screen. That supplication must be one of the best-known prayers in my country: “O my Lord! I fasted for Your sake. I trusted in You, and I broke my fast with the food You provided for me. Thanks be for the blessings You bestowed upon us, and for health and well-being. My Lord! Forgive me, my mother, my father and all the believers. Amen.”

Grandpa believed that if we had no guest at our table to break the fast with,our fasts would be incomplete. The alternative was to be guests at someone else’s table.

Islamic tradition recommends certain foods as best for breaking the fast: water, salt, sugar and dates. Dates were our household’s favourite. Grandpa was the only person from our village who had gone on pilgrimage, and the dates he brought back from Mecca never ran out. Even if they had, their stories would not have. With those small, dry dates, Grandpa’s whole pilgrimage would visit our dining table: all his friends, all the different kinds of dates he had seen there, the Ka’ba, the Black Stone. Years later, when I read the Bible, I understood what Jesus meant when he said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)

After being filled with food and word, we would perform the evening prayer in congregation. My father would lead as imam and each day would choose either me or my elder brother as the muezzin. While reciting the call to prayer, when I reached the line “Come to the Namaz”, I used to dream that all those visitors at our dining table would join us: Grandpa and his pilgrimage friends, the pilgrims in their white robes, the Ka’ba, the Black Stone and that date seller I had never seen, who sold hundreds of kinds of dates…

After the evening prayer, the whole family would begin an excited round of preparations. The women would change their headscarves; Grandpa would turn into a kind of commander, directing the family: “Get my prayer rug! Kerim, go and renew your ablution! Son, check whether the torch has enough battery! Ola [a name he used for my grandmother, which had no meaning at all], bring me my staff!”

Once ready, we would walk to the village’s only mosque to perform the last prayer of the day. The late evening prayer (we call it yatsı; the Arabs call it ‘isha) is normally longer than any of the other daily prayers. On Ramadan nights it is three times longer, with the addition of tarawih, the special Ramadan night prayer. In fact, prayers do not have a fixed length. Individuals can choose to pray longer by reciting longer verses of the Qur’an. When praying in congregation, it is up to the imam to decide. At least on those nights! I knew of neighbours with a car who would drive to another village simply because the imam there chose the shortest verses and recited them so fast that the elderly could not keep up with him.

Our imam had no choice. Grandpa was regarded as the real imam of the village, and he would rebuke the imam if he tried to “cheat Allah” by rushing. Oh, how I envied our neighbours’ children, with that car and that easy-going attitude to religion. But then, I knew that my father would buy me ice cream from the ice-cream man on his motorbike, who could reach our mosque after visiting another one simply because we stayed longer than everyone else.

Those were the earliest years of my Islamic experience. I was certainly younger than seven and probably not fasting all day, but the warmth and the moving depth of those experiences are still young and alive in my heart. This is what Ramadan was about in our small village house: having something to remember years later… and that memory was meant to be created in congregation.