A Turk becoming a Catholic. One must admit that this isn’t that common. In From Islam to Christ, Derya Little chronicles her journey to her belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. What a fascinating tale filled with Muslims, Catholics, Protestants and atheists.
She talks a lot about her upbringing in Turkey. Turkey has a love-hate relationship with Islam. For over half a millennium, Turkey was home to the most successful Islamic Empire in history. This Empire turned Constantinople, the greatest city in Christendom, into the largest Muslim city in the world. When the Ottoman Empire came to an end, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey as a secular state, however some Islamic influence remains.
Because of this binary history of Anatolia, a Turk can either be a Muslim or a Kemalist secularist and fit perfectly well into Turkish society. However, Christianity, particularly Catholicism is loathed in Turkey. Little points out that in movies set in the Ottoman era, the Christians are always the villains. Christian women are portrayed as lustful and sexually aggressive toward noble Turkish men. If a virtuous Christian woman exists in these movies, she ends up converting to Islam in the end. Little also talks about the crusades and how they’re portrayed in school. They’re simply unprovoked Christian wars of aggression against the Muslims who haven’t done the slightest thing wrong. Sadly, that’s the view of them here in Canada and we’re not even a Muslim country. She points out that in Turkey there is hostility to other religions and also heretical Islamic sects but Christianity takes the cake as the most hated religion in the republic.
Little became an atheist in her teens. She simply studied the life of Muhammad and decided that this religion was bogus. Now, she didn’t exactly jump to Christianity at that point. After all, Christianity is just a corrupted version of Islam and if the best religion in the world is a farce, the others can only be worse.
Luckily, Derya Little had some encounters with Christian missionaries and eventually a Jesuit priest. She talks about how her family reacted when she converted to Christianity. Spoiler alert, her father went on the balcony and cried for hours. After all, why not? She had converted to the most loathed religion in the country.
She talks about how she moved to England and eventually to America to live with her husband. The wedding was actually in a Catholic Church in Ankara and her father didn’t attend. Derya and her husband now live in Pennsylvania and have many children.
The book is interesting because it talks about a country with inner workings relatively unknown in the West. Most people in Canada and America don’t know anything about Turkey. This book gives a lot of details about Turkish life.
Definitely get the book if you’re interested in conversion stories or even other cultures. However if you don’t you can always watch her conversion story compressed into one hour on Journey Home where she’s interviewed by Marcus Grodi. Thank you Derya for sharing your amazing story!
This is a superb interview. What a very likeable, clever and reasonable woman she is. She has a very down-to-earth approach. There are surely more Turks out there like her, ready to be free of Mohammedanism.
Thank you for pointing this out.
Christopher
Hi Christopher,
When I was in University, I knew a lot of Turks. Not one was religious. Getting a Turk away from Islam isn’t that hard. Getting them to Christianity is the tough part.
God bless,
Allan