Francisco Öztürk: A Turkish poet and a former leader of the Muslim community in the country.

Etfik Nuru: Another name in Turkish but an expert writer. According to one scholar, he had been “born of a Turkish father and a German mother; they were married for 40 years, divorced once during the revolution and they divorced again while he was still an adult. She was a Muslim, he was a non-Muslim. However, if the word ‘Allah’ is found in his works, it is of the title ‘Ihram,’ or ‘Mystery’ of all the religious texts.” Nuru was a religious scholar of the Türkic origin, but, though he had studied a lot during his education at the university of Istanbul, he didn’t go on to become a monk (though he once was a monk as a teenager). But one of his books, The Book of the Sun, was translated into English, and the poem which is called on page 13 above is a very popular American and English poem. I don’t know the original name of this poem, but I assume it’s called ‘There is no god, all gods are fools’, from a poem called ‘Aurora of the North’ (The Aurora of the North by John Milton).

Alia Sultan: A Syrian who was among the first members of Muslim Youth Organization. In the mid-’80s she became an adviser to Abdullah Öcalan. Her first book was published in 1991. Her poetry appears in a number of magazines and was made into a film in 2005.