He was not elected president of Turkey, and these villagers were not American citizens. The reason, I believe, is that they saw something universal in Obama, wanted to participate in that historic moment and celebrated his election by performing the timeless ritual of animal sacrifice.I don't know how many Michael Jackson fans there are in Turkey. But when a group of villagers in the village of Mercimekli in the eastern province of Mardin said prayers for the dead in absence over Jackson, he was given the highest honor a Muslim community can give to someone they have never met. The Muslim prayer was organized by the Association for the Dialogue of Religions, Languages and Civilizations. After the prayers, its president, Mehmet Ali Aslan, said the following: “Michael Jackson was a living legend and belonged not only to the United States but to the whole world. He was owned by not only the members of Islam or Christianity but all religions.” Aslan added that his association understands the importance of embracing all universal values and Jackson was a universal phenomenon to which they could not have remained indifferent.
It is really striking to see this small group of Muslims reciting funeral prayers for Jackson. Under normal circumstances, such a prayer in absence is performed only for really important people because funeral prayers require the physical presence of the dead before the congregation. It is clear that Jackson was important for the people in Mardin. But what is even more striking is that under Shariah law, Muslim prayers for the dead can be performed only for Muslims. We don't know if Jackson ever embraced Islam; we know his brother Jermaine did, and Jackson himself had developed an interest in Islam and had some Muslim friends from the Gulf region, but the residents of Mercimekli did not seek any evidence. They simply felt that he deserved the Muslim funeral prayers whether he was a Muslim or not.
This is a moment of globalization. This is where the celebrity culture of late modernity meets a village setting and overcomes the boundaries between the global and the local. This is the globalization of culture, cross-cultural emotions, multiple identities and unnamed social networks. This particular incident unveils the extent to which the symbols of hyper-modernity travel across the world's cultures and communities in all directions. Jackson was a global phenomenon and had entered millions of homes around the world. This was Jackson's moment of globalization. But it is also true that those millions of fans had opened themselves up to the “promise” of the Jackson phenomenon; by embracing Jackson, they too participate in that moment and create their version of globalization.
Jackson's life, like many celebrities of his stature, was a “Truman Show.” His musical talent, groundbreaking dancing, hyperbolic lifestyle, his “color problem,” the endless and ill-advised attempts to remain young, aesthetic surgeries, the child-molestation charges, the extravagant lifestyle, the shopping sprees, his interviews, the “Neverland” of which he was proud but to outsiders was no more than an entertainment prison, his childish desire to be the Peter Pan of his generation… All these things happened before everyone's eyes. This, too, is a trait of hypermodernity: more visibility, more intrusion, more surveillance.
The residents of Mercimekli embody the Muslim reaction to globalization in Jackson's personality. The symbolic tension between Islam's serenity and Jackson's extravagant lifestyle is bracketed together and the multi-layered Muslim identity of the Mercimekli villagers allows them to embrace Jackson as one of their own. The reason for this is simple yet profound: crossing boundaries in all directions is increasingly becoming a leitmotif of our age. The Muslim acceptance of the Jackson phenomenon is a manifestation of this. The question is whether we can generate some good out of this without falling prey to the temptations of consumerism.
