Editor's note: Imagine if a young woman who had her whole life ahead of her stood up against bullies. Imagine after her courageous act she was attacked and subsequently died. Now imagine if she wore a turban. She would be hailed as a shaheed. Yet are the acts of this young woman who didn't hesitate to stand up for righteousness and lost her life for this high ideal, are they not shaheed quality acts? Below is an article about Tugce Albayrac the 23 year old German woman who recently passed away.
In Sikh history to put it as simply as possible, the Khalsa were created to stop bullies. I believe very strongly that the spirit of Khalsa is exhibited in many people throughout the world in various ways though they may not have even heard of 'Khalsa'. It is high spirits, the spirit of justice and devotion. When someone protects an innocent or brings a truly corrupt person to justice, this is the Khalsa spirit in action. I also be believe that our Guru is not just our Guru, our Guru is the Guru of the world. Meaning that our Guru teaches the whole world and holds all people as sacred children. Those with the Khalsa spirit are surely closer in the Guru's lap. Just as Guru ji knows our inner thoughts and feelings, surely he sees all with an equal and loving eye. I can not imagine that Guru ji is not pleased with the bright spirit of Tugce!
While the country of Germany is yet to decide whether to posthumously award her with a National Medal of Honor, to me it is clear how Sikhs stand. We celebrate the courage of one of our own. We take heart and confidence that many more will take the task of righteousness even at our own risk. We boldly shout cries of victory. We respect those who died doing what is right. We deeply honor martyrs. We remember shaheeds.
AKAAAAAAL!!!!
Thousands are expected to attend funeral of student Tuğçe Albayrak who was attacked after defending teenagers
Scrolling through the picture stream on her mobile phone, Tutku Keskin proudly shows off countless images of her cousin, Tugce Albayrak: at her school leaving concert, celebrating Germany’s World Cup win and holding her new baby niece.
Then the pictures of the spirited, beaming woman come to an abrupt halt, and are followed instead by images and videos of Tutku and other family members clutching candles at the vigil for Tugce outside the clinic in Offenbach where she spent two weeks in a coma before dying last Friday, her 23rd birthday.
Hundreds of friends and family visited Tugce, some camping in a designated room, sustained by a samovar of tea. Even Pascha, Tugce’s beloved terrier-chihuahua, was brought to her bedside.
Tutku, 17, recalls how around 6pm on Friday a hush descended on the crowd of 3,000 well-wishers gathered outside as Tugce’s parents, Ali and Sultan, appeared at the window of their daughter’s room. A photograph shows them gazing down, dressed in green hospital gowns, face masks around their necks and their arms around each other. Their faces are full of grief and bewilderment.
They were to turn off their daughter’s life support machine 90 minutes later, after doctors had told them she was brain dead and would never recover.
“I have lost my dear friend, my confidante, my older sister,” says Tutku, wiping her face. “But Tugce is with the angels now, and she has brought the whole world together.”
The tragic story of Tugce Albayrak, a teaching student at Justus Liebig university in Giessen whose family emigrated from Turkey in the late 1970s, has ignited an outpouring of public grief that is rare for Germany in its reach and intensity – and not least because of her family’s immigrant origins.
It has also triggered intense debate about ordinary citizens’ willingness to demonstrate “civil courage”, or resistance to wrongdoing, despite the personal risk involved.
The family’s world imploded on the morning of 15 November, when Tugce was attacked in the car park of a McDonald’s in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, after she had responded to the screams of two teenagers trapped in the corner of the toilet of the restaurant by a man who had been threatening them.
“Tugce told him he had no right to be in the ladies and he should please leave,” says Reyhan Albayrak, her aunt, who has spoken extensively to the four friends who were also there. When the man refused to leave, two men of Afghan origin, who had been eating burgers, entered the toilet and, putting the man in a stranglehold position, dragged him away and threw him out of the building.
“The girls described how he had angrily wagged his finger at Tugce, as if to say ‘I’ll get you’,” Reyhan says.
When Tugce and her friends left an hour later, the man was waiting for her. Footage from a security camera in the car park, shows how, despite repeated attempts by another man to restrain him, he managed to lunge at Tugce, who within a split second was lying motionless on the ground.
As the men tried to drive off, one of the women restrained the driver by holding his collar, allowing another to photograph the car’s number plate.
At the same time the two other friends were tending to Tugce, who was bleeding and rapidly losing consciousness.
That photograph reportedly led to the swift tracking down of the alleged attacker, an 18-year-old identified only as Sanel M from the Sandzak region of south-west Serbia. He has admitted attacking Tugce, and is being held at a youth detention centre in Wiesbaden.
An autopsy has yet to decide whether it was the blow to Tugce’s head or the impact when she hit the ground that proved fatal.
Ahead of her funeral on Wednesday, Tugce’s family paid tribute to the girl who has been referred to as everything from “the pretty face of civil courage” to “the heroine of Offenbach”.
“She was the most generous and natural of people,” Yasni, 51, Tugce’s uncle, said. “From the time she was a little girl, she was always a loving and outgoing character.”
Her cousin Tutku, a trainee dental assistant, described her as her personal agony aunt. “I could call her up about anything, and she never minded. She told me and my sister ‘be true to yourself’.
She chided me for initially not supporting Germany at the World Cup, saying: ‘but you are German, you’ve lived here all your life!’. The last conversation we had was when she visited us for tea and cake three weeks ago and we discussed what we would wear to a family engagement party.
Aunt Reyhan says her niece had a normal appetite for youth culture, including “Meggers”, as they called McDonald’s, where she and friends liked to hang out “partly because it didn’t sell alcohol and seemed like a safer place than a bar”. But she also loved philosophy, especially Confucius, as well as finding comfort in the writings of Atatürk, the moderniser of Turkish society and something of an idol for young Turks.
In her last Facebook posting on the anniversary of his death on November 10, only five days before she was attacked, she wrote next to a portrait of him: “Love in November is different, because it reminds us of immortality. We commemorate with a great respect and gratitude.”
The Albayrak family arrived in Germany in the late 1970s – following the route of many a Turkish Gastarbeiter, or guest worker, before them – from an Anatolian village called Bahadin, and settling in the western state of Hesse.
“My father (Tugce’s grandfather) had been working at the Opel carplant in Russelsheim for several years and my mother joined him and decided to bring the five children over,” says Reyhan, who was a toddler at the time. “For my mother the decision could not have been clearer cut. Turkey was riven by violence at the time. We collected our water from a well, had no electricity, not even a radio. In Germany everything was clean and modern and there was work.”
At the start, life was hard. “It was us, the Turks, and them, the Germans,” she said. “Integration did not exist.”
By and by, all five children gave birth. There were to be a succession of nine boys before Tugce came along in 1991. “She was our first princess,” says Uncle Yasni. “We treasured her all the more for that.”
Tugce’s parents – her father works at a car plastics production plant and her mother as a clinical assistant – were seen as particularly exemplary amongst the Turkish diaspora for the way they encouraged their children’s education – something they had no access to themselves. Tugce was in her second year at university, training to be a secondary school teacher of German and ethics. “She was a very good student and an extremely popular person,” a university spokeswoman said.
Her Facebook profile picture fittingly shows her smiling shyly in front of a blackboard, almost swallowed up by its energetic mass of multi-coloured chalkings.
“Seeing Tugce, in particular, doing so well was her grandmother’s pride and joy,” says Reyhan. “A sign that all the sufferings and homesickness we as a family endured, was somehow worth it.” No German Turk forgets their origins, she says. Not for nothing has Tugce been dubbed “the angel of Bahadin”, a village she never even visited, by the Turkish press.
The family says it has felt immensely buoyed by the support it has received. It has included Eintracht Frankfurt striker Haris Seferovic revealing a t-shirt under his football shirt bearing the slogan “Tugce equals #civil courage #angel #courage #respect during a match against Dortmund at the weekend. President Joachim Gauck has said he is considering awarding Germany’s highest order of merit to Tugce.
Thousands are expected to attend Tugce’s funeral at a mosque close to Bad Soden-Salmünster the town where she was born.
“I think the reaction forty years ago would have been very different,” says Reyhan. “Then they might have said ‘that foreign girl probably got what was coming to her’. Instead they refer to her as the helpful student who did the right thing at the right time.”