Ali Rıza Efendi

He is simply Mustafa, a common name, unremarkable, chosen without any premonition of the world-altering shape his life will eventually take.

His father, Ali Rıza, works as a minor customs official, though the word "official" flatters a position that pays little and promises less.

He has tried his hand at timber trading, too, with mixed fortune, and the family's economic footing shifts constantly beneath them, never quite secure, never quite desperate.

Ali Rıza is a man caught between two worlds in a way that will come to define his son's entire life, though neither of them can see this yet.

It feeds him verses but starves the part of his mind that wants explanation, structure, cause and effect.

He is a boy who likes to see how things fit together, and the mekteb offers him pieces without ever showing him the machine.

His father watches this friction and makes a decision that will prove, in retrospect, to be one of the quietly pivotal choices of his son's early life.

Ali Reza withdraws Mustafa from the religious school and enrolls him instead in a very different kind of institution, the School of Şemsi Efendi, a private establishment that teaches in what was then considered a modern, secular style: arithmetic, geography, the sciences, subjects organized by logic rather than liturgy.