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In 1999, when I moved to Scotland for my Master’s degree, I made the acquaintance of a Turkish PhD candidate.

He wasn’t my first Turkish friend. The previous year, while still studying in London, I had attended a Turkish-led study circle for a time. Before that, I had known a secular student who had helped me celebrate my twentieth birthday ignominiously.

So it was that I came to ask my friend in Scotland, “Do you know such and such?”

Hearing me, he laughed aloud: “There are two-hundred-thousand Turks in London!”

He was right to be amused by my naivety. And yet…

Three years later, at our wedding in Istanbul, we sat him and his wife next to my wife’s best friend, and it turned out they knew one another!

I should have guffawed, “But there are sixty-five million Turks in Turkey!”

Yet, in truth, nothing surprises me anymore. At sixteen, I attended a Christian youth festival on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. While there, I made friends with a youth worker, to whom I’d write from time to time.

Their address? Yes, it turned out they lived on the same road in Ealing my wife lived on, and we’d live on together for the first few years of marriage.

Hearing me recount these tales, some would say, “Pure coincidence!” Others would say, “Not even that; you’re just projecting patterns onto what is purely random.”

Perhaps that’s so. Perhaps I’m daft to ascribe significance to such happenstance. But then why not?

Isn’t it at least amazing that out of London’s sixty-thousand streets, two close personal relationships should have been situated within walking distance of one another?

It’s true: I’m in awe that when I traveled for Hajj in 2007, I sat down in a tent besides two doctors who knew my mother, one of whom lived around the corner from my childhood home.

I have recounted all of this before. About how I prayed for a wife like my Turkish friend’s wife in Scotland, only to be granted a companion with the same name.

Oh yes, and that we had both embraced the faith on this same Bank Holiday weekend, twenty-five years ago, unbeknownst to one another, until we were introduced three years later.

Yes, coincidences. Patterns. Seeing meaning where there’s none. Yes, I know this is what people say. So say that.

But for me? Signs on the horizons and within yourselves. I can’t account for it any other way. Divine decree.