Selam, my friends and family,

That means Peace, and is used sometimes as a greeting here. Subtitles in movies simply translate it as "Hi." (And yes, I've continued to see some movies on my travels.)

As a bonus in this email I've attached a photo for any of you who couldn't believe what I said about the size of the cabbages and leeks in the markets. Yes, a lot of the cabbages are smaller and a few are larger, but this will give you an idea. I have yet to see leeks smaller than this. (Do they just cut the stalks short in the US or are Turkish leeks simply huge?) The fresh produce here is remarkable. And Turkish food is so good and healthy that I wonder why there aren't more Turkish restaurants in the US.

The photo was taken in the Kadiköy market (on the Asian side of the Bosporus). And for any of you who've had the joy or burden of studying church history, Kadiköy used to be known as Chalcedon, just as present-day Iznik (not too far away and home of so much of the famously beautiful tilework in Ottoman mosques) used to be known as Nicaea, home of the Nicene Creed. History just stumbles over itself right and left here. Another example: They started building a tunnel under the Bosporus from the Asian side recently but had to stop and start again in a different place because they hit the ruins of yet another ancient city.

I've stored up a lot of stuff, so I'll send a long email now. Then it'll be a while till you hear from me again since I'll be out of town for the next nine days. More on that below.

Road trip

Last Saturday I went to Edirne with Alper and a friend of his named Bunyamin. Edirne was once the capital of the Ottoman empire and is near the present border with Greece and Bulgaria, maybe 130 miles west and a bit north of Istanbul. Landscape between here and there looked a lot like the American Midwest, except for where we went along the Sea of Marmara and where we could see what looked like mountains off to the north. We got a very late start because of traffic and lots of other reasons and so didn't get past the airport, where traffic finally eased up, till after 4. Along the way we passed hundreds of apartment buildings and at least one area that must have been the kind of settlement an expat described to me when she told me about a part of town "where if you can put up a house in a day they let you keep it." Istanbul is a city of close to 20 million and has swollen in size in the past 15 years or so. They're quite concerned about what will happen when the next big earthquake hits, in large part I assume because some of the new housing is substandard.

Once outside the city, the road was just like any American interstate. At sunset we stopped at a rest stop so Bunyamin and Alper could pray. Again, the rest stop was like any American one-except that it had a mescit (the c in Turkish is pronounced like our j), which is a prayer room. Mosques here tend to be grand buildings, even when they're not huge. Mescits are simple prayer rooms where there is no mosque.

The main reason for going to Edirne is to see the mosques, one in particular which is the only one we had time to see. The Selimiye mosque is the pride of Mimar Sinan, the best known Ottoman architect, and it is splendid. Well worth the 5-hour drive, round trip, and hard to describe in just a few words. (Actually I'm probably just trying to cram too much into this email.) But I do have pictures, a video actually that I took with our digital camera. I took it primarily to see if I could also record the audio of the imam chanting the Qur'an. Until now I've refrained from taking any photos at main worship times, but I was able to be unobtrusive sitting in the back with my camera in my lap, so I think this was OK. Finally it gives some sense of what it's really like to be in such a space at a non-touristy time.

Or does it? It was a beautiful sound, haunting I guess. Maybe sublime is the best word. And in the huge open space of the mosque, so gorgeously and simply decorated, the reverberations seemed to hang timelessly. There's no way really to do it justice with an itty bitty camera with audio, but the video clip is enough to remind me of it anyway. Whether it could really convey the beauty of it to someone else I don't know. So much of this trip has been like that actually. I try to describe scenes and aspects, but do words or photos really convey it? Maybe. But fully? No.

Qur'an reciters and more gender observations

A while back Alper was visiting when I had a CD playing, a collection of Qur'an reciters. It accompanies a book I've been reading about the Qur'an and its language. One reciter came on who clearly sounded like a woman to me. "He's very young," Alper observed. I looked up the name: Hajjah Mariah Ulfah. (A Hajji is a man who has gone to Mecca on the Hajj or pilgrimage.) "Isn't this a woman?" I asked. No, Alper told me; it couldn't be. "Even with this name?" I asked. No, he said. He didn't know what Hajjah meant, and maybe this man uses his mother's name (Maria), Alper guessed. So later I looked in my book, and of course, she is a woman and, it turns out, a very well-known and highly respected Qur'an reciter from Indonesia. But it was just more than Alper could imagine. When I showed him the bio about her in the book later, he simply seemed confused and said he wasn't familiar with this.

I also got into an interesting conversation with Emre, one of Alper's flatmates, a week or so ago. He was playing a subtitled TV program for me off his computer, of a Ramadan prayer time in Mecca, where one of the Meccan reciters (very important people) was chanting the Qur'an. Lots that's of interest there, but I'll just remark on one side conversation we had.

One of the passages in the Qur'an that was recited mentions Lot (as a prophet, I think). Lot isn't exactly a big figure in the Bible, but he does play a role in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was wary of getting too deep into this conversation, but I asked if they had a similar story about Sodom in the Qur'an. Emre wasn't sure exactly where it comes from, but he knew the story. I asked him what the understanding was of the sin of Sodom. "You really want to know?" he asked rather sheepishly. Yes, I assured him, because there is some debate about it in Christianity. (For those who don't know about the debate, Jesus among others seems to indicate that their sin wasn't homosexuality but the lack of (indeed the opposite of) hospitality. You could certainly add sexual violence, etc., but no point in going into a long discussion here.) So what is the sin of Sodom in Islamic eyes (at least according to this young man)?

Bisexuality

Maybe homosexuality is so off the radar screen that the assumption is that all men are heterosexual, and if they have sexual attraction to or appetite for other men, that makes them bisexual, and that's the sin. Or maybe this young man was too embarrassed even to say the word homosexual. I don't know.

What he might have had to say about women's sexuality I didn't even think I could ask.

Praying off the floor

One night last week Alper was over at my apartment when it came time for the evening prayer. He excused himself to go to the mosque on my block, but came back a few minutes later, quite disturbed. The mosque is still being built and it was locked, but the muezzin amplifies his azans from the minaret. I could see Alper's point. Why call people to prayer from a mosque that you can't get into to pray in? So he asked if he could pray in my apartment. Of course, I said. He started to look around. I offered him a clean bedspread to lay out on the floor to pray on. He declined and asked me if I would help him carry in a bench that's on my patio. We brought the bench in and then guessed which direction Mecca was. He stood, kneeled, and prostrated on the bench while he did his prayers. It would have been comical if he weren't so very sincere.

My apartment is pretty clean, but I don't take my shoes off whenever I come in. (Neither does he.) But it is the custom here when you go to someone's house to leave your shoes at the door (just like Scandinavians in Minnesota in the winter, but for a very different reason). Alper and his flatmates also have plastic sandals that they use when they step into the bathroom and then leave in the bathroom when they're finished, so the floor of the apartment stays very clean. They also vacuum after their meals, which they eat together while sitting on the living room floor. Then they do their prayers there.

The prophet Muhammad recommended eating on the floor, they tell me. Sitting like that helps prevent overeating, because your stomach is pressed a bit. They're often very interested in explaining about their religion and what the prophet said and did. (I'm often impressed with how Islam is really a way of living at least as much as it is a system of faith.) When they pray, in addition to having done the necessary ablutions (washing of hands and arms and feet, ears and face), they pray in a clean place. And of course, there's the whole thing of taking off your shoes before entering a mosque or mescid. It's very important to take off your shoes and then step directly onto the carpeted step outside the mosque so you don't dirty your feet again before stepping into the mosque. Nobody wants to kneel or prostrate in a dirty place, plus cleanliness-which is next to godliness, as a famous non-Muslim once said-is a way of showing respect to God.

While I've come across many men who want to tell me about Islam, few have shown much interest in asking about Christianity. America they have more interest in. ("Are there still cowboys?" two of them asked the other day. "And are there still Indians?") In part I think their disinterest in asking about religion comes from thinking they know a lot about Christianity and Judaism already. The Qur'an contains several references to Jesus and the Virgin Mary (yes, they have that story, too) and Moses and Noah and Joseph (he of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat), and lots of references to Christians and Jews. So, just as many Christians assume they know all they need to know about Judaism because Christianity came later and the Christian Bible includes the Hebrew Bible, many Muslims seem to assume that they know a lot about Christianity and Judaism. Sometimes they do. But many also have some serious misconceptions. I've come across some very interesting ideas and a few that are quite strange. But that's another long and complicated subject.

We in the US have a lot of misconceptions about Islam, too, of course. The main one perhaps (beyond assuming that Osama bin Laden represents all Muslims-and by the way, all the Muslims I've met both here and in Minneapolis insist that he's not a Muslim at all) is that Islam is both monolithic and can be boiled down to the way the Sunnis and the Shia are tearing each other apart in Iraq. Neither of those things is true. And if you stop to think about it, they're even contradictory.

The UCC missionary I met here said she thinks Turkey and Turkish Islam are the keys to peace in the Middle East. In some ways I think she's right. I have heard so much about love and tolerance from Muslims here, and again, not just from a small group of people who all know each other. There's a Turk named Fethullah Gülen whose name keeps coming up as perhaps the clearest teacher of Islam as it's understood by many (most?) people here. I've read some of his writing. Reminds me of the Dalai Lama in some ways, but Gülen comes to his love for love and tolerance from a devout and specifically God-centered, Muslim perspective. It's a voice and an understanding of Islam that we rarely hear in the US-even though Gülen apparently lives in Pennsylvania.

Conservatives? Fundamentalists? Fanatics?

I had dinner the other night with a man named Bülent. He's a tour guide, and I asked him about his favorite parts of town, which led to a discussion of his least favorite parts. He mentioned an area called Çarsamba (pronounced with a ch and a sh sound). Çarsamba means Wednesday. That part of Istanbul has a big market on Wednesdays, so it's called Çarsamba.

"Don't go there," he said. "Or actually, do go there. Just dress simply."

Çarsamba is not an unsafe part of town. It's just a very conservative part of town. Which actually makes it quite safe. A true fear of God can really keep people in line! Islam has quite an emphasis on Judgment Day, which goes hand in hand with its emphasis on justice and taking care of the poor. Bülent described Çarsamba as what we'd call an Islamist part of town, where the people really want the government to be based in Islam. According to its constitution, Turkey has to have a secular government, though the present government is a lot more religious than many previous ones were. (Insert your own American parallel here.) Whether that makes people in Çarsamba favor a Taliban-style government, I'm not sure, but I'm hesitant to jump to that conclusion. Still, I have heard some Turks (both men and women) dismiss quite conservative Turkish Muslims as "fundamentalists" and "fanatics." Again, you'd have to know more than I do to be able to evaluate those claims, but the harshness of tone people used in speaking of Islamists here really jumped out at me.

It's hard to draw significant conclusions from how people dress, but we Westerners tend to put a lot of stake in that regarding Muslim women, and I did notice there were a lot more in Çarsamba wearing headscarves or the full black gown. I should also say that on my way into Çarsamba I also saw a few huge high-fashion advertisements on the sides of stores showing stylish professional-looking women in headscarves. In the market I did a rough count of the first 100 women I saw. Two-thirds to 3/4 were wearing headscarves, and a third to a half of those were wearing full black chadors (if I have my terms right). There seemed to be no general separation between the women who wore no headscarves and those who wore any kind of traditional clothing. As I left the market I was right behind an old woman in the full black chador and a middle-aged woman who wore no scarf at all. They were joking together like neighbors, or maybe they were mother and daughter. I think we draw too many conclusions from dress alone.

Olives, dogs, and angels

I've really enjoyed Istanbul, but it is nice to get out of the city every once in a while. One day last week I took a ferry out to "the islands"-about an hour's ride out into the Sea of Marmara. No cars are allowed there, though most of the nine islands have year-round residents and sizable villages. It's very quiet, quite a contrast to Istanbul. I got off at the next-to-largest island and climbed a steep street and then a really long and wide stairway to the top of the ridge. It reminded me of some Mayan temple. At the very top I was in a pine forest and could hear only the wind whispering through. In front of me and behind me I could see the blue sea below and a beautiful sky above.

Later, back in town I saw a few things I hadn't seen before. One was women shaking olive trees to get the ripe fruit to fall. Another was the "Dikkat Köpek Var" signs on house gates-the Turkish equivalent of "Beware of Dog." You often see stray dogs sunning themselves in plazas or sleeping in doorways in Istanbul. Many have ear tags, so I guess the city gives them their shots, but having dogs as pets is rare here. According to a magazine in my apartment, there's an Islamic saying that angels won't enter a house where a dog lives. People in Istanbul seem to treat the dogs well, even fondly, but they don't take them in. I may have told you about the carpet shop owner Isabel and I visited with a few weeks ago who was grieving the death of his street's cat, whom he called Rainbow.

And oh, those cats. While the dogs that I've seen are invariably docile, the catfights you hear at night could raise the dead. Two were going at it one night outside my door as I was talking with Robin on the phone, and she could hear them loud and clear.

OK, now I'll put on my travel guide hat one more time. (The longer I'm here, the more I'd love to come back with a group of people and show them some of the places I've found. Care to hire me?)

Lesson No. Whatever (I've lost count)

Saturday morning I was trying to find a cafe in a building near my apartment. A man on the ground floor showed me to the elevator, held up three fingers and said (in English), "Two." Turns out he did mean three. An innocent mistake, no biggie. The other day I was sitting in a little public square. A man was going from bench to bench selling cheap little bracelets, calling out "Bir lira, bir lira" (one lira). Then he came to me and said in English, "Ten lira."

Learn to count in Turkish before you come.

Also check around if you're shopping. Sometimes merchants will drastically inflate a price just to see if you'll bite. Back when I first arrived, I was checking prices on scarves. One shopkeeper showed me several very nice ones at what I thought were OK prices. Then I asked about a beautiful one on a separate pile. "Hand-made, cashmere/silk," he assured me. "Ottoman design from Topkapi Palace." The price? 125 lira. Which is about $80-much more than I'd ever pay at home-but when you're working in foreign currency, sometimes it takes a moment even to see the obvious. (No, I didn't buy it.) After I made friends with a carpet dealer in Kas, I asked him what's a fair price for a scarf. He took me to a friend who sells scarves and asked him. The man said they're all machine-made nowadays and you should never pay more than 30 lira.

It's nice to have a friend in the (carpet) business. My friend from Kas also passed through Istanbul last week. He said it was too bad he wasn't buying carpets on this trip or he'd take me along to his secret places so I could see him bargain with his suppliers. Now that would have been fascinating! But if I ever do come back, I'll really have to know my numbers well if I'm to have any hope of even following that conversation.

Close to the end of this run of emails

After today you'll be hearing a lot less from me. I'm leaving Istanbul tomorrow to travel in Turkey for about 9 days, much of it with friends from Minneapolis. I'll be going to Ankara first, where I'll stay with a friend I haven't seen or been in touch with for about 30 years, then joining Matthew and Kip (from Minneapolis) in Cappadocia and on a road trip to Konya, Pamukkale, Selçuk, and Ephesus. We train back into Istanbul on the 23rd and 24th. I won't be writing during that whole time. Perhaps I'll have something to say in an email on the 25th. Then on the 26th, Robin arrives. I don't expect to be spending much time with my laptop after that, though I'll send word-and maybe a photo-occasionally. December 1 we leave Turkey and make our way to Italy. It's the same day the pope flies out of Istanbul. Can't wait to see how that affects things.

Today I was back over in Sultanahmet (Old Istanbul/Constantinople/ Byzantium). It was one of those glorious fall days, the kind that bring on a sweet melancholy because you're so aware that time is passing. I felt sad to be leaving Istanbul soon. It's a kaleidoscope of a city-as loud as any modern megalopolis and as still as eternity. It's dirty, and it's golden. It's crowded, and it has some of the most sublime spaces you'll ever step into.

I do hope to come back again after this trip is over. And I hope you get the opportunity to come here at some point, too.

As I close for now, one last photo from my ferryboat ride back in from the islands.

Be well, dear ones,