Hello again friends,

This is the final week of Ramadan. BIG thing here. This weekend apparently everybody leaves town (like "everybody ... going to the lake" in Minnesota, I assume) to visit their relatives in their hometown, so a bus or plane ticket can't be had for love or money. The three (?) days following the end of Ramazan are called Seker Bayram (the first word, with a sh sound at the beginning, means sugar or sweet) because children go around collecting sweets from everybody, or at least from members of their families.

I've already gotten sidetracked, but here as in other things this Muslim culture doesn't seem all that different from our own at times. Other times it does.

According to Islamic tradition, Ramadan is the month in which Muhammad started to receive the Qur'an from God through the angel Gabriel. (Gabriel apparently had a pretty good gig, both in Christianity and in Islam.) The Night of Power is the night during which Muhammad started to receive the revelation. No one knows exactly which night that was, but tradition holds that it was one of the odd-numbered nights in the last week or 10 days of the month. From what I understand from my reading, the 27th night of Ramadan is accepted as the most likely night. Last night was the 27th night.

A few days ago I met another friendly Turk, a young man named Alper who is from Konya but lives in Istanbul now. Alper is quite devout and has taken me into several mosques. I'm learning quite a bit from Alper. I read today that one kind of devotion that Muslims are encouraged to show especially during Ramazan is to explain about Islam to anyone who is interested. The timing may have been just right for both of us.

I'd just visited the Süleymaniye mosque (most likely the grandest of the "imperial mosques" in Istanbul) and was sitting in its courtyard drawing the multidomed facade, when Alper came over, introduced himself, and asked to see what I was drawing. That first conversation has led to hours more in the past several days and to some enlightening experiences, many of which have had to do with going to the mosques at prayer times. Alper says it's understood as a good thing in Islam to pray in many different mosques.

Non-Muslims are welcome in the mosques, but usually through a side door and at busy prayer times those doors are sometimes locked. I have seen groups of tourists gathering for pictures in parts of the mosque beyond signs that say please don't go any further, but nobody seems to enforce such things. Alper just kind of shrugged, saying you can't force people to do what you've asked them to do. The Islam I've seen here is not coercive.

A couple of times when the visitors' door has been locked, Alper has simply taken me in through the main door. If he needs to go do his prayers, he finds a place for me to sit and then comes back for me when he's done. Earlier in the week he said that on the 27th night of Ramazan, people are in the mosques all night praying. He and his friends go from mosque to mosque on that night. The devout Muslim's equivalent of bar-hopping or an art crawl, I guess. Much to my surprise, he asked if I wanted to go with them. I said sure, if it was OK. He assured me it was.

Everybody rushes to be home or in a restaurant for the evening azan during Ramazan--I know that now after last week's faux pas--and Alper has treated me to a couple of iftar meals this week. He won't let me pay for my food. (He's also bought me two books. All I've gotten away with so far to show my appreciation, besides giving effusive thanks, is a scarf I gave him that has the name of his favorite soccer team on it - another passion here.) So traffic is a monster right before the azan. We were underground in a subway station on the way to our train when a PA announcement let everybody know that the azan was sounding. Nobody stopped. We all just continued to rush on home. Newspapers also print the times of the azans every day and some restaurants have little signs on the tables listing the times of the azans for every day in Ramazan.

Long story short, we did head out to the mosques eventually after dinner at Alper's apartment, but later than he might have planned. We went to the Fatih mosque (Fatih means conqueror, and this one is dedicated to Fatih Mehmet, the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople in 1453) and later tried to go to the Eyüp mosque, which I mentioned last time, but traffic was so bad with everybody trying to get there that Alper's friends (with whom we were driving) joked that the illuminated letters between the minarets said "No parking here. Don't even try." We never did find a parking place in Eyüp. And this was after midnight--streets packed with pedestrians and with cars trying to find a parking place.

We had gotten into the Fatih mosque though. It was quite crowded. Again Alper found me a place to sit while he and his friends found other men to pray with. Women were praying at the back of the mosque or in the balconies. Earlier in the week when I'd asked Alper about that, he said women must pray behind the men so the men aren't distracted from their prayers. When I asked Alper (age 26) if there was no worry that women might be distracted by seeing the men, he looked a little embarrassed, also like maybe he'd never thought of that, and said something about how women can't see the men from the side balconies if they need to avoid distraction.

In the Fatih mosque last night, all around me men were praying or sitting quietly and talking. Some fathers had their young sons with them. Some men came in groups, most came alone, some were in suits, some in T-shirts, most in what seems to be the uniform of Turkish men of a certain age--an old sports coat and an open-necked dress shirt, no tie. Many wore those small brimless kufi hats (Alper's friend who wears one calls it something like a tekka,) many didn't. It is good but not necessary - for men and for women - to cover their hair, he said. Some sat quietly praying with a tespih, which looks like a rosary. I didn't check the time too closely, but I know we were there for over an hour. It was quiet, peaceful. Nobody expressed any objection to my being there, though I was the only one I saw who wasn't doing the prayer rituals and prostrations from time to time. I just sat quietly and did some praying on my own in my own way. I have bought a tespih, which I use from time to time in as inconspicuous a way as I can.

I've been in about half a dozen mosques now. Some are huge, some smaller than the sanctuary at First Church. Some have a dizzying array of tiles, some are much simpler. The Fatih mosque and the Süleymaniye mosque remind me a bit of European cathedrals--big open spaces, more exposed stone than in many mosques, beautiful decorations in the arches on the sides as well as in the dome and half-domes. One main difference between mosques and old stone cathedrals, of course, is that mosques are carpeted, so they are much quieter. They are calming, peaceful spaces.

I thought of asking Alper and his friends at the Fatih mosque last night if I could pray with them, doing the same ritual of standing and kneeling. But I didn't. Something within me wanted to participate. Much of what I understand to be the core of Islam (and the loving, generous parts of it that people here emphasize) is also at the core of Christianity. And I would have felt less conspicuous--and less distracted--joining in. I've watched men doing it often enough now that maybe I could fit in well enough not to distract anybody. When I was in Berkeley last winter for a conference I met a Southern Baptist minister from Atlanta who says he prays in a mosque there with his Muslim partners from an interreligious dialog. So it's not totally beyond the pale, at least according to some (though an article I read on the internet today gave the impression that it might have been a good thing I didn't ask.) But I didn't want to interrupt Alper and his friends, and as I've already said, we didn't make it into any other mosques last night.

There's something about the rituals and the space within the mosques themselves, as well as the friendly and egalitarian nature of the mosque (within each gender, anyway, which is another topic) that I find moving and beautiful. And there's a mystery to the language and the way in which the Qur'an is chanted/recited/sung that's very compelling. Again, much more could be said.

I've noted and benefited from a real generosity of spirit among the Muslims I've met and observed here. I think Turkish Islam is especially that way, much influenced as it is by the Sufis and by the general religious tolerance of the Ottoman empire. This is not Saudi Arabia or Iraq by any means, and the Turks I've met are genuinely dismayed and disgusted by al-Qaeda. I'm very happy to be here, and it's been quite a blessing to be here during Ramazan.

One thing I've noted here as at home: Muslims seem much more interested in talking about Islam than in asking about Christianity (which is fine; I didn't come here to talk about Christianity). In part I think they think they already know what they need to know about Christianity since they read about Jesus and Mary in the Qur'an. But occasionally they're very curious when I indicate that I hold many of the same beliefs and values that they do. And I've been asked more than once if I believe in one God. Many Muslims think Christians believe in three--that Trinity thing is so confusing to everybody, Christians included.

A couple of extraneous comments on other experiences I've had, again thanks to Alper:

A couple of days ago he took me to a Mehter concert. Mehter is Ottoman martial music, very macho, VERY LOUD, performed in period uniforms, including a couple of men in chain mail and helmets marching and stomping in place. A lot of the musicians wear bright red uniforms. Usually it's played outdoors and Turks sing along raucously, but this was in a large concert hall at the Military Museum. We weren't sitting very close (that would surely do ear damage), but still I could feel the vibrations of the biggest drums in my chest. Ottomans used Mehter music like Scots used bagpipes in battle, to inspire the troops and intimidate the enemy. The final piece was somewhere between comical and downright terrifying. The rest of the concert was all very disciplined. But this was every man for himself. It sounded like nothing so much as the grand finale of a fireworks display: Shouting, beating drums, everybody making the loudest racket they could and shouting something about Muhammad and Allah.

That, Alper told me afterward, was "the attack song."

There still seems to be quite a lot of pride in past military glories and quite an attachment to heroism. This is surely part of the Turkish government's adamant refusal that there was an Armenian genocide. "The Turkish nation is not a murderer," as some bigwig was quoted as saying the other day in the paper. (According to what I read here, it was also a more complicated situation than many of us have heard in the West, if we know anything about it at all.) It doesn't matter that it's not the Turkish republic that's being accused of genocide. There's still a lot of pride in the imperial Ottoman past.

Related to this in a way (pride in the past, not the dispute about "the Armenian tragedy"), Alper took me yesterday to a place called Miniatürk. I'd read a condescending entry about it in my guidebook, saying it's a mystery why Turks love this place so much, but I ended up thinking it was pretty cool. A little kitschy, yes, but fun and informative, too.

At first it looks like a grand miniature golf course, but without the golf. Covering something less than the size of a football field, it's a display of models of famous buildings in Turkey, from the Greek amphitheater at some city on the Mediterranean, to Haghia Sophia, to lots and lots of famous mosques from the Seljuk and Ottoman periods to Atatürk's tomb--and even Atatürk International Airport, complete with 4-foot-long 747s taxiing in. Most of the buildings are about 2 feet tall, some are bigger, some smaller. There's even a section on famous Islamic buildings from Ottoman times, like the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem (Kudus(?) in Turkish; al-Quds in Arabic--Alper had never heard of "Jerusalem").

One more thing before closing. Remember how in a previous email I mentioned the rarity of having a minaret with no loudspeaker right outside my apartment garden? Well, today they put a loudspeaker in. I now have a front-row seat to the azans now, five times a day. The nighttime azan is sounding now for the first time, and there's a child in one of the neighboring apartment screaming.

Next azan is at dawn.

Sweet dreams.