Hi again family and friends,

I heard someone comment once about living in Israel that if you spend a week there, you think you could write a book, a month there and you think maybe you could contribute a chapter to a book, a year there and you just don't know what to say. I'm sure some of my observations are naïve, too specific to support much generalization, or just downright poorly informed. Take everything I say as idiosyncratic and be wary of thinking I know too much about the many things I describe and reflect on.

I also find that occasionally I need to amend or expand a bit on things I've written earlier. One recent example: Last time I mentioned the handguns that are available in several shop windows for 25 Turkish lira. My new friend Alper says they're not real guns. "They just make big boom." They certainly look real, but I can't imagine there's a huge market for them here. I've never seen anybody buy one. Alper did say you can buy pellet guns for shooting birds. Whether there's much of a hunting culture here I have no idea.

And those boats that bob right by the shore in Eminönü (down the hill from Sultanahmet) and sell very fresh fish sandwiches? Apparently they're illegal. Alper says when the cops come to shut them down, they just untie and sail off into the Golden Horn. There's a lot of looking the other way on inessential laws here, I guess. And if there are ordinances against jaywalking, nobody cares. As a matter of fact, if you're scared to jaywalk, you'll never get anywhere in this town.

Whirling dervishes

Last Saturday I invited Alper to go with me to a Sufi ceremony (a sema) at the Mevlevi "monastery" a short walk up the street from my apartment. As I may have mentioned before, Alper is from Konya, where Rumi lived and the city most closely associated with whirling dervishes, who are Sufis who dance to attain and express union with God. The Western use of the phrase "whirling like a dervish" usually conjures up the sense of being frenetic, like the Tasmanian devil in TV cartoons. It's actually a very quiet and meditative thing to witness.

I won't go into a long description here, but the dervishes (I've only seen men) come out in black cloaks over white tunics and skirts. They wear what look like tall gray thick felt hats, a bit like Hoss' 10-gallon hat from "Bonanza," for those of you who grew up with '60s TV--except without the brim, of course, and some are flat on top. The hat represents the tombstone of the dancer's ego, the white tunic and skirt its burial shroud. First the dervishes take off their black cloaks (which represent the world, someone told me) and then they turn and turn and turn, arms outstretched, the right hand palm up to receive the love of God and the left hand palm down to distribute that love to all of humanity. The dervish is thus a kind of ecstatic vessel or conduit, a seed sower of peace. They often get these trance-like expressions on their faces. It's really quite a beautiful ceremony.

Before it started, an old man in similar clothing (though his hat was a bit different) came out and greeted us in English and in Turkish and explained a bit about what we would see. He described the dervishes as burning, not whirling, and explained about the love in which the dance is done. He had a quiet and compelling charisma about him. For the most part he and a dervish who seemed to be his assistant (white hat), silently observed the dervishes' whirling and kept them from bumping into each other, either by saying a quiet word to them or by simply going and standing by them as they whirled. The dervishes not only spin, but they also rotate around the room, almost as if they were planets in orbit. At the very end while the others continued to whirl, the old man and his assistant each turned very very slowly, holding their black cloaks open a bit, but without discarding them. I'm not sure of the symbolism there. (There's a scene about 2/3 of the way though a beautiful film called Monsieur Ibrahim that shows this quite well, for those who are interested.)

During the whole time, musicians in a balcony played the ney (a flute), drums, and some stringed instruments. I didn't notice the time, but the sema went on for an hour or so. It ends with some kind of prayers and a recitation from the Qur'an. Some people call the dervishes Sufi monks and refer to the place we saw them as a monastery, but Alper tells me that there are no monasteries in Islam and that the dervishes have regular jobs. They dance as a form of devotion. (Alper also says you don't have to pay to see the dervishes in Konya, whereas here you do.)

Gender issues

Observers at the ceremony sit in chairs separated from the whirling area by a low rail. Next to me was an American woman who works in the American embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She was in Istanbul while everything closed down in "Saudi" for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that follows Ramadan. ("Saudi" being embassy shorthand for Saudi Arabia, I guess.) Afterward, she and Alper and I went for what turned out to be hours of tea and then dinner and a lot of conversation.You can't plan to get too much done here if you're going to be open to conversations!

She spoke of how much more repressive everything feels in Riyadh. One small example: at work in the embassy compound she can dress like a Western professional woman, but when she goes out for appointments with Saudi diplomats she needs to cover up a bit more (long coat) and when she goes to a shopping mall, if she doesn't cover her hair the religious police - that's actually the term she used - will stop her and berate her, often shouting and making quite a scene. So she wears a scarf just to avoid the hassle. As a diplomat, she couldn't be arrested for not wearing a scarf, but any other Western woman could be. She also mentioned how women - herself included - can't drive in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi women need their husbands' permission (or their fathers', I suppose) in order to get a visa to leave the country. And those wealthy women who staged a well-publicized protest by driving a few years ago - they can't get a visa to leave the country at all now, even with their husbands' permission. Still, when Westerners get all upset about the fact that women can't drive, Saudi women respond by saying we can handle that. What we need help with is much more basic--political voice and larger cultural and economic concerns. For example, there's a huge problem with osteoporosis in Saudi women because they get so little Vitamin D (no exposure to the sun because they have to be covered up all the time), no physical education in school, and often next to no opportunity even to leave the house as adults.

Things are much less repressive here, and the diplomat from Saudi said it was like a breath of fresh air to have a week in Istanbul.

Since someone back home asked me about it, I've been making a point of asking others whether a Western woman might have as much access as I have gotten through the Turkish men who've invited me into the mosques and who've simply struck up conversations. (My main sources here are the diplomat in Saudi Arabia and a UCC missionary who's lived in Turkey since 1980.) The answer of course is that there's no yes-or-no answer to that.

If a woman were sitting in the courtyard of a mosque drawing, a man might come up to her to practice his English - and yes, some might approach her to hit on her, though that seems to be less prevalent than I'd expected. Practicing English is a big thing here. In some ways good conversational English is a step toward job opportunities here, or a ticket out of Turkey for study or for travel, though I haven't met people who've told me they want to leave Turkey for good. (And the visa issue is much more complicated than how good your English is. It's very hard for Turks to get visas even to visit the US or the UK.) But there are better ways for women to get access to an inside view here. My calligraphy class, for example, is almost all women. A few of them have been welcoming to me. They'd probably be more outgoing to a Western woman. Gender separation is still prevalent here.

The American from Saudi Arabia also said she has advantages as a Western woman in being what she and her colleagues call "an honorary man" in a Muslim culture - you have to look past the assumptions that phrase is based on, of course - and the UCC woman who's lived here since the '80s says she can hang out with the men as a man can do and then can go hang out with the women in the kitchen, as a man would never be allowed to. So she can get both perspectives, where men are limited to one.

In a sense I've come back to where I started with this email. All of what you read here is one person's perspective - one man's perspective - often shaped by conversations with the men and women I happen to meet because we happen to be in the same courtyard or sitting next to each other at an event or members of the same denomination.

There's much more to say on these and other topics, and other experiences to describe, but I've probably gone on long enough for now. And believe it or not, I'm not even trying to put everything in these emails!

Until next time.

Be well,