Where the City Goes to Worship
Globe and Mail, 16 May 2009
ISTANBUL, TURKEY — Özgur, my barber, is underwhelmed. If the blue-jawed men reading magazines by the door are typical customers, then I present a modest challenge: an uneven, month-old beard (three or four smears of stubble, a lot of naked cheek) and ears entirely bereft of fuzz. A few quick strokes of the straight razor should do the trick. But Özgur is a Turkish barber and, true to his profession, he takes care: lather spread thick, a slow shave, hot towels, balm, a massage.
"Now you no shave three weeks," he jokes, working the balm's sting from my puttied face. I am very relaxed. When a flame jumps from his hand I barely register that my ears are about to be set alight. Hair I didn't know I had whispers as it burns, briefly, before being patted out.
Seeking my cultural bearings I've come to Üsküdar, a neighbourhood on Istanbul's Asian shore, for a cheap haircut and a look at one of the city's unheralded places of worship. I climb the streets past nail salons and discount furniture stores to Çinili Camii, the Tiled Mosque.
From the outside it's not much. The courtyard is bare and weedy. A single minaret flanks the dome, which sits atop an ungainly modern extension. Of an age with the imperial mosques for which the city is famous, Çinili Camii is classical Ottoman architecture at its simplest.
Inside, however, the mosque is aswirl with flowers and Arabic calligraphy. Hand-painted Iznik tiles cover the walls and ceiling, a bequest, in 1640, of Mahpeyker Kösem, the wife of Sultan Ahmet I. Artisans in Western Anatolia developed Iznik pottery to meet the Ottoman court's demand for Chinese porcelain. Using the materials available to them — glass, silica, clay, and tin — the potters married Islamic and Chinese styles, retaining the traditional emphasis on decorative symmetry while adopting the Ming palette of blues and turquoises. Rinsed with morning light, the tiles glow softly and the prayer hall feels serene, aquatic.
Today is Friday, Jumu'ah, and in a couple of hours the observant will fill Istanbul's mosques. I cross the Bosporus to Sultanahmet, the seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, to get a better look. As the ferry rounds the Golden Horn I can see the domes of Süleymaniye Camii surrounded by four soaring minarets. It is the last and grandest of the city's imperial mosques, commissioned by Süleymaniye the Magnificent in the 16th century.
On the steps leading to the courtyard peddlers sell tespih, prayer beads strung 99 to a loop, one bead for each of Allah's names. A boy and his father hawk birdseed. They advertise their packets with lovely trilling birdcalls that seem to confuse the nesting sparrows and annoy the crowds. Pigeons swarm the pavement.
Süleymaniye Camii attracts a large and varied congregation of students, labourers, and businesspeople. Some of the women wear hijabs; many have obviously donned scarves for the occasion. At the ablution taps a man washes his feet and talks on a cell phone — I can't help but think about modern Turkey's embrace of French-style secularism and wonder where the people here would locate themselves on the continuum between cultural and religious Islam.
A Turkish friend once told me that love of their city is Istanbulites' true religion, one that reconciles Turkey's apparent contradictions, its zealous secularism and liberal Islam. It's an observation that resonates with the familiarity and truth of cliché. Eternally cosmopolitan and eternally great, Istanbul has embraced disparate cultures and cultural ideas for two thousand years.
At Nuruosmaniye Camii, a baroque mosque near the Grand Bazaar, I watch a shopkeeper devise a prayer mat from a piece of cardboard. Squaring it with the other mats, he joins the last row of men. He seems anxious. The imam begins the prayer. His words are languid, urgent. The men fall to their knees, their backs to the sky. They stand. They kneel again.
When the prayers are over, the shopkeeper hurries towards the gate. A man claps his shoulder and he's ushered into conversation with friends, two of them, heavyset and greying where the shopkeeper is thin and dark. They tease him and he laughs. They laugh. He is helpless, happy. Together they wander off.
I've recorded the prayer. Listening to it as I write this, a few weeks later, its ordinariness strikes me as beautiful: the whoosh of two hundred people falling to their knees, the plaiting of birdsong and prayer, the falling away of footsteps and laughter as the crowd breaks.
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