The Ezan

Cliches simply don’t work. In describing Istanbul, tired phrases like “east meets west,” “very European,” or, “Islamic but secular,” suffice only in reporting what one already knows. Yes, east does meet west, but these directional terms are hollow and make us jump to conclusions at best. When you look at the details, however, at what a superficial observer might call the minutia piled atop these foundational clichés—that is when Istanbul comes alive and transcends the hackneyed phrases that visitors use to classify such a place.

I don’t profess to know anything about Istanbul at all. I’ve been here for one week and have seen so much that my mind has become a muddled mess. I feel as if I’m on vacation, waiting for my two weeks to end, for my plane to bring me back to New York. I don’t feel like I’m going to be here for two years. My mind is constantly trying to grasp and store everything it processes, like one of those housewives who’s won a $5000 shopping spree, careening down the aisle, using her forearm to plow the shelves of all their contents into her already overflowing shopping cart. That is my mind.

While I can’t yet give any definitive description of this city, nor do I think I’ll ever be able to, I can tell you a little about that minutia I mentioned before. I can tell you about the piercing minarets that rise above the smooth domes of the countless mosques, giving an otherwise horizontal cityscape a touch of verticality. They are very tall and thin, wrapped in two galleries where a muezzin would have sung the call to prayer if it weren’t for modern audio technology. They reach up, up and up to the blue sky and taper off into a conical shape at the top.

Earlier, I saw the Blue Mosque, built in 1603-1617 on the site of the Great Palace of Byzantium. It is called the Blue Mosque because of its blue inner tiles as well as the light blue color of the tops of the six minarets and domes. As my teacher friends and I approached the main entry, we saw a few more-devout Muslims washing their feet at the outdoor faucets. Nearly everyone else didn’t bother to wash; we just took off our shoes and carried toted them with us in a plastic bag inside the mosque.

When I saw my first mosque here, which couldn’t have been more than five minutes after leaving the airport, I felt a little jolt, like how I feel when I’ve been dreaming about falling and I suddenly wake up just before smashing into the ground. I’ve never seen a mosque before in person, only on television when CNN or the History Channel has some feature on Islam or the Middle East. The Muslim world, in spite of all the attention it gets in the news, is a place so far removed from our minds and personal experiences that it might as well be in a completely different universe. We truly know nothing about that with which we think we are so familiar. Do you think that the seven o’clock news provides all your necessary knowledge of Islam? The news is nothing more than reportage on terrorism and why, ostensibly, the Muslim world “hates us.” I can’t tell you how many people cringed when I told them I’d be traveling to Istanbul—a safe, cosmopolitan city in a free, democratic nation, not to mention populated by an exceedingly hospitable people. I haven’t yet gone to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt, and I’m sure those countries are vastly different from Turkey. But I am nonetheless in a Muslim country, and I’ve had to flush my mind of all the preconceived notions I was fed by the media. Now, every corner I turn I find myself faced with that exotic, fairy tail-like image of the mosque, as if I were reading a picture book of Cinderella, and, taking a break, I look out my window and discover the castle from the book cover looming royally in the distance. And I’m now reworking my notions of Islam and the Muslim people simply by observation. Simply by staring at a mosque and listening to the ezan.

The ezan; that seemingly melancholy song of the muezzin, undulating between desperate highs and poignant lows. The call to prayer has become cliché to the West; we hear it in the opening credits of movies, as the camera pans smoothly over sandy dunes or shakily makes its way through the streets of a desert town; or in tourism commercials, where beautiful dark skinned people stroll down white beaches. Nevertheless, it is a beautiful song of supplication, God’s praises washing over the varying notes like rolling whitecaps, flooding the alleys of the city with a sudden piety. The first verse is comforting and slow, like the motion of a cradle rocked by a mother’s invisible hand, back-and-forth, “Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest.” Later the rhythm remains the same, but the ezan gains urgency, the high notes fluctuating like the footsteps of a runner gaining speed; “Make haste towards prayer. Make haste towards welfare.” It ends abruptly, and you find yourself waiting by the window, ears straining to make out the next note, but it never comes. Only a car horn sounds in the distance and for a moment you think the ezan has begun again, but it hasn’t.

Shortly after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, in a fit of Turkish nationalism, the ezan began to be sung, according to a new law, in Turkish. It is interesting, considering Arabic is considered to be the language of God, how nationalism trumped religion, such to the point where Turkish could, in some capacity, replace Arabic as a liturgical language. This was obviously the mild manifestation of an otherwise aggressive agenda that has dictated, until less than a month ago when the Islamic rooted AK Party won a landslide election, much of modern Turkey’s history—that is, fundamentalist secular agenda replacing fundamentalist Islam, the brand of Islam we associate with other Muslim countries, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia. In 1933, according to islamonline.net, the muezzin Tobal Khalil was beaten and arrested by police after he delivered the ezan in Arabic at a mosque in Bursa. President Ataturk promptly stated through the Turkish News Agency that the question was less about religion than about the language, and that such offenders would not go unpunished. In the late 1940’s Adnan Madris defeated Ataturk’s successor and abolished the provision that banned the Arabic ezan. I'm glad because I can’t imagine the ezan being sung in any other language.

True, today the ezan is played over speakers that sit atop the gallery rails of the minarets like gray pigeons surveying the stone streets and orange roofs before taking flight. But in spite of the song’s lack of authentic delivery, it still sends a sensation of reverence through me. In the early morning, when only the shopkeepers and stray cats populate the streets; in the afternoon, when bronzed shoe-shining boys shed their dull clothes and stern faces and dive from the cement banks into the Bosporus; just after sun set, when the wind begins to blow in my white curtains and a skittish dog yelps in an adjacent neighborhood; all throughout the day, the call to prayer reminds of the reverence with which I am to remember God. Today, the ezan sounded in the evening, and, looking up to the closest minaret, I realized my gaze was overlooking a stone Christian church, whose simple cross sitting atop the peak of the roof was dwarfed by the rising towers. The minarets seemed to grow taller during the song, and I felt as if they were leaning down like a parent and nudging me in the direction of holy ground; their singular voice tried to coax me through the doors of God’s house, be it the stout mosque or the stony church. I remained in the street a while, looking up at the cross and the minarets. I entered neither the church nor the mosque, but I lingered and my thoughts were on God.