Not a prayer
(Lots of loooooooong posts today, so bear with me--for the first time in recent memory I'm not going to the office on a Sunday so I'm directing my energies into rambling posts instead.)
Probably my favorite experience in Istanbul--and one that I couldn't capture with my camera--was walking the back streets behind the Spice Bazaar. It's not especially touristy, and unlike much of the rest of what I saw, was one of the few areas that seemed heavily Muslim (Turkey is an intriguing mix of a heavily Muslim population but a fervently secular state, so for example in Istanbul it was fairly rare to see women with their heads covered in many of the busiest districts...the book I'm reading, Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", grapples with the tensions this causes). Anyway, as I was walking around the midday call to prayer began, and if I understand correctly the Friday midday service is the most important, or at least the most widely attended, of the week. There must have been 3-4 mosques in the immediate vicinity and they were all a couple of seconds off, so there would be silence until one muezzin would start, then another, and so on, until there would be a powerful crescendo that would slowly tail off to silence again, then it would be repeated. In the meantime, I turned a corner and there must have been 50 men out in the street, kneeling and praying on carpets or, more commonly, cardboard boxes presumably facing in the direction of Mecca. (The only downside of that was that I couldn't visit any of the mosques since prayers were under way.) For some reason I find things like that fascinating--sort of like years ago when I was walking in Munich early on a Sunday morning and it sounded like every church bell in town was ringing simultaneously, or when we visited Hindu temples in Singapore and Malaysia around the time of Diwali, or visiting Buddhist temples in Thailand. I don't always understand what's happening, but it's intriguing nevertheless.
(OK, that's enough long posts for now...)
Probably my favorite experience in Istanbul--and one that I couldn't capture with my camera--was walking the back streets behind the Spice Bazaar. It's not especially touristy, and unlike much of the rest of what I saw, was one of the few areas that seemed heavily Muslim (Turkey is an intriguing mix of a heavily Muslim population but a fervently secular state, so for example in Istanbul it was fairly rare to see women with their heads covered in many of the busiest districts...the book I'm reading, Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", grapples with the tensions this causes). Anyway, as I was walking around the midday call to prayer began, and if I understand correctly the Friday midday service is the most important, or at least the most widely attended, of the week. There must have been 3-4 mosques in the immediate vicinity and they were all a couple of seconds off, so there would be silence until one muezzin would start, then another, and so on, until there would be a powerful crescendo that would slowly tail off to silence again, then it would be repeated. In the meantime, I turned a corner and there must have been 50 men out in the street, kneeling and praying on carpets or, more commonly, cardboard boxes presumably facing in the direction of Mecca. (The only downside of that was that I couldn't visit any of the mosques since prayers were under way.) For some reason I find things like that fascinating--sort of like years ago when I was walking in Munich early on a Sunday morning and it sounded like every church bell in town was ringing simultaneously, or when we visited Hindu temples in Singapore and Malaysia around the time of Diwali, or visiting Buddhist temples in Thailand. I don't always understand what's happening, but it's intriguing nevertheless.
(OK, that's enough long posts for now...)
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