Prayer Time in the Blue Mosque

by Caroline Tien (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Turkey

Alarm clocks are to the West as town criers are to Turkey, a discovery I made very much against my will at 6 AM one foggy March morning four hours after my red-eye flight from Dublin had touched down at Istanbul Airport. Hair tousled and eyes smarting from lack of sleep, I raised my head from the thin hostel pillow, roused by a sound altogether alien to me, especially at that time of day: singing. Select verses from the Qur’an, recited in a deep, melodic baritone that managed to turn the millennia-old commandments into something like music, were reverberating throughout my room, throughout what was surely the entire city, calling the faithful to prayer. Later that day, using the last of my cellular data to surf the Internet, I would learn that the technical term for it was “ezan,” which literally means “to listen, to hear, to be informed.” Translated, the bulk of the lyrics—which are sung by a single muezzin, or specially appointed mosque official, and echo over miles by means of a sophisticated loudspeaker system—mean “God is great!” But at that moment, it was nothing more than a pure stream of incomprehensible sound, as foreign and beautiful as the siren song Odysseus heard when his fleet passed the isle of Anthemoessa must have been: “Allahu Akbar...La ilaha illa Allah.” Everyone else—my traveling companions Maria and Pablo, the cocky French students who were sharing the small room with us—was still snoring, curled beneath the sheets in various versions of the fetal position. I have always been a light sleeper, apt to jerk awake at the slightest noise, and at that moment, spellbound by the surreal beauty of the muezzin’s voice, I was glad of it. Then the spell was lifted: Pablo sat up, eyes obscured by a black velvet mask, Maria rolled over with a grunt, and the final notes died away as the darkness began to evaporate into sunlight. I grew up in a small town in a small U.S. state, the sort of place with a single-digit number of stoplights and a population best described as almost exclusively white and Christian (though I myself am an atheist), so the presence of the ezan was a constant reminder of just how out of my cultural depth I was. It was there in the mornings before the hubbub of the morning commute began; it was there in the afternoons when I wandered from stall to stall in the Grand Bazaar or through the tiled hallways of the Hagia Sophia and the eerie, echoey corridors of the Basilica Cistern; it was there at night when I watched bearded dervishes whirl, white skirts flying, or crossed the Bosphorus Strait by ferry. Perhaps that is why it took me until late in the afternoon on my second-to-last day in Istanbul to screw up the courage to enter the very source of the ezan: the Blue Mosque, an enormous building in the center of the city famous for the brightly colored tiles that line its interior walls. It is from here, or, more specifically, from a balcony built into a slender minaret that stands kitty-corner to the main dome, that the muezzin sings morning, noon, and night. Shoes deposited in a plastic bag and headscarf concealing my hair, I entered the mosque, folding my hands and bowing my head as the sanctity of the place registered. There must have been fifty or more people crowding the room, but it was silent, absolutely silent, save for the soft thump of footsteps and the rustle of clothing. As I watched, some of the worshippers bent at the waist before kneeling and pressing their foreheads to the carpet in a show of piety, their movements as slow and methodical as those of yoga practitioners. Their lips moved as they recited the first of the five pillars of Islam for what must have been the fourth time that day: There is no god but Allah, and Muhummad is his messenger. Exiled to the area behind the cordon of red velvet rope that separates the tourists from the devout, I wondered, with more than a little envy, what it must be like to believe something that fervently.