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Regular readers of Dennis's blog will be familiar with my ongoing flirtation with all things Islamic. I don't believe in any formal God-figure, so I'm not sure how or even quite why this crush has come about. But I can tell you when and where, almost to the minute. At dawn, on an October day ten years ago in an attic hotel room in Istanbul overlooking the Blue Mosque, I heard my first muezzin's call to prayer.
My stomach flipped over. The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end. Maybe I'm just particularly susceptible to the pentatonic scale but I scrambled half asleep to our tiny window, fascinated, and opened it.
It was still dark outside but the city below had been awake for hours. Great oil tankers queued in the Bosphorus, waiting to pass through the straits on their return home to the Black Sea. The night-fishing boats unloaded their catch onto the quay amidst clouds of seagulls. Trams rattled along the streets, car headlights twinkled in the half light, streaming over the bridge from the west part of the city to its eastern sector, their horns honking impatiently.
The sound which had wakened me was now joined by other calls from mosques all over the city, an alternative dawn chorus. And I was completely smitten.
Since that autumn morning there have been many other such moments which defy words and thus descriptions. Like wandering through an Roman ancient cemetery at noon, in the southern Syrian city of Bosra, trying to find shade at a time of day when shadow is not thrown, and hearing the muezzins call begin to sound from every direction: old voices merging with young, barely broken voices which sound almost female, while the sun beats mercilessly down overhead and lizards scurry into corners. Feeling lost and hot and smiling...
In the decade spanning 1999 and now, I've visited as many countries where Islam is the dominant religion as I can. I've found architecture ancient and modern to blow me away. I've found people who confirm and contradict all my preconceptions - literature, music, sights, smells, philosophies and sexual practices which have made me re-evaluate my stance on so much. Something in all this speaks to me, breaks down my ego and gives me peace. I have no idea if it's religious, ethnic, cultural or aesthetic in nature. I do know it's alien. And I like that. Even if I can't explain it. Or perhaps exactly because I can't.
So here in no particular order are my Top Five Favourite Mosques from five different cities and countries. They're favourite not for spiritual reasons, in any conventionally religious sense at least, and they're all totally different: noisy, silent, ancient, modern. They're connotative for me, I suppose. Personal places of pause - an alternative souvenir, a reminder of incidents and encounters which otherwise leave me without words.
This massive structure is 1,600 years old and was originally built as a Christian church - the name means 'holy wisdom' in Greek - only to be reconsecrated as a mosque by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. Modern Turkey's founder Attaturk worked his secularist magic and turned it into a museum in 1935. It's got these great dome things balanced on each other which seem to defy gravity. As mosques go, it's unusually gloomy inside – at least it was when I visited – maybe cos it no longer functions as a mosque. But it still does its job: in a hot, sunshine-y city it remains a cool, dark space where one's footsteps echo around its ancient stone walls and thoughts turn to matters bigger than oneself. Aya Sophia was my first mosque. I thought they'd all be like this. I was wrong.
Flash forward a year: it's April 2001. We're staying in a hotel of the same name across the square from this mosque and, at the time, have no idea it's one of Islam's holiest spaces. Since the head of Mohammed's grandson Ali Hussein is reputedly interred here it's considered way too sacred for non-Moslems to enter. Not that we have any inclination to go inside: we're too busy battling through the onslaught of humanity that is Cairo, guidebook in hand in search of its 'must-see' places. We never find a quarter of them: we get lost an hundred times, are gently set back on track by helpful locals only to get lost again. People insist on buying us coffees, people practise their English on us, trying to execute a simple task like crossing the bloody road is a nightmare and nothing is where it was supposed to be. Full-on Cairo's like an assault.
At least three times a day we scurry back to the relative peace of our room in the Al Hussein hotel (the building to the left, in the photo) just to get breathing space on our little balcony. And every time we do so, the muezzin in the Al-Hussein mosque across the square seems to be wailing. How we manage to coincide with prayer-time I have no idea. But we do – each night we collapse into bed, clubbed into submission by a city that never lets up, drifting off to the evening call to prayer, only to be nudged awake at dawn next morning by the same, with the muezzin sounding like he's in the same room as us we're so close to the mosque. Slowly, a rhythm develops, five punctuations in each 24-hour sequence. Okay, we're not praying in any conventional sense. But prayer's about more than talking to a God. Maybe it's about simultaneously being in sync with yet apart from one's surroundings. Whatever it is, by the time comes to leave, we've uncovered the secret of crossing the road in Cairo: deep breath and just launch yourself into the traffic. It works.
The clip's from a cafe opposite the mosque. For me, it just sums up Cairo.
It's January 2002. Post-11th September. The world has discovered the existence of Islam. But it's not the Islam I know.
Most mosques are so light and airy – the complete opposite of dark, gloomy Christian cathedrals. As if to emphasise this, the Hassan II mosque (built to celebrate the eponymous king's 60th birthday) features a retractable roof which opens Tracy-Island-like as if in preparation for the launch of Thunderbird 1, as well as a laser on top of the minaret which sends a red beam towards Mecca in the evenings. It's also built on land reclaimed from the sea. Very modern, this mosque: designed by a Frenchman and completed in 1993 it's completely massive and perches mere metres from the pounding sea on Morocco's Atlantic. This is only of only two mosques in the entire country which admit non-Moslems, and even then you have to take the guided tour. But it's a small price to pay to wander its vast marble interior: for the size-queens amongst us, it's the 3rd largest Mosque in the world. The sheer scale of the place humbles the ego and calms the mind. Maybe it's the modernity of the building, but there's also a sense of the here and now: an emphasis on trying to reconcile the present with the past. A bit like what Morocco itself – along with the rest of the world – is trying to do right now. This clip says it all.
Where the sheer scale of Hassan II is slightly intimidating, where Al-Hussein in Cairo's so sacred infidels can't even enter, the Umayyad is positively laid-back. Take your shoes off and just wander around, worship, meditate, meet the locals and in general just hang out. Damascus is that kind of city. It's Cairo without the onslaught, Morocco without the rap-music. The muezzins calls are still there, but there's a secular, very French feel to the Syrian capital, with way more women without the hijab than with. What's happened to the wonderful otherness? Am I merely becoming used to Islam? Or is this what it feels like in a country determined to separate state and religion?
Remember the head of Mohammed's grandson, back in Al-Hussein in Cairo? It was displayed here in the Umayyad, for a while. These days it's John the Baptist's noggin which has pride of place...well, pride of place in a casket behind a shrouded gate.
Since there are at least three other sites throughout the region claim ownership of said head, we're still a little disrespectfully giggly when we stroll round the back of Umayyad to visit Saladin's tomb: confusingly, there are two sarcophogi on display – the original 12th century plaid cedar box containing his body, and this wildly ornate marble creation donated by German emperor Wilhelm II. We're trying to work out what on earth Saladin could possibly have been to this guy when a bus-load of elderly ladies, head to foot in black, on some sort of tour troupe into the small mausoleum.
They smile politely at us but soon there are real tears, real emotion. They stroke the plain wooden box which contains the remains of a man who died penniless, having given away most of his money to charity. It's a genuinely humbling experience: something real to take home from this country our media has to gall to tell us is part of an axis of evil. Along with the best hot chocolate I've ever tasted.
Flash forward a few thousand miles and the odd millennium to Andalusia. No muezzins summon anyone to prayer here these days, not in Catholic Spain. But click on the link above, listen to the ululating song which accompanies that most Spanish of institutions, the flamenco, and the Moorish, Islamic legacy's still there. Like the great Mezquita's still there, albeit with a Christian cathedral built inside its great prayer hall.
We visited Cordoba on a day trip from Seville, during the autumn school-break. The place was full of parties of sight-seeing teenagers and tourists. But still there was peace. In somewhere this big, this old, this beautiful, it's hard not to find peace unless one is intentionally trying to avoid it. Countless arches of jasper, marble and granite mesmerise the eyes like an Escher etching, focusing the brain and slowly calming it.
I'm still not religious. I still don't believe in a God in any accepted sense. Maybe I believe in buildings, in music, in people. Maybe that's my 'other', the thing that's bigger than me. The thing which brings me perspective.
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p.s. Hey. I miss d.l. and awesome writer Jax. A lot of you guys know and remember him, I'm sure. You know what I mean? He made this post for us a long time ago back when this blog was one of his second homes. Get into it for today, please. Thank you.
Regular readers of Dennis's blog will be familiar with my ongoing flirtation with all things Islamic. I don't believe in any formal God-figure, so I'm not sure how or even quite why this crush has come about. But I can tell you when and where, almost to the minute. At dawn, on an October day ten years ago in an attic hotel room in Istanbul overlooking the Blue Mosque, I heard my first muezzin's call to prayer.
My stomach flipped over. The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end. Maybe I'm just particularly susceptible to the pentatonic scale but I scrambled half asleep to our tiny window, fascinated, and opened it.
It was still dark outside but the city below had been awake for hours. Great oil tankers queued in the Bosphorus, waiting to pass through the straits on their return home to the Black Sea. The night-fishing boats unloaded their catch onto the quay amidst clouds of seagulls. Trams rattled along the streets, car headlights twinkled in the half light, streaming over the bridge from the west part of the city to its eastern sector, their horns honking impatiently.
The sound which had wakened me was now joined by other calls from mosques all over the city, an alternative dawn chorus. And I was completely smitten.
Since that autumn morning there have been many other such moments which defy words and thus descriptions. Like wandering through an Roman ancient cemetery at noon, in the southern Syrian city of Bosra, trying to find shade at a time of day when shadow is not thrown, and hearing the muezzins call begin to sound from every direction: old voices merging with young, barely broken voices which sound almost female, while the sun beats mercilessly down overhead and lizards scurry into corners. Feeling lost and hot and smiling...
In the decade spanning 1999 and now, I've visited as many countries where Islam is the dominant religion as I can. I've found architecture ancient and modern to blow me away. I've found people who confirm and contradict all my preconceptions - literature, music, sights, smells, philosophies and sexual practices which have made me re-evaluate my stance on so much. Something in all this speaks to me, breaks down my ego and gives me peace. I have no idea if it's religious, ethnic, cultural or aesthetic in nature. I do know it's alien. And I like that. Even if I can't explain it. Or perhaps exactly because I can't.
So here in no particular order are my Top Five Favourite Mosques from five different cities and countries. They're favourite not for spiritual reasons, in any conventionally religious sense at least, and they're all totally different: noisy, silent, ancient, modern. They're connotative for me, I suppose. Personal places of pause - an alternative souvenir, a reminder of incidents and encounters which otherwise leave me without words.
Aya Sofia - Istanbul
This massive structure is 1,600 years old and was originally built as a Christian church - the name means 'holy wisdom' in Greek - only to be reconsecrated as a mosque by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century. Modern Turkey's founder Attaturk worked his secularist magic and turned it into a museum in 1935. It's got these great dome things balanced on each other which seem to defy gravity. As mosques go, it's unusually gloomy inside – at least it was when I visited – maybe cos it no longer functions as a mosque. But it still does its job: in a hot, sunshine-y city it remains a cool, dark space where one's footsteps echo around its ancient stone walls and thoughts turn to matters bigger than oneself. Aya Sophia was my first mosque. I thought they'd all be like this. I was wrong.
Sayyiduna Al-Hussein -Cairo
Flash forward a year: it's April 2001. We're staying in a hotel of the same name across the square from this mosque and, at the time, have no idea it's one of Islam's holiest spaces. Since the head of Mohammed's grandson Ali Hussein is reputedly interred here it's considered way too sacred for non-Moslems to enter. Not that we have any inclination to go inside: we're too busy battling through the onslaught of humanity that is Cairo, guidebook in hand in search of its 'must-see' places. We never find a quarter of them: we get lost an hundred times, are gently set back on track by helpful locals only to get lost again. People insist on buying us coffees, people practise their English on us, trying to execute a simple task like crossing the bloody road is a nightmare and nothing is where it was supposed to be. Full-on Cairo's like an assault.
At least three times a day we scurry back to the relative peace of our room in the Al Hussein hotel (the building to the left, in the photo) just to get breathing space on our little balcony. And every time we do so, the muezzin in the Al-Hussein mosque across the square seems to be wailing. How we manage to coincide with prayer-time I have no idea. But we do – each night we collapse into bed, clubbed into submission by a city that never lets up, drifting off to the evening call to prayer, only to be nudged awake at dawn next morning by the same, with the muezzin sounding like he's in the same room as us we're so close to the mosque. Slowly, a rhythm develops, five punctuations in each 24-hour sequence. Okay, we're not praying in any conventional sense. But prayer's about more than talking to a God. Maybe it's about simultaneously being in sync with yet apart from one's surroundings. Whatever it is, by the time comes to leave, we've uncovered the secret of crossing the road in Cairo: deep breath and just launch yourself into the traffic. It works.
The clip's from a cafe opposite the mosque. For me, it just sums up Cairo.
Hassan II - Casablanca
It's January 2002. Post-11th September. The world has discovered the existence of Islam. But it's not the Islam I know.
Most mosques are so light and airy – the complete opposite of dark, gloomy Christian cathedrals. As if to emphasise this, the Hassan II mosque (built to celebrate the eponymous king's 60th birthday) features a retractable roof which opens Tracy-Island-like as if in preparation for the launch of Thunderbird 1, as well as a laser on top of the minaret which sends a red beam towards Mecca in the evenings. It's also built on land reclaimed from the sea. Very modern, this mosque: designed by a Frenchman and completed in 1993 it's completely massive and perches mere metres from the pounding sea on Morocco's Atlantic. This is only of only two mosques in the entire country which admit non-Moslems, and even then you have to take the guided tour. But it's a small price to pay to wander its vast marble interior: for the size-queens amongst us, it's the 3rd largest Mosque in the world. The sheer scale of the place humbles the ego and calms the mind. Maybe it's the modernity of the building, but there's also a sense of the here and now: an emphasis on trying to reconcile the present with the past. A bit like what Morocco itself – along with the rest of the world – is trying to do right now. This clip says it all.
The Umayyad (The Great Mosque) - Damascus
Where the sheer scale of Hassan II is slightly intimidating, where Al-Hussein in Cairo's so sacred infidels can't even enter, the Umayyad is positively laid-back. Take your shoes off and just wander around, worship, meditate, meet the locals and in general just hang out. Damascus is that kind of city. It's Cairo without the onslaught, Morocco without the rap-music. The muezzins calls are still there, but there's a secular, very French feel to the Syrian capital, with way more women without the hijab than with. What's happened to the wonderful otherness? Am I merely becoming used to Islam? Or is this what it feels like in a country determined to separate state and religion?
Remember the head of Mohammed's grandson, back in Al-Hussein in Cairo? It was displayed here in the Umayyad, for a while. These days it's John the Baptist's noggin which has pride of place...well, pride of place in a casket behind a shrouded gate.
Since there are at least three other sites throughout the region claim ownership of said head, we're still a little disrespectfully giggly when we stroll round the back of Umayyad to visit Saladin's tomb: confusingly, there are two sarcophogi on display – the original 12th century plaid cedar box containing his body, and this wildly ornate marble creation donated by German emperor Wilhelm II. We're trying to work out what on earth Saladin could possibly have been to this guy when a bus-load of elderly ladies, head to foot in black, on some sort of tour troupe into the small mausoleum.
They smile politely at us but soon there are real tears, real emotion. They stroke the plain wooden box which contains the remains of a man who died penniless, having given away most of his money to charity. It's a genuinely humbling experience: something real to take home from this country our media has to gall to tell us is part of an axis of evil. Along with the best hot chocolate I've ever tasted.
The Mezquita - Cordoba
Flash forward a few thousand miles and the odd millennium to Andalusia. No muezzins summon anyone to prayer here these days, not in Catholic Spain. But click on the link above, listen to the ululating song which accompanies that most Spanish of institutions, the flamenco, and the Moorish, Islamic legacy's still there. Like the great Mezquita's still there, albeit with a Christian cathedral built inside its great prayer hall.
We visited Cordoba on a day trip from Seville, during the autumn school-break. The place was full of parties of sight-seeing teenagers and tourists. But still there was peace. In somewhere this big, this old, this beautiful, it's hard not to find peace unless one is intentionally trying to avoid it. Countless arches of jasper, marble and granite mesmerise the eyes like an Escher etching, focusing the brain and slowly calming it.
I'm still not religious. I still don't believe in a God in any accepted sense. Maybe I believe in buildings, in music, in people. Maybe that's my 'other', the thing that's bigger than me. The thing which brings me perspective.
I hope you guys get something out of all this.
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p.s. Hey. I miss d.l. and awesome writer Jax. A lot of you guys know and remember him, I'm sure. You know what I mean? He made this post for us a long time ago back when this blog was one of his second homes. Get into it for today, please. Thank you.