Turkey has got it right. Religious shrines should inspire, not degrade the worshipper to the excesses of religiosity
we were thrown into a panorama of domes and minarets from the moment we entered Istanbul. Everywhere we looked, the contours of a mosque pierced the mostly sunny blue skyline. It made me a little nervous, to tell the truth. All the stuff hurled at us on a daily basis about Islam and its practitioners does tend to leave a mark, even on someone like me, who’s been brought up to be liberal and secular to a fault. So, we mostly avoided going inside any of the grand mosques Istanbul spread before us, whichever road we took, although I did catch the son looking longingly at the Blue Mosque as we passed it.
Late in the evening one day, we hit the New Mosque. Don’t be fooled. The mosque in question is new only in terms of relativity to its fellow mosques — it was built a good five hundred years ago! We wanted to see the Valens Aqueduct which lay beyond the mosque. The aqueduct was built by the Romans when Istanbul was in its Constantinople avatar and is a wonder of architecture that connects up to the more citycentral Basilica Cistern, of Dan Brown’s Inferno fame.
But I digress. There we were, feet blistered and swollen from all the walking we’d done and the aqueduct in plain sight, with only the New Mosque in between. Going around the mosque would have added considerably to our path.
“Let’s go through the mosque,” said the son. In your twenties, you don’t realise that many more things are wrought by too much prayer than you can possibly have nightmares about. With the added factor of being a woman stacked up against me, I was hesitant. “Let’s go through it,” said the husband, clinching the matter.
The New Mosque is set in the midst of a huge garden, full of grassy lawns dotted by trees. Most of it wears a well-worn look and you can see pathways worn through the grass in most places. It has a cheerful air of benign neglect. As we looked around, though, we could see it was not actual neglect, but lots and lots of use. Though it was late evening, there were women grabbing a chance to gossip as their children played on the lawns. Old men huddled together on benches, also gossiping, I’m guessing. There were families, groups of young men, all kinds of people.
Our path took us to the entrance of the outer courtyard of the mosque. As if on cue, people poured out of the mosque. The evening prayers had just ended. Seeing us hesitate, not sure whether we could use the courtyard as a transit path, an old man beckoned to us. “Come, come!” he gestured with his hands. “Me too?” I pointed at myself. He beamed at me and gestured some more. And when we went inside, he pointed towards the mosque interior, indicating we should go inside.
Well, you could have thrown me for a six there! This was a new face of Islam and I liked it immensely.
We’d wondered at the little dhabas and tea shops that clustered around the mosques we’d passed. Now we figured that they served to take the social scene begun in the mosques further.
Some years ago, we’d visited Iran — Tehran to be more precise. The son and I went to see the Mausoleum of the Khomeini. The mausoleum was impressive, with its mosque placed conveniently to one side so that no unwary visitor would wander in by mistake. Nice trick that, but no welcome here if you were not a Muslim, it seemed.
Tehran was visibly full of women. None of the compulsory male chaperonage one thought to see, as in the neighbouring Gulf region. Most of the offices we visited were manned by women. Hijab existed, to varying degrees, with government staff on the topmost rung. In the bazaars, more often than not, you saw heads covered in flimsy, colourful scarves worn with tight — and I mean tight! — black coats over blue jeans or leggings. Unused to keeping my own head covered, my dupatta would often slip off only to have a passer-by, usually a man, lift it gently back. So it was no surprise to read earlier this year that Iran had rejected a draft legislation that would give its police the right to monitor hijab.
Tehran’s biggest tourist attraction, I would rate, is its moral police. If you sit around long enough in a public area, especially parks, sooner or later, you will see vans of police come to check on young couples snatching a bit of together time. This was quite evidently strongly resented. A local told us he and his wife had been stopped by the moral police when they were newly married. He had to go home to retrieve his marriage certificate while his wife waited with the cops! Shades of the Hindutva Brigade there.
If Tehran was a surprise, Istanbul was a revelation. Women walked free and alone in the streets, whether on work or just idly, few of them wearing the hijab in any form. We went to a bar and I was once again trepidant. It was bad enough to be seeking alcohol in a 99.8 per cent Muslim country, but for a woman to seek it would be unthinkable, I thought. But I did want to try the local brew, called raki. Imagine my shock, then, when I saw the bar full of women. There were even groups of women, without any man anywhere near them, ordering raki and the customary snacks that accompany it. That it was served to them by male wait staff was the gilding on the lily.
Our visit to Istanbul set me thinking. Hitherto, I had treated religion like a particularly irritating fly, buzzing in my face, which refused to be swatted away. But the Turkish mosques had added a whole new dimension to my conception of religion. For the Turks, religion was not something to take refuge in when you thought your pot of sins was boiling over. With a mosque never more than a short walk away, it was an integral and welcome part of your day, a refuge that eased the transition between your work day and your domestic chores. Young families visited mosques as a pleasurable outing, ensuring that children didn’t associate religion with the drudgery of morality. The mosques themselves were grand and imposing, inspiring — and everywhere. The very sight of them transported you to loftier realms, with no room for petty grudges and intrigue.
We needed more such religious places in India, I thought. Yes, we had grand places of worship, but seldom could we enter those as freely as we pleased. Neither were such visits so pleasurable that they were eagerly anticipated. We went and gabbled our little supplications and prayers and rushed out again. There was no sense of succour or peace to be obtained. Turkey had got it right, I mused. Religious shrines should inspire, not degrade the worshipper to the excesses of religiosity.