Allahhhhh…Freaking Grandpa Out

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I’m in Turkey now. The country just had an election and it swung to the religious right. It’s the holy month of Ramadan and the atmosphere is charged.

Let me share some things I’ve learned about Muslim tradition — apologizing in advance for anything I get wrong because this is always dangerous territory…especially when you try to simplify and inject any playfulness.

(Any Muslim readers are welcome to set me straight, as I am quite certain that I have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God somewhere here. Any Christian threatened by the growth of Islam…please comment only in a constructive spirit of seeking understanding. I am a Christian who can live peacefully with Islam. I’d rather this not be one more battleground on that issue.)

Traditionally, as the sun prepares to rise, an imam stares at his arm. When he can tell a grey hair from a black one, it’s time to call his parish to prayer.

While quality and warble varies, across the land the Arabic words of the call to prayer are exactly the same. The first one of the day comes with an extra line.

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Praying is better than sleeping,
God is great (Allahhhhhh akbar…)
I witness there is no other God but Allah
I witness Mohammad is Allah’s prophet
Come join the prayer
Come to be saved
God is Great…God is great
There is no other God but Allah

My hotel is within earshot of five mosques. They say tiny mosques can’t afford a musician, so the imam himself does the singing — not always top-quality. Big mosques have a trained professional singer — much better. To the non-Muslim ear, it sounds like coyotes howling in a cacophony. My challenge (which I succeed at) is to hear it as a beautiful form of praise that sweeps across the globe like a stadium wave, undulating exactly as fast as the earth turns…five times a day.

As pre-Vatican II Catholicism embraced Latin (I guess for tradition, uniformity and so all could relate and worship together anywhere any time), Islam embraces Arabic. Turks recently experimented by doing the call to prayer in Turkish, but they switched back to the traditional Arabic.

The trained singer is a “Muezzin.” “Ezzin” means prayer. “Mu” before a word in Arabic is like “er” after a word in English — it means “one who does it.” Muezzin.

The Koran says “Abraham was a good submitter (to the will of God).” The word for submitter is “Muslim” derived from “Islam” (submit) with a “mu” (one who). Islam means submit, Mu-Islam (contracted to “Muslim”) is literally one who submits. I followed up asking my friends “how about eat and eater?” They said, “We don’t know Arabic.”

Traveling in Islam, the call to prayer sounds spooky to many Americans. My time in Turkey, with the charming conviviality of neighborhoods in the streets that comes with Ramadan (just as it comes with Christmas where I come from), reminds me how travel takes the fear out of foreign ways.

Traveling here also reminds me how my Dad used to be absolutely distraught by the notion that God and Allah could be the same. I taught our son, Andy (when he was about three years old) to hold out his arms, bob them up and down, and say “Allah, Allah, Allah” after table grace just to freak out his Grandpa.

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Then I took my Dad to Turkey.

Comments

11 Replies to “Allahhhhh…Freaking Grandpa Out”

  1. Hi, Rick! Good to hear you made it to Turkey safely. Religion is part of exploring the culture of a country. I have learned respect goes a long way down that road. It’s very interesting to hear how everyone lives and believes that does truley make the world go around so to speak. Embrace the experience and enjoy the people. Good luck on your guidebook research while there. I hope your dad did enjoy his trip to Turkey. :) Take care!

  2. At Mount Solmissos, above Ephesus, Turkey, we visited what local legend says was the last home of the Virgin Mary. Near “Mary’s House” a row of pipes supply what we understood is “holy water,” something like at Lourdes, France.

    Our taxi driver, a Muslim most likely in his fifties, had been a driver for a General in the Turkish Army, and was wounded in the leg during a war in the 1950’s. The wound would not heal, in spite of what the doctors and hospitals did.

    He walked and hitchhiked across Turkey, managed to visit “Mary’s House,” did something with this water, and his leg healed. (1989)

  3. Rick, thanks for finally addressing some of the intolerance that has been creeping into some of the posts over the summer. I look forward to reading some educational posts from Muslims (when they do post) because it is a culture I’ve recently been wanting to know more about. On a cruise stop in Tunisia a few years ago I was disappointed not to hear the Call to Prayer during our stop there and to experience that sound for myself. One day I hope to be where I can hear it myself. Have fun in Rome; I hope you make the resulting show from the trip available to those of us who are not Lutheran but interested in seeing Rome from that perspective. It’s hard out there for a Methodist sometimes … Cheers to other posters!

  4. Hi Rick and all readers! Enjoy reading your comments about Turkey, Istanbul and its culture. Have you ever considered a week-long tour to Istanbul–the way you have for other cities?

  5. I remember the first time my husband went to Turkey. He said when he heard the call to prayer for the first time, it scared him to death! He said it is a very spooky sound when you don’t know what it is. The strangest thing to him was, he wasin the middle of a drive with clients and when they heard the prayer call, they would stop the car, get out their mats and pray right by the roadside. Over the course of many visits he has gotten used to the call, but say’s it’s still a bit haunting.

  6. Rick, I think calling the AK Party election a win of the “Religious Right” is a bit of a misnomer. Yes the party has roots in political Islam, but it also has been the most pro-reform for EU membership govt Turkey has had in decades, and looks set to continue on that path over the term of the next government. Back after WWII people like Adenauer founded Christian Democratic parties that both Christian values and Democratic Values can be integrated to the benefit of both. I think the AK are moving to develop a similar fusion that validates Turkey’s Islamic heritage while embracing democratic values. But it is not an “obscurantist” political movement as many Islamist parties in the Arab world are. Hopefully we in the West can help encourage the AK successfully blend both, so that Turkey enjoy’s both the freedoms of democracy and embrace a cultural heritage that Ataturk’s reforms tried so hard to make Turks forget in his quest to be “modern.”

  7. Did you actually visit the same Istanbul I visited? (Or are you sure you visited Istanbul at all?) It sounds nothing like the same country! I am Christian, and I wasn’t scared by the Muslim call to prayer at all–it was actually beautiful. I was a bit paranoid before I came to Istanbul, a little over a year ago, thanks to the grandstanding of travellers like you, but when I got there, I found Istanbul, and Turkey as a whole to be a curious blend of the sacred and the secular. However, when I say “curious,” I don’t mean–bad. The Turks we interacted with were so nice, I’ve been dying to go back ever since.

  8. I just visited Istanbul on a business trip about 3 weeks ago. It is one of my favorite cities where I’ve spent about 35-40 weeks of my life over the past 5 years. Usually, I stay in the Taksim or Be?ikta? area, not in Sultanhamet where most tourists go. Despite my numerous safe returns, my mother always freaks out when I’m going to Turkey because it’s a Muslim country. I have never had a bad experience and tell my mother that the only place I’ve experienced anti-Americanism was in Paris.

    Some of my favorite experiences in Istanbul: 1) sitting on a rooftop or balcony at a hotel on the Bosphorus (favorites are the Conrad or Hilton) in the early morning or evening during prayer time. Hearing dozens of minarets calling prayer at the same time is magical. 2) Getting my shoes shined – sounds silly, but it’s a bit of a show in Turkey. 3) drinking Turkish coffee with friends. 4) fresh-squeezed Turkish OJ for breakfast. 5)Enjoying the many restaurants with good food and Bosphorus views

  9. Hi, Rick, Thanks for expanding our understanding of Islam; this is very interesting. It sounds like you get “fear reactions” from some readers, but I hope you won’t be deterred. You are making the world a better place by promoting understanding. Back when God/Allah was a boy and I was in boarding school, my Saudi roommate’s alarm clock was a plastic minaret that sounded the prayer call. I loved it, except on the mornings when she turned up the volume. She thought it was funny to scare me out of bed.

  10. Rick, You truly are the only writer who’s writing made me literally laugh out loud! Your attitude about life and the world is so awesome! Keep it up, and thanks for sharing it.

  11. The problem here is an age old one – how do you tell the difference between moderate and fanatical followers of Islam? The truth is that The Quran does have passages that clearly state that those who do not convert are to be beheaded and that all who are not followers of Muhammed and supporters of Jihad are infidels. There is a possibly related passage in the Revelation of Jesus Christ 20:4 – And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God. Regardless, fanatical Islamofascists are recruiting and viciously coercing more moderate followers into the fold every day. Islam (with Sharia law) is less a religion than a tyrannical political system. We will not survive as a nation or as a free world by burying our heads in the sand and ignoring facts.

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