Destination: Istanbul

Sitting down in the yellow taksiat Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport and seeing the welcoming grin of the unshaven driver greet me with a “merhaba,” I just blurted out, “Çok Güzel.” I forgot I remembered the phrase. It just came to me — like a baby shouts for joy. I was back and it was “very good” indeed.

I went through a decade-long period of annual visits, but it’s been years since I wished a Turk “merhaba” — that local “aloha” or “namaste” that ices rough people with gentility. My first hours in Turkey were filled with déjà vu moments like no travel homecoming I’ve ever had.

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As the taksi turned off the highway and into the tangled lanes of the tourist “green zone” (just below the Blue Mosque with all the tourist-friendly businesses still lined up with that desirous “Yes, Mister”), I looked at the dirty kids in the streets and remembered a rougher time, when they would earn small change hanging out the passenger door of ramshackle vans. They’d yell “Sirkeci, Sirkeci, Sirkeci” or whichever neighborhood was ahead in a scramble to pick up passengers in the shared mini-bus taksi’s called dolmus(that wild cross between a taxi, a bus, and a kidnapping vehicle literally and so appropriately called a “squish”).

While Turkey’s new affluence has killed the dolmus, the echoes of the boys hollering from the vans bounced happily all around me. “Aksaray, Aksaray, Aksaray…Sultanahmet, Sultanahmet, Sultanahmet.” My favorite call was for the train station’s neighborhood: “Sirkeci, Sirkeci, Sirkeci.”

Stepping out of my shoes and into the vast and turquoise (a color early French travelers took home as the “color of the Turks”) of the not-quite-rightly-named Blue Mosque, something was missing. Yes…gone was the smell of so many sweaty socks, knees, palms and foreheads soaked into the ancient carpet, upon which worshippers did their quite physical (as Mohammad intended) prayer work-outs. Sure enough, the Blue Mosque has a fresh new carpet — with a subtle design that keeps worshippers organized like lined paper tames letters.

Prayer lets out and a crush of locals heads for the door. The only way to get any personal space is to look up. And that breathtaking scene plays again for me — hard pumping seagulls powering through the humid air in a black sky, coming into the light as they cross in front of floodlit minarets.

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Walking down to the Golden Horn Bay and Istanbul’s churning waterfront, I miss the old Galata Bridge — so rusted with life’s struggles. But the vivid street life — boys casting their lines, old men sucking on water pipes, sesame rings filling cloudy glass carts — has retaken the new bridge.

And on the sloppy adjacent harborfront, the venerable “fish and bread boats” are still rocking in the constant churn of the busy harbor. In a humbler day, they were 20 foot long open dinghies — rough boats with battered car tires for fenders — with open fires grilling fish literally fresh off the boat. For a few coins, they’d bury a big white fillet in a hunk of white bread, wrap it in newsprint and I was on my way…dining out on fish.

A few years ago the fish and bread boats were shut down — no license or taxes. Now, after a popular uproar, they’re back. A bit more hygienic and no longer wrapping in newspaper — but still rocking in the waves and slamming out fish. (The 3 lire or $2.50 sandwich remains the best poor man’s meal going.)

In Turkey, I have more personal rituals than in other countries. I cap my days with a bowl of sütlaç. That’s rice pudding — still served in a square and shiny stainless steel bowl with a matching spoon not much bigger than a gelato sampler with a sprinkle of cinnamon.

And I challenge a local to a game of backgammon — still a feature in restaurants, tea houses and cafes. Boards no longer smell of tobacco, with softer wood inlays worn deeper than the hard wood.

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And now the dice are plastic, with obedient dots rather than the tiny handmade “bones” of the 20th century, which had dots that didn’t line up. I spun and paused…a bystander moved for me. As before, if you don’t move immediately, locals move for you. There’s one right way…and everybody knows it.

Today in Turkey the people, like those dots, line up better. There’s a seat for everyone as the dolmus are no longer so dolmus. Fez sales to tourists are way down, but scarf wear by local girls is way up. There’s a rigidity to the chaos and each of my déjà vu moments shows a society that stays the same while enduring great change.

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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.