f you know me, then you know that I’m a Christian. My faith’s bloody history might suggest that people like me wouldn’t want mosques. But both my Dad and I had the same reaction to the piece linked below: we need more mosques.
The full photo essay is certainly worth a cup of coffee. Here’s how the photo journalist Chris Arnade (previously featured in “About Albany” last year) encountered mosques in Istanbul:
Physically the mosques are also community centers that are almost always open. Mosques gates are unlocked every day from Fajr (currently 5:08 am) to Isha (8:44 pm). Not just the central prayer halls, but the surrounding courtyard, with its ablution space to wash up, and benches under awnings or trees to escape the sun.
Also open are the mosque bathrooms, available to anyone, which are shockingly clean.
For closer quarters of the historic, everyday Istanbul, mosques are a place where community happens. Sure, the religious people pray at the mosque their required five times, but the people also gather and linger and spend time together. Arnade talks about this, talks about the form of religion that makes people mix, and about how a religious culture has less room for the problems of public drunkenness and drug use that bedevil his walks around American cities.
That’s the comparison my Dad and I both thought about. The closest Americans may get to the mosque’s public space is a Starbucks or perhaps a bar. It’s distinctly American, or at least western, that our best communal spaces are places of commerce. As a churchgoer, I’d like to think our churches could be a sort of communal space, but their design is exclusively for sectarian worship, and that gives them far less utility as communal space. My guess is two-thirds of us wouldn’t feel at all comfortable lingering in a church.
Maybe this is one reason why we like to travel: it’s good to leave the places optimized for complete autonomy and go to those places that allow us to be human together.
PS: Istanbul, I should have known.