If A Muezzin Shouts In A Forest, And Nobody Prays...

Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Reykjavik.

Currently sitting on the plane back from Istanbul, where I have spent the last eight days – apologies for the hiatus in posts, but sacrifices must be made at times.

Turkey is a very interesting country in many ways, quite a few of which will find their way into my writing in the coming days. But I want to begin with the most salient one to any visitor: the omnipresence of the muezzin, and its incongruity given the general balance Turkey has historically struck between religion and secularity.

The muezzin, in case you are unaware, is the guy who issues the call to prayer five times per day by bellowing…something…in Arabic from the minarets of the local mosque. There are approximately 2,000 mosques in Istanbul today, all of which resound with the more-or-less sweet strains (depending on the quality of each mosque’s loudspeaker system) of the muezzin at the five predetermined times: pre-dawn (approximately 5:40 am), noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and “nightfall” (sometime around 8 pm).

As any visitor to Istanbul will readily attest, you can’t escape the muezzin when the time comes. The only time during the eight days I was in Istanbul when I was awake and didn’t hear him was while sitting on the tarmac at Ataturk Airport (more on him later) for my flight home.

Yet for all of their volume and effort, the muezzins had no visible influence on the Turks. I was in Istanbul for eight days, and I saw no one – I repeat, no one – stop to pray when the muezzin started up. Of course, sometimes this was because I was in my hotel room, or in a tourist-heavy locale where all of the people around me were either non-Muslims or had been trained to ignore the call to prayer for fear of scaring away the tourists and their wads of cash. But even when we were wandering around the residential sections of the city, where no one around us spoke anything other than Turkish, the muezzin’s call went seemingly unheeded.

So what does this say about Turkey? Perhaps it just means that the government's famous commitment to enforced secularity has won out over any Turk's instinct to publicly express his or her religious convictions? But the muezzins are Turkish government employees: the government owns every mosque in Turkey, and the calls to prayer are thus explicitly sanctioned by the government. The answer is clearly not that Turks are not religious people: there are 2,000 mosques in Istanbul alone, and over 80,000 in the country (according to our Turkish guide).

The most obvious answer would seem to be that prayer has simply been relegated to the private sphere: if you are in private when the muezzin starts up, you pray; if you are in public, you don't. But if prayer is a private endeavor, why is the call to prayer such an obtrusively public one? The Turks have a long and proud history of iconoclasm when it comes to their religious institutions, starting with Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate after a nearly 1300-year run. So while some countries might broadcast the calls just out of deference to tradition, Turkey would not seem to be one of them.

I am not in a particularly great position to posit explanations for the behavior of the 15,000,000+ residents of Istanbul, nor to generalize it to apply to the rest of Turkey. In the more conservative eastern and southern portions of Turkey, for example, I would bet a lot of money that when the muezzin shouts, many more people stop and pray. But the fact that I am not a Turk, nor was meant to be, does not make what I observed any less striking to me. If nothing else, the observations of foreigners may at least help to dispel stereotypes.