More from Eyup Sultan

An Ottoman-style military band plays in front of Eyup Sultan Masjid on Friday mornings before prayers.

Waiting in line to see what is supposed to be a footprint of the Prophet Mohammed (salallahu alayhe wa sallam) pressed into a polished stone, and the supposed tomb of the companion of the Prophet, Khalid ibn Zayd (radiallahu anhu). He died so long ago, it’s hard to say exactly where his grave actually lies. We saw another reputed footprint of the Prophet at Topkepi Palace, also in Istanbul.

You can see some of the famous Ottoman ceramic tiles on the walls, and Rukiye telling me to hurry up and quit taking pictures of everything. The Thuhr athan had been called, and we thought we were going to pray in the masjid, but we had to wait for the men to finish.

We wandered around looking at tombs for quite a while, and then wandered around the markets near the masjid, and had a look at the beautifully restored old row houses nearby. Some of the women were standing in a circle praying around a deep spring or well of some sort, flush with the paving stones outside a tomb.

By this point we had been waiting for several hours, and Thuhr prayer was almost over. The masjid and the courtyards around it were still packed with men praying on straw mats.

Here we are waiting outside a tomb, just down the path from the men praying. I admit I look a little freaky in that outfit, and my niqab was misbehaving, but that lady on the left blatantly stared at me all afternoon. You would think the novelty would wear off after a few hours.

I voted to find a private spot and pray by ourselves, rather than miss the prayer entirely, but I was overruled. It's not appropriate for ladies to pray outside.

Thuhr wasn’t quite over, so I waited, and we eventually made our way into the masjid and up the tiniest spiral staircase I have ever seen (I wish I had a picture of that), to the women’s balcony – except that there were still men sitting around up there, damnit. There was plenty of room downstairs by that point, I really think the men should have moved down so the women could pray in privacy, while there was still time. I have to take my niqab off to pray, and I didn’t want the men sitting around staring at me, so I stood behind a group of women.

The men file back out of the masjid after prayers. That gold and white bay window on the right is the tomb of Khalid ibn Zayd (radiallahu anhu), and just to the left of it, under the red Turkish flag, is the footprint of the Prophet (salallahu alaye wa sallam).

Cities of the Dead

At Eyup Sultan Masjid in Istanbul (built by the Ottomans in 1458 AD), the tomb of Sokullu Mehmet Pasa, a sixteenth century AD Ottoman vizier, whose last known descendant passed away a few months ago. The masjid is located near the supposed grave of Khalid ibn Zaid ibn Kulayb, a companion of the Prophet (sallalahu alayhe wa sallam) who participated in the seventh century AD Muslim conquest of Istanbul. Many Ottoman officials are buried near the masjid.

An iris flowering on another grave in downtown Istanbul.

One of the things that struck me about Istanbul was the sheer number of people who have died in the city. Many of the graves I saw dated from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but even still everywhere I went there were vast graveyards, or old graves squeezed in next to the street.

I was on a bus to Eyup, and I saw a small mountain on the Golden Horn, overlooking the sea. It appeared to be covered with square white limestone rock formations, interspersed with trees, but when I got closer I realized that the whole mountain was covered in white stone tombs about the size of coffins, all jumbled together. Families bearing flowers picked paths among the tombs, winding their way up the mountain to tend the graves of their loved ones.

Most of the monuments at Eyup Sultan dated from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, which puzzled me for a while, because they were in the Ottoman style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the carvings were mostly perfectly legible. Had the Ottomans built new monuments for ancient graves? If so, why were they all so close in age? It took me far longer than it should have to realize that they were using the hijri calendar. The current hijri year is 1431.

Just the number of people who died and merited monuments in this one city in the past two centuries is hard to grasp; I can’t imagine how many people will rise up on Judgement Day.

Little Flying Brains

It's hamlah season in Jordan. Hamlah are raw, green chickpeas each in their own little pod. I think the name is related to the word for "pregnant." After the hamlat are shelled and roasted in the oven, they're called hemmas.

To eat them, you pinch the top of the pod, and it splits open along the seam.

They look like perfect little brains with wings to me. You can't see much detail in my crappy webcam photos, but hamlah look just like brains.

Mmmmmmm, braaaiiiins. Nom nom nom.

Springtime in Istanbul

Artifacts from the ruins of an ancient church dating to the fifth century AD, found under the edge of the Hagia Sophia. It became a masjid after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, but before that it was the site of a series of churches beginning in the fourth century AD. These ruins were not fully excavated, to avoid damaging the Hagia Sophia.

Turkey, and Istanbul especially, have been famous for their tulips for centuries. We were fortunate to be in Istanbul during their brief season, and saw pretty much every sort of tulip imaginable. I photographed these pink ones in a park along the outside of the old city walls, the same walls that Fatih Sultan Mehmet led the Ottoman forces through over six hundred years ago. A little further along, people were growing vegetables under the wall, and it looked like some people were squatting in the trees between the wall and the road, and in some of the disintegrating towers as well. I spotted a young couple necking inside a tower that had crumbled down to only about a storey high.

I was fascinated by the city walls, and took a ton of pictures of them, one of the great things about being allowed to use Rukiye’s digital camera. I can take twenty pictures of something without worrying about wasting a whole roll of film; some of them will turn out, and some of them won’t, but that’s okay. Using a film camera is very expensive here, especially since mine uses unusual film and batteries, it's hard for me to communicate what I want at the studios, and the studios often mess up the prints. I took about half a dozen pictures of Rukiye’s lace curtains, and Rukiye decided I was officially nuts. In a week and a half, we took over six hundred pictures.

Rapunzel growing in the warmth and shelter of the stone wall.

Halloween in Istanbul

Rukiye, my host in Istanbul, has her last university exam today, just a half hour on Arabic grammar. She's almost done a two year program in Islamic studies. Hijab is forbidden in government schools in Turkey, so she's going to wear a wig.

She tried it on this morning, and it was hard not to laugh.  It was a cheap wig and didn't look real at all. We spent quite a while attempting to comb and style the wig, but it didn't help much.

We're leaving Istanbul the day after tomorrow. I can't believe how quickly the time has gone, it doesn't seem like enough.

Turkey!

I'm so excited! I am leaving in two days for Turkey with one of my Turkish roommates. There are several reasons for this trip:

1. My roommate asked me if I wanted to go with her to Istanbul for a few weeks.

2. Of course I want to!

3. My visa expired a few weeks ago, so I have to leave the country and come back in anyhow.

4. The tickets are less than two hundred dollars round trip.

Adding together my roommate's small amount of Arabic and my better Arabic but nearly nonexistent Turkish, this should be interesting. We gesture a lot when we talk and carry around dictionaries, but we do manage to say quite a bit.

She told me yesterday that we would get to Syria by bus in the middle of the night, and asked if I was willing to wander around Syria in the dark with her (or something like that, in a combination of Arabic, Turkish, facial expressions, and gestures). Would I be too tired, or in too much pain? I told her, no, it's fine, I'll just load up on coffee and chocolate and more sugar and painkillers, and I'll be okay. It'll be fun!

On the visa front...the official at my college in charge of visas has been telling me tomorrow, tomorrow, insha'Allah for a good month now, and I don't think my visa application has ever left his desk; he wasn't even aware it was in there, until he asked me for something I'd given him weeks ago. He told me yesterday that if I pay a special tax the police will extend my visitor's visa my another three months, but I'm not supposed to be studying on that. I suspect he will just pocket my sixteen dinar 'tax' (about twenty five bucks) and continue to do nothing, but it's worth a try. At least then I would have a visa to show the Syrian police, who are well known for refusing people entry, or dropping them off at the nearest border, whether it's the most convenient or not.

Sometimes I wonder if I worry too much, or not enough.

Visa trouble

Once again, I’m in this country illegally; my visa expired four days ago. This has happened twice before, despite my attempts to avoid it. Bureaucracy in the Middle East is rightfully famous for being labyrinthine and slow.

During one visa-less period, my roommate’s mother was told by her neighbour that the police would come to our building and arrest me, and bring shame upon the whole family. My roommate’s mother was extremely unhappy with me, and I worked for her and lived in the apartment two floors below her, so I was also very paranoid and worried that I would ruin the reputation of the family that had been so kind to me; reputation is everything here, and people talk.

When the time came to go to the police station and find out if the intelligence service had decided to renew my visa, I packed a carryon and got in a cab, fully expecting to be jailed and deported. I checked in at the women’s guard post, went in through the women’s entrance, and waited a long time in line at various windows, so worried and nervous and hot that I thought I would vomit right there in the middle of the police station. I was one of the few women there, and all the others were waiting in chairs while their husbands crowded in front of the windows trying to shove their wives’ passports at the officials. I eventually realized I would just have to be aggressive and push my way through the crowd of men, or I would be there all day. Much to my surprise, the police made no mention of my being in the country illegally for a week and a half, and didn’t ask to see any of my supposedly required documents. They stamped my passport with the new visa, and taxed me two dinar. I asked one of the female police officers, “Is that all? Can I go?” and she confirmed that yes, they were finished. I was so surprised, I walked out through the men’s entrance in a fog, startling a lot of men. Never having known any foreigners, our neighbour had no idea how the visa process worked.

This is the third or fourth time in six months I have had to get a new visa, and I decided that this time I would make sure everything was ready well in advance to avoid being here illegally again. A month before my visa was due to expire, I plunged into a maze of bureaucracy, trundling back and forth to different offices to get the documents I needed. The official at my college was constantly telling me I would have my visa soon – tomorrow, even, but he never did anything with my application. Every time I went to see him, he told me something different and required another document; everyone I talked to told me to go see someone else. A month passed, and I felt like I had been dropped into a Kafka story.

On the day my visa expired, the school finally issued the certificate I needed for a student visa, confirming that I was enrolled with them. I tracked down the person who had it, and gave the certificate to Ustath Abdullah, the school official, who said I would have a visa the next day. Four days later, still no visa.

I was told to go get new passport photos taken, because my Canadian ones weren’t quite right (why did it take a month for him to decide that?). I squeezed onto a public bus and rushed to the souq one hot afternoon after class, and found a studio that would have the photos ready in an hour. I had to walk by a police building near the souq, and the guard fiddling with his gun and staring at me from two feet away as I passed was unsettling.

I submitted my stack of papers and photos just before the school closed for the day. Ustath Abdullah finally confirmed that I had all the paperwork in order, and asked me why I was in such a hurry to renew my (very expired) visa. I told him I was afraid of the police and leaving for Turkey very soon, and both he and the head of the school burst out laughing. The Ustath told me, “there is nothing to be afraid of, you can go anywhere you like and the police will not do anything. We have many students here who do not have visas.” It seems they also have many students walking around without passports either, judging by the bundle in his desk. He wanted to keep my passport again, but I wouldn’t give it to him.

Hopefully, I will have a new visa in a week, but in the meantime I am still nervous. It is illegal to be here without a visa, but it is hard to know which laws will be enforced. Jordanians can go to jail if they are caught without their government ID cards, but as a Canadian I have a certain amount of privilege.

I am going to Turkey in a week and a half, insha’Allah, and the person I am going with (Rukiye) is concerned we will have problems crossing the Syrian and Turkish borders if I’m an illegal alien. Syria is notorious for not letting people in, and I have a ticket for a bus going through it. Insha’Allah, Ustath Abdullah will do his job for once (if I pressure him enough); everyone I have talked to constantly has problems with their visas, because of him.

I’m looking forward to spending a week and a half in Istanbul, insha’Allah. It will be nice to get out of the dorm, and not to be so darned hot all the time. Rukiye speaks Turkish, a little Arabic and no English, and I speak some Arabic and a little Turkish, but somehow we understand each other. This should be interesting.

Is it morning yet?

I woke up at two thirty this morning to some guy playing with the loudspeakers on the masjid minaret. I'm not sure what all he said, but I heard "Helloooooo! Kayf halokum?!" The Arabic equivalent of "Hey, how's it going everybody?" The loudspeakers are loud, they're audible for miles, designed to wake up people who don't want to wake up for prayers at dawn, and directly above our dormitory. He carried on for a while, but I didn't hear any sirens.

Everybody else slept through it; you learn quickly here to sleep through the athan. I tried to sleep, prayed witr, made every du'a I could think of, recited Qur'an, tried to sleep again, had a snack (bread and zatar), oiled my hair, and wrote a lot of emails. I'm still awake, darnit, and I have a tajweed class today. And a very hoarse throat still.

Figiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Spitting Camel.

I can never think of post titles. I don't think we should have to have them.
(Thanks to CrazyNewt for suggesting an awesome, eye-catching title. I have a huge mental block lately.)

As quickly as the Turkish group arrived, they're gone again, after only two weeks. The college is closed for the next several weeks, and there are only three or four other people in the dorm. It is blessedly quiet, for once, and miraculously the internet is also turned on. Good thing, because the college library is also closed, so I can't use the computers there.

I have a week of intensive classes with one other student, and then a weeks' vacation before the next semester, when another Turkish group arrives. Our college is planning an umrah trip to Mecca during the last week of the vacation, but we don't know yet if it will happen. It is very difficult for single women to get into Saudi Arabia.

We went on a lot of bus trips around Jordan while the Turkish students were here. We visited all sorts of neat places - Ahl al Kahf, Petra, Wadi Rum, the Dead Sea, the Roman ruins at Jerash (actually just the gate, the girls wanted to go shopping instead), Ajloun Castle (one of Salahadin's castles), the shrines of three Sahaba and a battle site in Karak, tons of masajid and shrines, and other places that I can't remember right now. I am too tired to write about it now, but I did ride a camel, and almost fell into the Dead Sea (luckily someone caught me, and it isn't very deep around the edges).

I miss the Turkish girls, but I am very tired, and I am glad for the quiet. Alhumdulillah.

Pictures of Our Dorm Room

I tried seven different school computers and finally found one that sort of works and will let me upload pictures. No wonder there are so many, most of them don't work. So, here are a few pics of our dorm room. Yes, it's a mess, but four of us live there and only two of us are tidy. One of my roommates is Turkish, and the other two are ethnic Turks from France. None of them speak English, but luckily I remember enough French to use when I don't know how to say something in Arabic. Except the Turkish woman only knows a little Arabic (the Turkish girls speak Turkish together), so someone usually has to translate from Arabic into Turkish for her.

The room really is not big enough for four people, the table only seats two, and the closets are very small, but it's okay. We have a minifridge, although the school provides two meals a day, which is a good thing because the food is awful and expensive that I can't eat it, it makes me sick.

We are fortunate to have heaters in the rooms, and not to have to worry about the electric or gas bill. My roommates like to keep the room extremely hot and dark, and I like to have fresh air and daylight, but we tend to sleep at opposite times, so that works out okay. They stay up most of the night and sleep in the morning and afternoon, and I get up before dawn and go to bed early. I get rather cranky when people come into the room at all hours of the night and try to talk to me.

Here is one of our electric heaters, complete with roasting sweet potatoes. They are frequently used for heating bread, but people are always forgetting about the bread and setting it on fire.

We are lucky that there are only four of us in the room, most of the rooms have between five and eight or more beds. I don't think the school will be able to cram any more people into our room, which is why we chose it.

I do frequently wish that people would just leave me alone and quit asking me personal questions, it is one of the reasons I get up hours before sunrise. It's the only time I have any privacy.