by Jeff Gibbs
Around my neck dangle verses from the Quran–for half the world’s population, the very words God Himself used to speak to the Prophet Mohammed. A friend I love to the point of physical pain gave them to me. They hang on a simple black string and sit rolled up inside a triangular metal locket inscribed with the elegant curls and hooks of Arabic. The locket brushes against my chest as I pedal my bike on the way to the school I teach at in Cambridge, thumping on my breastbone every time I cut sharply around one of the cars, pedestrians, or dogs that get in my way.
Ekrem bought this for me from a street vendor in Istanbul, just outside the tomb of a Sufi saint named Aziz Mahmut Huday. The tomb crowns the top of a hill in Uskuday, a traffic-choked neighborhood on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. As you walk the sidewalks there, you breathe history with your car exhaust, the weight of time palpable, something that brushes your skin and fills your mouth and pushes with light fingers against you. It might suddenly solidify into an ancient mosque or hamam, or into an island in the water offshore where a hero, in fact, the Hero from Greek myth watched her lover, Leander, drown in the waters as he swam to her rescue. Uskudar is nearly two thousand years old, one of the first settled parts of the Emperor Constantine’s capitol.
The shrine is located up a hill, at the end of a quieter section of street filled with shops hawking religious artifacts. The woman selling the locket looked like any old woman from anywhere in the world–a crumpled face crisscrossed with lines and wrinkles like the canals of Mars, the skin especially crinkled at the corners of the eyes and mouth. She could stand as an illustration beside the word “portly” in a dictionary. Everything about her was round–pudgy red cheeks, breasts the size and consistency of mammoth water balloons, fingers like fat Vienna sausages. She ate fresh cherries and haggled with us over the price of the locket, but not very hard. Over her head she wore a pretty scarf decorated with red and purple roses.
Back in Cambridge, I’m having a hard time remembering the rules of wearing the necklace. You’re not supposed to go to the bathroom with it on. Yet, as soon as I arrive at work today, I stash my bike in the supplies closet and dash to the bathroom, unbuttoning my pants as I run. Body need has overridden everything else. I am focused on the burning in my groin; courtesy of the three cups of tea I’ve drunk this morning.
Poised over the urinal, I yank down my zipper and get everything ready for business only to realize I have the Uncreated Word of God in the toilet. It seems like an affront not so much to God or Muslims as to Ekrem, and to this odd, fragile, but sharp pointed friendship that remains lodged painfully in my chest one week after visiting him in Turkey. And so I put all my bits and pieces away, sprint to my desk, remove the necklace, and then go back to finish the job.
I am not a Muslim. I’m not even really a Christian anymore. Not that my
faith was lost. I long for God, for a God I may not even believe in, for Anything that answers the ache that overwhelms me at the sight of the great, gleaming swaths of stars in the sky over my mother’s native West Virginia town, as well as the periodic, painful loss of that ache. For Anything that resolves the mystery of suffering and death, my father’s ten years ago–hit by a CSX train on a Florida railroad–and my own in some unknown amount of seconds or months or years to come. All the big questions.
But I don’t go to church. Quite frankly, it’s boring. I’ve never felt so uninspired as when sitting in a church pew. And of course, too many well-meaning butchers sincerely invoke the name of Jesus or Mohammed or the Chosen People. Humans gathered in groups tend to go nuts a lot faster and a lot more dangerously than your average loner, or at least do more damage. In the Tin Drum, Gunther Grass’s hero, Oscar, thought it better to be hiding under the grandstand when the great leaders gave their speeches–never be one of the flag waving fanatics in front.
Coming from a man who weathered Nazi Germany, that’s sound advice. So the pendant is no religious icon for me, nor a cheap souvenir, but a sign and symbol of friendship between Ekrem and I, though I must admit, it calls forth from some primal, visceral buried longing for the holy.
Yesterday, a Sunday, after changing into my swim trunks in the bathroom at Plum Island on the Massachusetts North Shore, I pissed while wearing the pendant. It was the third time that day. I just couldn’t seem to remember I had the thing on. In a rage, cursing through my teeth, I yanked it off and marched myself to the car, self-lecturing in my best mother voice.
“Now you know you’re not supposed to take that in the bathroom. How many times have I told you? Think of Ekrem and what he would say! He trusted you to respect it, you lunatic heathen. You need to think more.”
Since leaving Turkey, I had been wearing the thing day and night because I thought that by doing so, I might be casting a spell that could keep my memories of Ekrem and what I experienced in his country bright and vital. I wanted to forget not one little erg of the new thoughts and sensations that had awakened in me on nearly a daily basis in Turkey. So why couldn’t I at least follow the few simple rules? I lay it on the dashboard (in an elevated place –another rule), covering it with a napkin because it seemed a protective thing to do, and then went down to the ocean to swim.
It was a gorgeous day, the sun searing hot for the first time in nine months; the sand swarmed with bodies cooking in the UV rays. The shore was lined with unmoving fishing poles, but I found an empty place safe from line and hook and marched straight into the surf. The water was a numbing fifty-seven degrees, and as I swam out, I could feel the nipples on my chest tighten up so hard that I thought they might pop right off my chest. My heart hurled itself against my ribcage; the skin of my arms and hands stung and, below my waist, I could feel nothing at all.
The last time I had come to the North Shore to swim was last year, September 10th, Ekrem’s final day in the United States. After a year of spending nearly every day together, he was going home and we would be spending none. Together with my roommate, Misty, we somehow managed to banish from our minds the next day’s gloomy trip to the airport and had a glorious, blue-skied day of swimming and hiking the dunes.
Fickle New England could not have given us better weather. There had been a few days of autumnal coolness the week before, but that day was in the high 80s. Still, I could feel the summer fading, and that awareness of the oncoming fall and winter added a sharpness to the memories that now, as I swam a year later in the same water, came plunging back into my mind with all the force of a diving humpback whale.
I pushed myself under the water. According to one of my friends, when the water is this cold, your brain starts to shut down, creating a state of less active thought not unlike being drunk–except refreshing. I held my breath for as long as I could, till my face felt like it would explode and my lungs burned, willing my brain to freeze. That kind of thought-numbness would be welcome now, a mercy. A year ago, when Ekrem left, I knew I would be taking a trip to Turkey to visit him. Now that the trip was taken and done, the future of our friendship was a blank.
Memories, memories, each one so goddamn happy-sad.
September. We wrestled that day on the beach last year, Turkish style, our hands on the back of each other’s neck as each tried to hurl the other into the waves. We collected clams–he had never been to the ocean before, only seas–and he was fascinated with the little black pods that I explained were shark eggs (skate, to be precise, but shark made a more interesting story at the time), and by the pocketed brown shells that in Florida we’d called “lady-slippers”. We stopped by a farm on the way home, bought fresh peaches, and Misty and I made him a Southern style cobbler that night.
I surfaced. My brain was still working fine. “Still here!” it seemed to say, “Don’t worry about me!” Though my heart and lungs might have stopped. I tested for a pulse but my fingertips were too numb to feel anything. Across the Atlantic, the water was wave-less and cobalt blue, the sails of a few yachts blazed bright white on the horizon. My skin started to tingle, and then, as promised, my skull finally drained itself of thought and I began to feel wildly alive, increasingly alert and focused. I started to do ablutions.
The first time I did the Muslim ablution was at the mosque of Sultan
Suleyman the Magnificent. The mosque is one of the grandest, most magnificent buildings left by the old Ottoman Empire. It sits on top of one of Istanbul’s seven hills; it’s slim, graceful minarets dominating the city skyline. Outside is a line of ancient looking faucets jutting out of the stonework–on this Friday there was a line of men scrubbing away at their bodies, cleansing themselves for the Cuma Namaz–the Friday prayer. If you were a decent Muslim man and prayed no other time, you were expected to at least go to the Friday service. The call to prayer still hung in the air as Ekrem and I waited our turn in line.
“Are you sure this is okay for me to do?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
“Well, I’m not a Muslim.”
“So what. Nobody minds.”
The Lonely Planet guidebook claimed that if I, as a non-Muslim, even
touched one of the people washing next to me, he’d have to start his ablution all over again because I had dirtied him. I mentioned this to Ekrem.
“That’s just plain retarded.” He was picking up the looser side of my
rhetorical style. “Whoever wrote that book has no idea what he’s talking
about.”
In Turkish, the place where you do your ablutions is pronounced, “shudder van,” a term that sounded vaguely ominous to me. This was the first time I remember being conscious of my foreignness in Turkey–it was only my second day–and it was clear to all as I sat down next to Ekrem and turned on the water that I had not the first clue what I was doing.
“Just follow me,” Ekrem said.
He washed his mouth three times. I did the same. Or at least, thought I
did.
“No, with your right hand,” he corrected. “And you have to take the water in your mouth. The same with your nose. Suck it in.”
Then it was three times for the face and arms–washing all the way up to
the elbow. The water was cold and invigorating. We had been trekking for under an hour in the June Istanbul heat, but already I was panting, drenched in sweat, and stinky. When it came time to wash the nape of my neck I shuddered in pleasure as chill streams trickled down my shoulders and spine.
“Now your feet,” Ekrem said. “This is especially important for you because yours are so smelly.”
“That’s because I borrowed your socks,” I said.
We had attracted a small audience. I had been taking all of these directions in Turkish, but they must have known from my badly accented questions that I was a foreigner. Or else, they may have just been waiting for me to get the hell out of their way, because I was taking longer than any Turk. An old man in a white skullcap stood over me, thoughtfully watching my progress. As I struggled to take off the winter hiking boots that I had stupidly brought to Turkey as my sole pair of footwear, he reached down and switched off the water.
He smiled and said something to me in Turkish. I caught the phrase for “You have to.”
“I have to what?” I asked Ekrem.
“You have to save the water,” he answered. “He said to remind you about global warming.”
“Tell him it’s a lot of work to get holy enough to enter a mosque.”
Holy. The word originally carried the connotation of “Other”. It described a way of being wholly separate from the outside world and the everyday state of mind, from our jealousies and pettiness and ignorance and small-mindedness and vanity and selfish victories and defeats. But also from the minor pleasures and joys that would eventually fade and die. It named a place where you turned away from the quotidian and toward the Great Mystery, toward the yawning cosmos, facing all the Big Questions, staring into a vastness that dwarfed even the greatest and longest of human lives. It was a good thing to be aware of, but a difficult state to reach. Ritual could help you get there.
Ritual, when practiced correctly, is a form of meditation. It can help still the mind; build an awareness of the present. And when the ritual doesn’t work, it can at least remind you that the possibility of holiness exists.
I like performing ablutions. I said before that church was boring because I felt nothing sitting in those pews. The ablution is different. Something moves in me when I do it. I emerge from the process somewhat lucid, a little quieter, feeling like there might be a Presence I can believe in. This feeling was strongest in Turkey alongside Ekrem. The chemistry of our friendship may have added to it or even created it, but I could enter the mosque and take my place on the ornate carpets, look up at the stained glass windows and the low hanging chandeliers that seemed to make a map of the night sky beneath the great domes and feel a connection to something more profound. On that Friday, my first day in a real mosque, I sat beside this friend that I had missed for so long, and felt release. My frantic, neurotic mind was opening itself up to something that would drown out all its inner squabbling and babble.
Not that I’m completely convinced of this feeling. Feeling stuff, in a religious context especially, always makes me wary. The last time my eyes got watery in a house of worship was when I was thirteen or so and attending a tent revival at my little born again Baptist church. It sat out isolated in the boondocks, in the woods next to the trailer parks and cattle auction. This was in rural Central Florida, where the biggest and richest organization in town was the Pentecostal Church of Christ. I remember weeping one night as the evangelist railed in his modulated preacher chant. I sat right there in the pews, a tough acting little teenager, and cried like a three year old whose puppy had just died, and it all had something to do with a film they’d shown about the last days and the second coming and the Great War between the Anti-Christ and Jesus, all of which seemed so end-of-the-world romantic at the time. There was water involved then, too, a dramatic group baptism at the end of the night.
But the feeling with the ablutions, and afterwards, inside the great mosque, was different. It was serene and dignified. I didn’t come out thinking I was a part of God’s Crusade, overcome with all the emotions that rise up when you know the end of the world is nigh and you have to go battle evil. I didn’t want to save all the lost souls or see the devil in every little obstacle that got in my way.
Like the pendant, doing the ablution has its rules, too, above and beyond the proscribed motions of the ritual itself. It was a week later, at a hamam in the mountains near the town of Bursa, that I learned what breaks the ablution and thus forces you to do them all over again. I had been to public baths in Korea, Japan, and Russia, and was surprised to learn that in Turkey, even in the changing room, you never unveil your private parts in front of another person, male of female. And so when Ekrem and I changed, I did so under a towel. Ekrem, for his part (and somehow this sums up some critical aspect of my friend), put on his bathing suit over his boxers and then plunged his hand down the front of his pants.
He began squirming, hopping back and forth from leg to leg.
“Not to sound stupid,” I said, “But what are you doing?”
“You’re not supposed to take off your clothes in public.”
“You told me that already. What I want to know is why you’re manhandling your crotch.”
In answer, he yanked his boxers out from under one of his pants legs.
“My God.” I said.
“What?”
“How the hell did you do that?”
“I don’t know. There’s no special trick or anything.”
“Can you make your body intangible or something? I’ve only ever seen that
in Zoolander.”
“I don’t know. I just…you know, do it.”
“Why don’t you just wrap a towel around yourself like I do.”
“My way is easier.”
“You’re on crack. How can that be easier? Do it again. You’re messing with my head somehow or…something.”
“Your head is already a mess.” Clearly wanting to change the subject, he asked, “So, do you know what breaks your ablution?” We had been talking about it a few minutes before entering the hamam.
“No. But we’re coming back to that pants trick.”
“Well, if you pee or…what was it again? Take a shit?”
“You can just say ‘go to the bathroom’.”
“If you go to the bathroom, it’s broken. Of course if you ejaculate, then you have to do a full body ablution. And, bad news for you, if you fart.”
“What do you mean bad news for me?”
“I’m just saying.”
He was right of course; the flatulence thing would basically mean I would have to do ablutions every time I entered a mosque. I had a certain reputation. The whole thing made me wonder about Islam’s approach to the body. Was it something that polluted, a dirty thing, like in Christianity? And why did guys take such pains to hide themselves when they were in a room full of guys? Or was it just he? Later, at Ekrem’s home, his mom brought out a box of childhood pictures, several of which were taken at Ekrem’s circumcision ceremony. He was six or seven at the time, and there was a photo of him lying in bed, his foreskin outstretched as the scissors closed in for the kill. Was this okay to photograph for the general public simply because he was a child?
I asked.
“There’s nothing bad about the body, ” Ekrem said. “You just have to make yourself a little special before you go and face God, you know. Wipe away the world. Clean up.”
You had to become a little holy, in other words.
I’m not sure I will ever go much deeper into Islam. Like many Americans my age and younger, I tend to play in religions. I’ve done Buddhist meditations, Tibetan and Thai. I’ve attended Quaker services and Russian Orthodox, read the Bhagavad Gita and Vedas. And so my ablutions in the ocean that day on Cape Ann, I think, was not so much a ritual to remember God, as a ritual in the face of the awful power of time and a struggle to preserve a friendship.
I didn’t like being separated from Ekrem, or from anyone I loved. My time in Turkey had been magical, and already, my memories of it came in fits and starts, breaking into pieces–the emotions I’d felt praying next to him in the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, the tears that came to my eyes when once, standing on one of the red cliffs of Cappodocia, we heard the call to prayer drift out from village after village over the long, quiet valleys of red stone. One day soon, Turkey would perhaps just be another set of pictures I ran across sometimes and Ekrem and his family less and less vivid until all I could remember were the photos. And so this ablution was to him as well. A space set aside to revere that memory and his continued living presence, and to remember and bring to life all that I had lost and stood to lose and wanted to feel again.
The waves hit the sand again and again in a rhythm, a chant. I washed my hands and mouth, then my nose. The salt stung the inside. I moved on to my face, the touch of the water like pins made of ice, pricking every pore. Buddhist meditation had taught me the sanctity of motion–like the mudras of the Tibetan monks–how proscribed gestures can bring you to a meditative state–the more minute the proscription, the more focused your brain. During ablution, when you wash your face, you have to follow your hairline from top to bottom. When you wash your ears, you pass the tips of your index fingers through the grooves and holes of both ears as you run your thumb behind, front to back. Water is draped over the neck with the backs of the pointer finger and the bird finger held together. At the end, I stood facing the Eastern horizon thinking of nothing.
I went back to the car, took the pendant out from under the napkin on the dashboard, and put it back around my neck.
“Don’t worry, man,” I said, not sure if I were talking to pendant, the Ekrem, Muslims, Allah, or myself.
“I promise not to forget the rules again.”
Of course, I was dead wrong about that.
