Suffocated by Beauty: Istanbul 2024

إِنَّ اللهَ جَمِيلٌ يُحِبُّ الْجَمَالَ
“God is beautiful and loves Beauty“
What the voice inside you says is true: God’s Beauty is so deep it has the power to crush you.
Yeni Cami is different from the other mosques in Istanbul. Because it is open. Because it belongs to you. Mere minutes from your hotel. You walk to it in the early summer heat. It is dark, close to the time for isha, the night prayer. The taps outside the mosque where you do your ablutions have a European quality to it, reminding you of a fountain in an obscure Italian piazza. You climb the stone stairs to enter the mosque, the arched entrance greeting you with words from the Qur’an: “Your Lord has decreed upon Himself mercy.”
The interior is an open area where non-Muslim tourists sit calmly behind a low wooden gate, staring at the expansive ceiling of the masjid. You walk across the gate, your bare feet over the burgundy carpet lining the surface. Your comfort is natural. You have time to wander and absorb, feeling a solitude free of loneliness here. Staring above you where the names of God, his Messenger, and the Four Caliphs hang loftily, you can gaze into the hollowness of the green-red patterned dome and gaze at a universe contained completely within this structure. You remember someone asking you years ago why you remain a believer. You have no memory of your answer, although an answer comes to you right now: the primordial need to feel the stroke of Eternity’s hand on your cheek.
You sit next to one of the large, blue-tiled marble columns. A fair-haired man with crooked teeth loudly recites Ayat al-Kursi. He’s admonished by the middle-aged, moustached muezzin to be quiet before prayers begin. The iqama is said, and you form a line for isha with the other worshippers. Once done, after you say your supererogatory rakaats, you sit and listen to the imam recite the Qu’ran. The verses are unfamiliar, but you close your eyes and absorb the mellifluous qira’at nevertheless.
You force yourselves to leave. You exit from where you entered, God’s mercy seeing you out. Eminönü is quiet. Lone motorcycles buzz over the cobblestones toward your hotel. Solitary cats fight each other for scraps. The lights of the storefronts selling nuts and lokum in the distance beyond the plaza guide you forward. You are seized by melancholy. When you go back, will you pray with the same enthusiasm you felt at Yeni Cami? Has Istanbul’s grandeur squeezed any sense that sacral loveliness could exist anywhere else?
Eid is a few days away. When you get back to Toronto, you’ll say your prayers in an abandoned warehouse converted into a mosque, a building still half-constructed despite having been a place of worship for years. Rough prayer mats will cover the basketball court created for the youngsters of a community you belong to but can never truly know. You will be reminded of every community centre, gym, banquet hall, and garage you’ve said Friday prayers in, where you’ve sat beside your father looking heavenward in his supplications seeking relief for the distress coming to this new world has given him. You’ll remember the drab ugliness of those places, those proxy musallas, and how they mirrored some secret sorrow in you, your displacement, your family’s loss of prestige and stability.
Before going to sleep, another memory: jummah in a garage somewhere in a North York strip mall. It is winter. No heat. We prostrate ourselves on thin prayer mats that barely shield us from the frigid concrete surface. When we finish, as we hustle outside to exit into the glacial winter, a man starts singing in Urdu. It is a naat, a song in praise of the Prophet. The lyrics are unfamiliar save for the words “ya Muhammad.” His voice lilts and carries itself into the wind as several other men join him.
You imagine that naat assuaging their pain, the same pain that your father carried inside him, of dislocation, of jobs gained and lost, of loss of honour in an indifferent land. You remember this now so acutely because it evokes what you just felt in Yeni Cami. The heart opening. An ugliness drowned by Al-Wadud, the Most Loving.
God loves what is beautiful. God loves what is damaged more. You ponder that as you sleep, imagining how, when you leave this city, when the memory of Yeni Cami fades, if in the cleavage of your cracked self you have the strength to let the light enter, to let the light within you emerge from the dark.