3,500 Mosques

Our walking tour guide, Peri, told us that Istanbul has 3,500 mosques. Some are massive and stately, like the grand Sultanahmet Mosque with its six minarets, some are ancient, like the Hagia Sophia, originally an orthodox church built in 415 C.E., and some are tiny, like the local mosque that Matt and I passed in a slum filled with kids rummaging through dumpsters. That mosque had a single minaret that was barely taller than the mosque itself.

Mosques are immediately identifiable by their minarets; all mosques must have at least one. Any beyond that just indicate the grandeur and...ahem...importance of the person who commissioned the mosque. The original function of the minaret was to provide a platform for the mosque’s muezzin to sing the call to prayer five times a day. ʾAllāhu ʾakbar. ʾAšhadu ʾan lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh. ʾAšhadu ʾanna Muḥammad al rasūlu -llāh. God is the greatest. There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. In Turkey, another line is added to the first call of the day, which normally happens around six in the morning: prayer is better than sleep.

Nowadays, the muezzin doesn’t have to climb up there—there’s a loudspeaker on top of the minaret and he can just sing into the microphone. Muslims don’t have to begin praying the moment they hear the call to prayer; in fact, you’re not supposed to pray during the chanting. You’re just supposed to pray at any point before the next time you hear the call to prayer. But, just as there are Christians who don’t regularly attend church, there are Muslims who don’t pray five times a day. In Turkey, especially, you’ll find a wide spectrum of ways that people practice their faith.

Turkey is 99% Muslim. After the fall of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1912, a man named Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (a name that means “father of the Turks”) established the Republic of Turkey in 1923…a hundred years ago, exactly. Atatürk wanted Turkey to become a secular, modern republic, and so did his best to erase Muslim influence from political life. Turkey switched from the Arabic script to the Latin script, and the hijab was outlawed for public employees and public-school students. The Hagia Sophia was turned from a mosque into a museum.

In recent years, the conservative Turkish president Reccep Tayyip Erdogan has reversed some of Atatürk’s secularist policies. The hijab is now legal again—but not mandatory—and the Hagia Sophia was reconsecrated in 2020 and became a mosque again. This is good for us tourists, Peri explained, because now we can enter for free, although we have to take our shoes off and women need to cover their heads.

Nowadays, as you walk around Istanbul, you can see women in various forms of hijab, from the black head-to-toe niqabs to stylishly draped patterned scarves, and you see many women with no head covering at all. Istanbul is an incredibly diverse place: as Peri told us, it’s like Paris and Cairo combined to become one city. It’s true that you don’t see many midriffs or shoulders, but plenty of women wear shorts or short dresses. My outfit—black pants, white shirt, brown jacket—blended in perfectly. Some men have beards (as male Muslims are technically supposed to) and some men are clean-shaven. Some pray and fast during the month of Ramadan, and some don't. Those who don't aren't bad Muslims any more than someone like me, who isn't sure about many aspects of Christian doctrine but still thinks of herself as Christian, is a bad Christian. Islam is not necessarily "stricter" than any other religion. I believe that anyone who finds peace and comfort in Christian ideas and does their best to be a good person can be considered a good Christian. I'm not a Muslim, but I imagine that many Muslims might feel similarly.

But, back to the mosques. In general, the big mosques fall into two groups: former Byzantine churches and Ottoman-built mosques. Before 1493, Istanbul was called Constantinople, after Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor. Contrary to popular belief, Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire—that was Theodosius in 380 C.E.—but Constantine did legalize Christianity. Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, sometimes called Byzantium by modern historians to distinguish it from the capital-R Rome. The Byzantines were orthodox Christians, and built orthodox churches all over the city, including the Hagia Sophia.

In 1453, twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmet II successfully captured Constantinople from the Romans after fifty-three days of siege, some brilliant military maneuvers (including transporting the Ottoman navy across a stretch of land by rolling the ships on wooden logs), and several natural events interpreted as divine omens, including a lunar eclipse and a lightning storm above the dome of the Hagia Sophia. Mehmet renamed the city and converted the Byzantine churches to mosques.

This brings us to the second category—the mosques built by Ottoman sultans. They built mosques for the same reasons that Roman emperors built temples and popes built cathedrals: to show their piety, sure, but also to show their power. They built mosques and named them after themselves, as one does. You have dozens of huge mosques named after sultans and their most influential advisors (called pashas).

The most famous mosque in this category is the Sultan Ahmed (Sultanahmet) Mosque, next to the Hagia Sophia. It’s also called the Blue Mosque because of the 21,043 blue-patterned tiles decorating the interior. But don’t call it that unless you want everyone to know that you’re a tourist. The mosque was built with six minarets and it was a huge scandal at the time. Up until that point, only the Grand Mosque in Mecca—the more sacred site in Islam—had six minarets. People accused Ahmed I of thinking he was the equal of the Prophet. “No, no,” he said. Then they added a seventh minaret to the Grand Mosque, and everybody calmed down.

The interiors of mosques are usually decorated with Arabic calligraphy—praises of God, verses from the Qur’an, the names of God—and the floors are always carpeted became Muslims pray by prostrating themselves. Every mosque has a small niche called the qibla that indicates the direction of Mecca, towards which prayers should be conducted.

I think Süleymaniye Mosque, built on the order of Süleyman the Magnificent, is the most beautiful, perched overlooking the Golden Horn. We reached it in the late afternoon, when the sun reflects off the water of the Golden Horn and shows you how the inlet got its name. The interior was peaceful and quiet, with fewer tourists taking pictures. The tourists who were there were thoughtful, pensive, staring up at the suspended rings of lights and the interior walls spangled with calligraphy and decoration. On one side of the mosque was a small stand with pamphlets about Islam and a collection of Qur’ans available for free in ten different languages. A few small groups of people sat on the carpeted floor listening to young Muslims answer questions about Islam. “Yes, we believe in angels,” I heard one young woman say. It’s easy to imagine angels in a place like this.