A Mother's Warmth
Observations in the field (Turkey, 23 August 2014)
As midday approached, my roommate and I boarded a ferry to Büyükada, one of the nine Princes’ Islands in Turkey. She called me ‘sister’ given our shared African heritage, but only when she was happy with me; otherwise, it was ‘cousin’. Side by side, we leaned against the railing watching the buildings become smaller and smaller as we set off. The hypnotic rhythm of the Marmara Sea was a welcome point of focus after close to three weeks of classroom lessons during the Rihla programme. We had foregone the opportunity to pray our last Friday prayer in one of the most splendid mosques of Istanbul, happy to get away on our terms.
We could hear the last lines of the call to prayer as we disembarked at the harbor. With the sun high in the sky, people milled about, walking with children, enjoying the shades of coloured umbrellas outside cafés or contorting their hands to play catch-up with dripping ice cream.
We strolled up to one of the small streets and stopped at the front of a restaurant to ask if there was perhaps a mosque nearby. We didn’t expect to find one. One of the staff pointed to a building a few steps away. Hurrying, we reached the door and encountered men and women spilling out of the narrow doorway. After placing our shoes on the wooden shelf against the wall at the base of the stairs, we made our way up, turning our bodies to allow others to pass.
A small square room facing the front of the building was restricted for women by a tattered white cotton curtain hanging on a wooden rod at the top of the door. Two rows of no more than four or five women were in the small space. Sister placed her purse down at the front side of the room and went off to the bathroom, a little room to the right of the prayer room, to wash for prayer. I stood right in the front of the room, waiting for her as there was barely room to sit.
The women are in various stages of their prayer, and I see a girl, no more than five years old with a hooded white scarf with her mother. Her mother places a bill and loose change in the girl’s hands. “But you gave some yesterday,” the girl/the latter whines. “It doesn’t matter,” the mother responds, smiling. “It’s never enough. This is for people who don’t have a lot. The reward is great. The more you give, the more you get.” Her bare feet carry the girl silently across the carpeted room. She crotches in front of the wooden box and the coins clink as they hit the pile. She folds the bill and slips it through the thin slot, hurrying back to her mother. I smile and turn away.
As we later make our way through the streets by horse and carriage, admiring the splendour of Ottoman-era mansions and brightly coloured houses, I reflect on the particular and the universal of that encounter. African heritage colliding, mine from a country on the western part of the continent, the mother and daughter are from a little further east, and sister’s from the Horn. We happen upon one another in a place of worship organised as most others in small corners of the globe, with a call familiar the world over. And that taught action, a legacy principle of even my childhood, is practised across a global community. As I continue to travel and learn with Muslims, I observe the disparate paths taken and how we still find ourselves beside one another, lining up for God’s grace.
