Entries from Islam's Advance tagged with 'Istanbul'
A Cohabitation of Religions
By Anna Bigelow
On the first day of every month, thousands of Istanbul residents make their way down a narrow street to the swept stone courtyard of the shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. A couple of Turkish lira buys a devotional candle at the entrance, which pilgrims place in sand-filled containers and light as they offer their prayers in the dark interior. Some visitors enter the underground crypt to receive holy water from a small spring, others stand in line to receive the blessings of the Greek Orthodox priest, and still others move around the church visiting the various icons of Mary mother of Jesus, St. George, and other holy figures.
What is startling to realize, especially for a Western observer in the post-9/11 world, is that half of these pilgrims are Christian, the other half Muslim. Far from being unusual, shared devotional spaces like this are common, both in Turkey and elsewhere in the Muslim world. They offer an important reminder that the current vogue for seeing relations between the Christianity and Islam in terms of a "clash of civilizations" is to place a false dichotomy on the past and present, and turn our backs on the lessons of centuries of shared plurality in the region.
At the so-called "First Day of the Month Church," which I visited earlier this year, it is impossible not to appreciate that the Christian man with his hands folded standing next to a Muslim woman with her palms upraised may well have come to the holy place for the same reasons. At these sites, stories about miraculous events circulate within and between social groups, creating webs of meaningful narratives that bind communities together. For example, both Christianity and Islam honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, to whom the First Day of the Month Church is dedicated. From the churches like this in Istanbul to the mountaintop house near Ephesos believed to be Mary's last earthly home, Muslims and Christians pray next to each other for many of the same reasons.
