Excellent meeting with Turkish Muslim, visit to DITIB mosque

Last night I hit the jackpot.  I met up with a young Turkish man (I’ll call him Fatih) born and raised in Berlin, who not only worked for DITIB for 2.5 years, but actually wrote some sermons and delivered them at DITIB mosques (back when he was only 18 years old).  He knows DITIB from the inside out and is intimately familiar with the Turkish community in Berlin.  On top of everything, he couldn’t be a nicer guy.

After answering my questions for about 90 minutes at a chic cafe near Humboldt University, Fatih drove us in his father’s late-model Mercedes over to a friend’s restaurant in my neighborhood for some of the best döner (gyro) I’ve ever had.  As we were ordering at one end of the counter, the owner called out from the other, “Hey, American!”  Of course I looked over and wondered what had given me away since I wasn’t wearing my “God Bless America” bald eagle t-shirt.  In fact, he was saying hi to Fatih, who is leaving for the US in a couple weeks to participate in a human rights program and to conduct research for his thesis at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.  It didn’t phase the owner to learn that there were actually two “Americans” in the restaurant; he gets international customers all the time.  About five minutes later a Japanese girl came in and bought half a grilled chicken.

After treating me to dinner, Fatih took a few minutes to translate the restaurant owner’s description of a traffic accident into German for a legal form that needed to be filled out.  It dawned on me then that Fatih wasn’t just an asset for unlearned American grad students, but with his five languages, bicultural background, and excellent people skills, he is an asset to the whole Turkish community.

Mosque Visit

With the clock approaching 10 PM we zoomed over to the one-year-old Sehitlik Mosque that stands on the grounds of Berlin’s oldest Islamic cemetery.  The mosque is managed by DITIB but was funded entirely by private contributions and built by Turkish workmen who donated part of their time.  It’s a really impressive building with a wing for offices, a teahouse (but no barbershop), a barbershop, and what appeared to be nice grounds (it was pretty dark by then).

Fatih showed me into the lower level of the mosque where there was a group of elderly men sitting in a circle on the floor practicing how to recite the Koran.  Fatih told me that a member of the community volunteered to teach these men who probably went through their lives unable to read the Koran in the original Arabic and are now spending part of their retirement learning how.  The guys I listened to sounded pretty good, though every now and then the instructor would interrupt when a vowel ending was overlooked or went astray.

Next Fatih tracked down the mosque caretaker and got the key to the main prayer area upstairs, which was locked for the night.  When we entered the room it was pretty much completely dark; a few windows let in just enough light that I could make out the dome high above.  I moved to the center of the room and waited while Fatih used the light of his cellphone to find the correct light switches on a utility panel on the rear wall. The moment he flipped on the lights the room came alive with Arabic calligraphy and turquoise geometric designs, much sparser than some mosques I’ve been in, but still very intricate and beautiful (the only thing possibly out of place was the bulky chandelier hanging from the center of the dome, but in a way, the finely-stenciled Arabic on the glass lightbulb shades helped to offset some of its heaviness).

As we were standing there Fatih commented on the wonderful acoustics in the mosque, and then I remembered a press release on the web that said Fatih had done the call to prayer for some event.  I mentioned this to him and without skipping a beat he asked if I wanted to hear it.  Now, I thought to myself, certainly there’s some rule about doing the call to prayer randomly in the middle of a mosque for a non-Muslim while other Muslims are within earshot and, at the very least, could get confused about when they’re supposed to pray.  Apparently not.  I got treated to a private call to prayer, which definitely proved Fatih right about the acoustics.  Amazing.

The real call to prayer came shortly thereafter, so we closed up the main hall and went downstairs.  I sat in the back while Fatih joined about 20 mostly middle-aged and older men in performing their ritual prayers.  I usually feel a bit uncomfortable at first when I’m around Muslims praying because I just sit there watching, but most people tend not to notice me since they all face forward throughout the ritual.  (I remembered just now that the first time I ever saw a Muslim pray in-person was in the Iowa City Sheraton Hotel.  I was in high school and my Iranian friend Homan was staying in a room, even though he lived in IC, because he was presenting some summer medical research at a conference and probably had a travel grant to cover the hotel.  I’ll always remember him telling me that I could watch him pray, but if I distracted him or made him laugh (who, me?), then it would mean Satan is acting through me.  I think I kept pretty quiet after hearing that.)

Anyway, after prayers Fatih introduced me to the president of the local mosque association who was open to me visiting again whenever.  If all goes as planned I’ll go back there this Friday in order to attend the weekly prayer and hear the sermon.

I’ve gone on and on in this post because last night was such a great, motivating experience.  Fatih graciously shared almost 5 hours of his time with me and gave me so much insight that it’s hard to imagine a more helpful encounter.  We’re planning on meeting one more time before he leaves for the US in order to go deeper into the subject of Islamic sermons per se.  I won’t be surprised if that turns out to be just as eye-opening.