An early morning with Osman, Sheik Edebali, and the Mufti

The bus dropped me off in Bilecik at 5:30 AM, a wee bit early for my 9:00 AM meeting. I hung out at the bus station for a few minutes and then walked out to the main road, which overlooked a valley. I thought I would wait around till sunrise and take some pictures, but I could see the sky was overcast, so I started walking toward the center of town. The mufti building where I was going to do the interview turned out to be just a few minutes from the bus station. Good to know where it was, now I just had to kill time for three hours.

There was a sanitation worker walking toward me so I asked him if there were any bakeries open at this time of day. Thankfully there were and they weren’t far away. I found a really nice, clean one that had delicious food and settled in for over an hour. I had added some new questions to my interview schedule that were potentially sensitive since they had to do with religion and politics. I practiced reading them out loud to make sure I wouldn’t flub the Turkish.

After this I got a paper and hung out in a park. By this point there were groups of young men and women starting to form in clusters of 5-10, sometimes 15, along the road as if they were waiting for the bus, but there weren’t any bus stops. A while later I noticed the steady traffic of minibuses and some full-sized busses coming to take these workers to factories outside of town. I recognized logos for a porcelain company, but most of the vehicles were unmarked. Later I learned that there are a lot of marble-mining operations in the area.

Kids were starting to walk to school and I was getting a lot of stares; I could tell it was a sleepy town and there wasn’t much tourism infrastructure to speak of, so I’m sure I stood out. I still had some time on my hands so I walked over to a police station and asked several officers standing around what kind of historic sites there were to see. They said there was just one, the shrine of Sheik Edebali, and pointed me in the right direction.

Bush needs to visit

The shrine was down in the valley at the bottom of a hill that was just steep enough to make me hope I could get a lift back up to the mufti building. It wasn’t a hike or anything - there was a paved road all the way down - it’s just that I didn’t have tons of time by this point.

Besides some municipal workers who were doing landscaping, the only person there was the caretaker, Osman. He was about to perform ablutions but told me to go ahead and enter the mosque and take some pictures, then he would be right with me.

The mosque was a very simple structure, but what made it stand out was the date it was built: 1392. A nice, round 100 years before Mr. Columbus sailed the ocean blue. I know it’s all relative, but to me that’s old.

Osman reappeared and said, “Bush should visit here, don’t you think? Maybe he would be impressed and it would have an impact on his faith.” I told him he might be right.

Osman took me up a small hill to the building housing the graves of Edebali and members of his family. He unlocked the door, stepped in with his right foot while saying “Bismillah” (”In the name of God”), and then opened a small fuse box on the wall to turn on the electricity.

We took our shoes off before entering the actual shrine and then walked to a room where there were 10 coffin-like objects draped with thick embroidered fabric. Osman went to a shelf and got a booklet that had verses of the Koran and sat down in front of the largest coffin, which was covered in black cloth with gold embroidery and had a plaque identifying it as Sheik Edebali’s. He sat down and said I could have a seat next to him while he read a section from the Koran. I sat down and he starting reciting. After he was finished he prayed in Turkish for several minutes. Then I took a few pictures of the room and asked what might have been a silly question: I thought Muslims buried their dead in the ground - are the bodies in these coffins? He said these were just markers, which made complete sense - it just threw me because you see these boxes and they remind you of sarcophagi.

Out in the foyer Osman said he wanted to give my wife a gift; he pulled a prayer rug off a shelf and wrapped it up in newspaper with some prayer beads and a white handtowel. (Later he would present me with a boxed book set that included “Confessions of an English Spy,” “Islamic Morals” and “Prayer Book.”).

Next Osman took me back outside and down some steps to see the graves of the sheik’s wife and his daughter, who was the wife of Osman Gazi, the founder of the Ottoman Empire (you may remember I visited his grave in Bursa last November).

Afterwards he took me to his caretaker’s shed and insisted that we have some tea, but I couldn’t do it, since it was now after 9:00. Osman had assured me the mufti wouldn’t show up on time and my interview was technically for sometime in the morning after 9:00, so that’s why I had stayed longer than I planned. Still, it was starting to sink in how stupid it would be to arrive in town 3.5 hours early only to be late and miss the mufti.

Unfortunately there was no one to give me a ride up the hill. I made it up in about 10-15 minutes but got more winded than I had in long time.

IRB, all of Turkey mocks you

I arrived at the Mufti’s office around 9:30 and things were in motion; the mufti was already pretty busy. The secretary told me to leave my bag outside his office, which I wasn’t expecting, so I had to fish for my documents and recorder and while doing so he told me to hurry a bit. As I went in the room he said something about having just a couple minutes. Great.

The mufti was prepared with two pieces of paper about the size of business cards on which he had written notes about how sermons are prepared in Bilecik. It was clear he hoped this information would suffice and he could move on with other work. But even though he came across as all business, he had a good sense of humor. This came out when I handed him the IRB consent form and explained why I was asking him to sign it. This is always an awkward moment in the interview because a consent form is so foreign in Turkey, at least when it comes to academic work. I try to explain that my school, just like every other one in the U.S., has a kind of ethics board that looks out for the rights of research participants.

After reading the form and hearing my explanation he laughed and said, “What rights?” He wondered what the other muftis had said about the form and I replied that most have just signed it without comment, or they ask what the point of it is. He chuckled as he signed it and said, “Americans really work in an orderly way.” I said, “Well, they try.”

The interview went well. The “couple minutes” his secretary told me I would have with him turned into two hours, which I have to admit gave me a sense of satisfaction. As I left his office the mufti came over to shake my hand and kiss me on the cheeks (more of a gentle head-butt, temple to temple), saying we should keep in touch.

Across the street I found the next bus to Bursa, which got me there in time for the afternoon sermon meeting.