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by ESTHER SMITH
News staff writers
August 9, 2006
A well-done college paper led to a trip
to Istanbul, Turkey, for Elsie Denton, who is in her first year at
Colgate University in New York.
“I took a class in Asian cultures my first semester,” she said. “One
of the teachers really liked one paper I wrote, and suggested I take
this class.”
The class is “Islamic Heritage of Turkey,” taught by Omid Safi,
associate professor of philosophy and religion at Colgate. The class
spends the entire semester reading intensively and discussing medieval
and contemporary understandings of Islam in Turkey, with a focus on
Islamic Mysticism, or Sufism, before taking a 3-week trip to Istanbul
at the end of the school year.
“It wasn’t a subject I knew much about but it sounded interesting,”
she said. “I had no background in Islam and I was sort of working it
out with what I knew about Christianity.”
Sufi practitioners at the first night’s
concert.
The 19 participating students met Safi May 29 in New York and he
accompanied them to Istanbul where, jet-lagged from the 10-hour
flight, they struggled to stay awake during a calming musical concert
the evening they arrived.
“The concert was in the coolest room you can imagine,” she wrote the
next day in an e-mail to her friends and family. “It was the small,
top story of a family residence and they had about 35 people jammed
into a living room covered with intricate carpets and pillows. On
every square foot of the wall was hung, strung or balanced some
beautiful hand-crafted instrument.
“These ranged from flutes to harps to drums; some lute-like
instruments and many others I couldn’t begin to recognize. The head
musician at the concert apparently has made it his life’s work to
travel around the world collecting ethnic instruments and learning to
play them.
“The songs were in Turkish with Arabic refrains so I understood very
little besides the occasional “Allah,” but the harmony and emotion the
six or so Sufi musicians put into their music was both beautiful and
powerful.
It wasn’t until she had experienced some of the Sufi ceremonies that
she really began to understand everything she had read in class. One
of the last things the group did in Istanbul was attend a zikr, a Sufi
ceremony of prayer, meditation and remembrance.
Dwellings and chapels carved out of soft
stone
at Cappadocia.
“About 40 guys from this one sect got
together, with some kneeling in the center and the others standing
around them in a circle in a long chanting and singing ritual,” she
said. “When we went to the zikr it sort of filled in the blanks of
what we’d been taught, and rounded everything out, so we could really
understand the Sufi religion.”
Denton said that she really enjoyed traveling as a student rather than
a tourist because people seemed to react more positively to it and
were interested in what she had learned and she, in turn, got to know
the people better.
“You learn so much more than you would just looking at the monuments
and seeing the little blurb on the plaque that tells you about it,”
she said. “He took us into people’s homes, and that’s a part of the
culture that we really couldn’t have seen if we hadn’t been with him.”
Traveling with her teacher had another benefit: The shop owners know
him and give him the “good friend” discount, which they benefited from
as well.
“One of the shop owners was my teacher’s friend, Rajab, who sells
scarves and pashmina (wraps),” she wrote in another e-mail. “He was
very kind and would give us a lesson on the quality of the product and
what to look for, and what things were actually worth. That was a big
help for those of us who know absolutely nothing.”
A once-ornate obelisk now stands
stripped
of its valuable embellishments.
Denton has found that when many people
hear the word Islam, they automatically assume she was in danger.
“I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, ‘You got out
of there just in time’,” she said. “But both Turkey and Egypt (where
she and two classmates spent a week following the class tour) are
incredibly safe places. Egypt’s got a low crime rate and is really
modern, and Turkey’s been on its best behavior for the last 15 years
because it’s trying to get into the EU. There are really no radical
groups there.”
The group toured many mosques and museums in Istanbul and surrounding
areas. One of Denton’s favorite stops was Cappadocia, a landscape
carved by erosion into amazing shapes and carved by humans into homes
and other things.
“People burrowed into the soft rock and turned the twisted towers of
ancient ash into dwellings, monasteries, forts and stables,” she said.
“They even burrowed out several underground cities capable of housing
around 3,000 people in case invaders threatened their cities above. It
was very cool.”
The class and its “field trip” not only helped Denton more fully
understand the world of Islam, but made her want to learn about other
cultures as well.
“Turkey was never on my radar as somewhere I wanted to go, but getting
to do this class made me want to go to lots more places that aren’t
the usual touristy places,” she said. “It just reminds me how big the
world is.
“It was also a great bonding experience: Going into the class, I knew
about two of the people, but when it was over I had 18 new friends.” |
