At the other side, I entered the covered market through one of the ubiquitous roman archways around this city. Wandering the old city is like a walk through a massive archeological site—layers and layers of city planning construction are visible as new apartment blocks and storefronts are built up to or against or on top of the walls of the old market enclosure. When driving in form the airport, the boundary of the old walled city look to be crumbling right  before your very eyes. In a second world country like Istanbul whose growth exceeded the pace of city planning and the development of its infrastructure, the evidence of the former Roman, Ottaman and Arabic empires are evident in the strata of building, existing today at various stages of decomposition. Istanbul is not a clean city—particulate from diesel buses and taxis and billows of second hand smoke are everywhere. Yet the Bosphorus strait is the lung of the city and if you are facing the water and the wind is right, you can take in a nice deep sea breath.

The market was a mass of stalls butted together. Men sit at the shop threshold drinking the ubiquitous Turkish tea from cups just a size larger than shot glasses. The asile between stalls was packed, elbow to elbow with shoppers and tourist gawkers, men who set up improvised stores in the middle of the walkway, mothers pushing strollers and vegetable push carts. I watched a man wield a hand cart stacked with 30 dozen cartons of eggs over a cobble stone street.

Shops in the enclosed market sold rose water, aromatic oils, dates, apricots, walnuts. teas, sweets, sesame seed treats, dress coats, hookahs, Turkish carpets,  fez caps, football jerseys, cotton towels, silk scarfs, blue and white god’s eye trinkets, splendid floral plates, shoes, watches, kids toys and the works. I bought a beautiful cotton cloth form a black mustached salesman in a starchy dress shirt. He pulled out a picture guide to the region in the mountains of turkey where the cloth is hand sewn and flipped through it like a tour guide.

Very soon my eyes were spinning, my head full of colors and smoke and so I headed for a  mosque at the market’s edge that was recommended to me for its ornate tile work. It was impossible to see the mosque’s dome from the market floor until I happened upon a stone flight of stairs that wound up above the stalls and opened out into the a lovely spacious courtyard at the threshold to the mosque. It was striking the proximity between the silence and solitude of the temple and the relentless bustle of the hawkers selling there wares. I thought of Huineng the 6^th patriarch of the Zen tradition who overhead the heart sutra being chanted near the market place and attained instant realization. I thought of the non-difference between the ordinary and the sacred.

Entering the mosque is a joy, for all seekers are required to take off their shoes and leave them on a bench outside. The mosque floor is covered from wall to wall in carpet, cool to the feet but typically bearing a low grade stink. I sat in virasana and released my knees and stared upward into the mosque’s internal dome. Inside spaces devoted to the spirit, I am inspired to reflect on how the body’s architecture is replicated in sacred design.  The dome I thought is shaped like a  respiratory diaphragm with a central tendon at the top. Just below the dome are ribs with slits of intercostals space allowing natural light—and prana—to flow in. Everything in the mosque is spherical and this prompts a feeling of coolness and levity to the backs of my eyes. The interior walls are tiled from floor to dome in floral patterns and it strikes me how this is a celebration of beauty, feminine beauty. From the exterior the domes look like breasts with golden nipples. Yet this soft curvature is contrasted by the surrounding guardian minarets that look like fully loaded rocket launchers. The phallic minarets pierce the sky straight up. The chief mosque architects in the times of the sultans competed in their designs in attempt to draw the most grand edifices. The extraordinarily large mosque just above Gallatin Bridge has six minarets which caused a fury at the time due to the fact that only the great mosque in Mecca had this many minarets. 

I couldn’t help but feel that the verticle thrust of the minarets stand like sentinels, to guard  and hold captive the curvaceous mosque dome, in the way that orthodox Muslim men restrain their women. The orthodox women in Istanbul can be seen in full purdah, pitch black from head to toe, but for their eyes, or, more commonly, they walk about with their beautiful jet black hair hidden under floral scarves. In conversation with my host David over last nights breaded pan fried fish, he said that violence toward women in this society is rampant and that many of the women in yoga class are victims of rape. Recently in this city the right wing Islamic party shut down a series of shelters for disadvantaged young girls.

The mosque’s interior, in addition to evoking a female sentiment, seemed lunar, with its multiple half-dome ceilings. Of course on the streets of Istanbul the lunar mark is everywhere, as the  red Turkish flag sports the white crescent moon and star. The Turks stir up their national sentiment with the shock red color appearing everywhere form 8×10 size flags to scoreboard size models. Just this morning in headstand, looking out over David and Zeynep’s garden, my eye kept getting pulled to the ripple red of a flag atop a nearby neighbor’s roof. 

I lingered in the big silence of the mosque’s interior a bit longer, half-dreading a return to the mayhem of the market below. It dawned on me that the sense of spaciousness within the womb of the mosque was elicited by the lack of form. It is against the Islamic faith to represent Allah in any graven image. I thought back to my visit this past week into the interior of the Our Lady of Faith cathedral in the old city center of Antwerp. The catholic church interior was cluttered with figurines reenacting  biblical scenes complete with celestial figures equipped with  musical horns and wings and angelic faces. Of course the primary form is that of Christ’s crucifixtion (Eno and I had stood together remarking on the image of the cross and he was most puzzled by the technicality of how when they brought Jesus down from the cross, how they removed the nails from the center of his hands and feet. “they used the back of a really big hammer and had to pull hard” was all I could muster as a response.

The nearest thing to the replication of form  in the mosque is the Arabic script. At the top of the archways that vault upward toward the semi-circular domes  are big discs—signets inset with calligraphy. The calligraphy strokes are astonishingly beautiful—swift slashes and curvi-linear marks, loops and dashes and bold carved strokes. They bring to mind the sword—a symbol for the might of the sultan’s rule. The most beautiful I find, are the panels of emerald green inset with golden calligraphy. The deep indigo color and turquoise hues are typical in the interior mosque.

I linger on the carpet a bit longer and extend my legs out and fold forward into paschimottanasana. Just as I begin to fold more forward to release my bound hamstrings, a man mysteriously appears at my side. He is standing near to me, almost on top of me, too close, and speaking Turkish in a rapid clip. He wore the traditional Muslim cap and vest coat, and like many orthodox men over 50, dons a full white beard. I tell him that I only speak English but this doesn’t phase him. He squats down and gestures toward my posture. I tell hi that I am doing yoga, but as soon as I have said , I regret it, thinking that perhaps he considers it a sacrilage. I wondered if I was perhaps directing my feet in the wrong direction. Are you not supposed to point your feet toward Mecca in the way that students in the presence of a guru are not supposed to direct their feet toward the teacher? Then I thought perhaps he is drawn to me because I have been on the floor of the mosque for nearly a half hour, absorbing the atmosphere by extending out in a semi-prostration. Most of the visitors walk in without sitting down. They poke around, take pictures and fiddle with their digital devices. I thought maybe he considered me special somehow, taking in the spirit. He didn’t go away but seemed to be getting closer to me. He was close enough that I could smell his breath—lamb kebab and Turkish tea—and as I looked into his eyes it struck me that he might be blind. His eyes were swollen, half shut, like the eyes of a tired donkey. He kept speaking at me without any hesitation and so showed no sign of having registered that I didn’t comprehend one word. When he finally stopped, it seemed like it was my turn to reply so I said something about the prana, the lifeforce and I tapped my sternum a few time at the place of my heart, thinking that a celebration of the prana and the spirit of life that it sustains, could be something we had in common. I felt a bit awkward, for this mosque was clearly his territory and the last thing I wanted was to appear presumptuous in any way. Then he moved in towards me even further. And he held out his hand and pointed repeatedly to a heavy hewn silver ring on his finger. I held his hand in mine and looked at the inscription on his ring. With his hand in mine I first noticed the swollen bulges around the knuckles and the resulting stiffness in his arthritic joints. His hand was like that of a claw. Yet I remarked how smooth his skin was, almost transluscent, like the finest of pastry shells. The inscription on his ring looked again like a sword, a sword with a swirled expression. Then I understood his words for the first time. “Allah, Allah, Allah” he repeated. And once I nodded in assent he seemed satisfied at last, and so stood up and walked away.

In speaking to David the owner of Cihangir Yoga where I am teaching, it is clear that a yoga center in present day Turkey is a bit of a liability. In the eyes of the Muslim orthodoxy, yoga competes with the proliferation of Islamic values. The fundamentalist Islamic party keeps gaining strength each year (which is the primary reason  why Turkey has not been accepted into the EU). The conservative right seeks to limit the free reign of democracy by attempting to have women teachers removed from the public school system and to have certain artists’ work banned. The yoga studio is cautious about its place in the media and in advertising. For should too much attention be drawn to itself, it is vulnerable to attack form the religious right. 

The yoga students who come to practice are professionals—business owners, architects, actors, secretaries etc—and fully Westernized. Yet they may be born to parents or grandparents who are devout Muslims and so the culture of traditional Islamic values is all around them.

 Istanbul is the most religiously conservative culture that I have taught in, and as a result I am more cautious in the way I present. For instance, when chanting before class starts, it has happened on several occasions that the  call to prayer is being broadcast via loudspeaker from the local mosque just at the same time. The call to followers to face Mecca and do their routine of prayer and prostration (the call to prayer fills the Istanbul skies 5 times per day), is a reminder of the prevalence and power  of the Islam religion. Imagine in the USA what the atmosphere would be like if their were Christian messages broadcast on every street corner, petitioning the populace to pray to Jesus five times per day.

David described to me the occasion when Cihangir yoga hosted Shiva Rea around during the time that celebrations were being made to commemorate Rumi’s birthday. She started class with a mantra of some kind to Allah,  encouraging students to join in “Allah, Allah, Allah”, in the spirit that all faith is good. Yet in reality, David remarked upon how insensitive this gesture was, given the tenuous place of Islam in Turkish society. To an outsider the, the daily invitation to prayer is mysterious and inviting, yet the cultural and religious differences are significant.

It was difficult to tell just when we went underneath the channel. The crossing under the water is not a great distance and plus the train traveled under numerous long tunnels over the duration of the journey (2 hours). We arrived in Brussels and were met by the two studio directors hosting us Nicki and Wesley. In Brussels we were trapped traffic as a civil march of some kind cluttered the city center around the train station.

We drove south to Antwerp an hour. Upon arrival, just as we stepped out of the car a young boy on a bicycle was hit and struck down to the pavement by a car. The impact was so forceful that the bicycle wheel punctured the car’s front fender. I was the first one to reach the boy (who we later thought was Lebanese in descent) and once helping him to his feet stayed with him as the local grocer, pharmicist, doctor, medics and police arrived. The boy seemed to come through without fracturing any bones, but the impact onto the pavement surely jarred his sacrum far out of position. For me witnessing the whole event  was a real glimpse into the local culture.