Matters of the mosque: Changing configurations of buildings and belief in an Istanbul district

Abstract

Long acknowledged to be a center for religious pilgrimage, the importance of the Istanbul district of Eyüp is widely understood as being founded upon the figure of Halid bin Zeyd Ebâ Eyyûb el-Ensârî, a Companion of the Prophet Muhammad. Others point to the district's extensive cultural, political and social significance to explain its particular importance. In contrast, this paper avoids such reductive perspectives and argues that assemblage provides one particularly suggestive conceptual framework within which to reconsider Eyüp's significance, glossed in this paper as the ‘matters of the mosque'. Linking that discussion of assemblage to recent scholarship on Islam calling for a greater interrogation of the multiple (and sometimes ambivalent) modalities of religious practice, this paper draws on a series of fieldwork encounters to present one such grounded perspective. Paying particular attention to questions of agency, materiality and belief, this paper argues that assemblage provides an especially rich set of conceptual resources to continue developing new understandings of the practice of Islam; at the same time, this paper's careful attention to questions of belief addresses what has been heretofore underdeveloped in assemblage urbanism.

Key words:

• Istanbul
• Eyüp
• Islam
• religion
• practice
• assemblage
• materiality

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am grateful to my friends and interlocutors in Eyüp, without whom this project would not exist. Of the many colleagues who offered ideas and support, Luis Alvarez, Dylan Connor, Abigail Cooke, Alice Huff, Nicholas Lustig, Tom Narins, Sarah Neel Smith and Jeremy Walton offered particularly valuable critique. All errors and omissions are the author's own.

Funding

The research and writing of this paper were supported by grants from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Fulbright Institute for International Education and the Institute of Turkish Studies.

Notes

1 The ‘Companions' refer to those individuals who interacted with the Prophet Muhammad while he was alive. Within the constellation of Islamic thought, they occupy a particularly important place as those who helped to furnish the materials of the hadith and thereby constitute the sunnah. Within that group, Halid bin Zeyd was especially significant as the person who hosted the Prophet during his initial flight from Mecca to Medina. Numerous histories attest to his participation in the Arab siege of Constantinople, during which he died. Upon the rediscovery of his grave in 1453, the Ottoman sultan Fatih Sultan Mehmet ordered the immediate construction of a tomb and endowed the city's first imperial mosque around it (Kafadar 1995; Kafescioğlu 2009). He is variously addressed as Ebu Eyüp el-Ensari, Eyüp Sultan Hazretleri, Eyüp Sultan or (rarely) Eyüp.

2 In describing this mode as ‘belief’, I remain sensitive to Talal Asad's (1993) critique of placing belief at the center of theorizing religion. I use the term as an imperfect substitute for the constellation of words used in Turkish, including inanç, iman, ibadet and din.

3 As we note in the Introduction to this special feature, Istanbul's structure of urban governance was transformed in 1984. Even as the administrative borders of the city were expanded, it was broken into a series of districts (ilçe), each with its own mayor and local administration who serve in addition to the mayor and administration of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (büyük belediye).

Additional information

Timur Hammond is a doctoral candidate in Geography at the University of California–Los Angeles.