The skyline of Istanbul, silhouetted by the setting sun, displays an elaborate tracery of domes and minarets belonging to its great mosques. What goes on inside one of these mosques? The visitor enters and marvels at the decorative designs and tiles, the richly colored carpets on the floor, and the spaciousness created by the domed ceilings and the absence of furniture and pictures. What does all this mean to the people who worship there? How does a mosque work? Who are the worship leaders, and what are they like? Which people come there to worship?

But do these questions help us understand religion in Turkey? The problem the visitor faces is to be able to come quickly to the point and know what to ask. What is the logic behind the contemporary religious behavior of Muslims in Turkey? Is knowing what goes on inside a Turkish mosque a clue to understanding the religious lives and struggles of Muslims? This book tries to bring out the right questions, the questions that lead to the heart of religion in Turkey. Our claim is that what observers see of Turkish culture, society, or civilization is formed at a deep level by Islamic principles of worship and teaching of truth. And so whether people in Turkey are overtly religious or not, they have something in common in their cultural and social attitudes. A major purpose of this book is to provide visitors or interested parties with enough insight into Islamic practices to feel the ideals, the viability, and the humanity of an Islamic way of life.

In previous centuries, isolation from one another bred prejudice and contempt. But in today's world, more people wish to overcome their ignorance of other people's religious expressions. They have taken the step along the road to a sort of golden rule: if you want others to take your religion or culture seriously, you must take theirs seriously.

This book is an introduction for those who want to learn the basics of how and where and why Muslims worship, without twisting and distorting things through intentional or unintentional prejudice, something from which much western writing on Islam has suffered. The way to truth is as important as truth itself. Our Muslim readers should be able to say, 'Yes, that's what it is.' We authors believe that such a way to present religion is a sure path to interfaith and intercultural understanding, a sound basis for genuine dialogue and cooperation.

The authors of this book, one a Muslim and one a Christian, have been in dialogue for over a decade in the living situation of Turkish Islam. Adil ™zdemir has met with hundreds of Christians of various branches and denominations. During the 1985-86 academic year he was in residence at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions. Then in 1994-95, he toured the theological schools of the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the USA. There he taught, lectured, and discussed Islam with many students and teachers. He has also extensively studied both the Christian and the Kur'anic ideas of salvation. Kenneth Frank is an educator who has been residing in Izmir, Turkey, since 1982. He spent one year in research for a masters degree in religion at the theological school of Dokuz Eyll University in Izmir. His interest is religious pluralism, particularly in the context of Muslim-Christian interfaith dialogue.

We see this book meeting two important needs: on the one hand, the requests from visitors to Turkey or to other Islamic countries to learn about the Islamic culture and practices that they see; on the other hand, the desire of Muslims to present their faith to the modern mindset in an intelligible way, a way that speaks a contemporary language. We authors introduce some Islamic practices and ideas to non-Muslims, and to Christians in particular, through the eyes and words of a particular Muslim and a particular Christian. No prior knowledge of Islam is assumed. Our intended audience is basically western minded, western in upbringing and framework, with the western expectations of philosophical precision and consistency, intellectual integrity, and academic soundness. We also appeal to the spiritual and religious sensitivity of our audience, to its openness to fresh observation, and to its respect for factuality and honesty.

We find a rich plurality of Islamic orientations in Turkey, as well as a depth and range of ideas and practices of religion. There are in fact many Islams, or expressions of Islam: that of individuals, of groups, of sects, of the state, of mystics, of legalists, of the dogmatists, of the philosophers, of the book centered, and so on. In these pages we explore this variety but concentrate on the common or so-called orthodox understanding of Islam. By the term 'orthodox' we mean Islam as traditionally canonized, prescribed, structured, and put into book form, the Islam of the centuries-old mainstream legal and theological schools, the Islam of the majority. Thus what the reader learns from these pages will be widely applicable throughout the Islamic world.

But as we dwell on this core of universal Islamic practices, we are ever-mindful of dealing with Islam as lived by people in Turkey: Anatolian Islam, Islam of Eurasia, Islam in the former lands of the Byzantines, Romans, Greeks, and Hittites, Islam as planted where Christians dominated for a millennium, Islam that shows pre-Islamic Turkic and Christian traces, Islam of the great mystics who stressed love, tolerance, hospitality, and a transcendence of legalism, rigidity, and ritualism. In using the term 'Islam' or 'Muslim', we authors want to be respectful of all ethnicities, for Islamic culture has embraced them all, sometimes contributing positively to non-Muslims.

We would like to remind our readers that Islamic worship practices, on which we will be concentrating, are not the whole of religion. At the center of a religious person's life is his or her faith, loyalty, and trust in that which transcends human beings. This is the engine that drives sincere participation in religious practices. It is also the standard by which those practices are revered, or ignored, or judged. For non-Muslim observers to witness the practices of Muslims, and then to generalize from these observations about Islamic views of God, nature, human beings, and society, is therefore to look at this matter from the wrong direction, from outside in. Islamic views of God, the universe, the individual, and society dynamically spring from inside out, from the revelation of God to human beings. It is therefore necessary for outside observers to dialogue with Muslims to get at the truth behind the Islamic expressions they observe. We authors hope to equip our readers to begin just such a dialogue.

Islamic worship practices in Turkey are not carried on in a vacuum. They take place in a particular social, political, and economic context. Our image is that of the soil of Anatolia, the heartland of Turkey. This soil has seen the coming and going of a great many peoples and empires, from the Hittites and those before them to Turkey as it exists today. Depending on weather and environmental conditions, this land has nourished and brought to fruition countless human dreams and ambitions. So it is with Islamic worship. It is a soil in which seeds are planted, but what is produced in terms of character and worldview is affected by the context, by the environment. The agenda of the age continues to change, but the way people respond to that agenda is fed by the culture and psychology of their worship practices. We will return to this image of the soil in our concluding chapter. It is enough now to say that the environment influences the deep questions Turks are asking themselves as they seek meaning for their lives, as they search for truth and self-identity. For these reasons we will present our readers with a brief analysis of the context for Islamic practices in Turkey as well as a short presentation of the faith history of Muslims.

Islamic practices are constantly changing in response to various pressures. For instance, one hundred years ago, in the Ottoman Empire, Muslims worshipped in a largely multicultural, multilingual, non-secular, traditional, agrarian, and imperial setting. But today they live in an industrial, technological, computerized, secular, national, republican, democratic, homogenizing, humanist and individualist age. With what problems have people occupied themselves in making this change? Where is Turkey coming from, and where could it be going? We will consider these issues. The degree to which various Muslims in Turkey observe religious practices, the intensity and type of observance, or whether people observe the practices at all, is tied to the context of modern Turkey. We will show the connections between this context and the religious practices of Muslims.

Whatever one counts as successes for the contemporary age, there remains a deep, unsolved, global problem, which may be characterized in the following way: what is the role of an enlightened, modern nation regarding religion? Is it one of disinterested distance? Support and facilitation? Subjugation and dominance? Peaceful coexistence? Submission and surrender? Our book is a case study of this issue of the modern perspective and religious tradition. It seems to be a problem for any culture that would at least partly locate its identity in the modern world. What the reader will find in this book are the specific manifestations of the issue in the Turkish Islamic context, but we invite everyone to reflect on how it expresses itself in his or her own culture.