Placing Islam

With elegant prose and meticulous scholarship, Placing Islam: Geographies of Connection in Twentieth-Century Istanbul by Timur Hammond offers a rich account of cultural memory, place-making, and religious practice through an in-depth study of one “textured place of Islam: Eyüp” (1)—a district in Istanbul that is home to one of the cities’ most important religious sites: the tomb of Halid bin Zeyd, a companion (sahabe) of the Prophet Muhammad. The monograph examines the creative stories Muslims tell about buildings and neighborhoods to make sense of their faith, their material surroundings, and their social relationships in a shifting urban environment. With its focus on individual agency and cultural interpretation, Hammond’s pioneering book invites us to rethink the relationship between religion and cultural geography.

Moving beyond both origin chronotopes and static accounts of urban religion, Hammond offers “building stories” as the main analytical framework for analyzing the mutually constitutive relationship between Islam and urban space. According to the author, building stories are best understood as “stories that weave personal histories with evaluations of the urban landscape” (44). One significance of this approach lies in its acknowledgement of the connections between dimensions of human life that are generally thought to be separate or even oppositional, such as spirituality vs. materiality, faith vs. reason, and individualism vs. community. 

Part 1 of the book is dedicated to exploring varied and intersecting stories about Eyüp, the Eyüp Sultan Mosque, and the tomb of Halid bin Zeyd. Hammond demonstrates that a place-of-Islam acquires meaning through the multiple, often contradictory accounts uttered by those who share an urban place. Hammond not only illustrates the dynamism of Islamic beliefs but also pays attention to the role of material things in giving meaning to religion itself. In chapter 2, Hammond provides examples of storytelling about Eyüp from 1920s, 1950s, and 2010s, and in doing so demonstrates how stories about Islamic sites are as much as about place-making as they are about the reinterpretation of Islam’s role during major shifts in the economic, social, and political lives of Turkish Muslims. Chapter 3 provides a more in-depth analysis of the 1950s, a decade during which the neighborhood of Eyüp not only went through profound changes, but also came to signify new cultural meanings and historical imaginaries thanks to the rise of print culture. Chapter 4 turns to the stories that are told about Eyüp and water in the present day. Instead of questioning the validity of the presumed hydrologic relationship between Eyüps’ wells and fountains with other places of Islam—most significantly, Mecca—Hammond shows what these stories can tell us about the cultural experience of Islamic place-making in relation to divergent geographical imaginaries.

The second part of the book analyzes how people relate to the buildings of Eyüp, and the ways in which these buildings—and stories told about them—relate to political cleavages of Turkey. Most significantly, Hammond refrains from telling the story of Eyüp in a manner that reproduces the secularist vs. Islamist divide, instead inviting the reader to recognize how the urban-religious experience of Eyüp both reproduces and undermines this conventional binary. In a poignant fifth chapter, Hammond examines how the rise of political Islam since the 1990s transformed Eyüp into an “authentic” Ottoman neighborhood by conservative actors who sought to revive the district’s civilizational “essence.” The production of local/religious authenticity—a key aspect of Turkey’s civilizational politics—was achieved through a series of political interventions, architectural renovation projects, and cultural programs which were introduced by Islamic mayors and implemented by municipal bureaucrats.

A sixth chapter on the rules of visitation illustrates how expectations about gender, religion, and culture seek to govern people’s clothing and demeanor differentially across the various courtyards of the Eyüp Sultan Mosque. While these guidelines play a crucial role in Islamic place-making, their implementation is subject to exceptions: women and non-Muslims, for instance, navigate different expectations than Muslim men do. In the seventh chapter, Hammond examines the celebration of Ramadan in the central square of Eyüp. He highlights how (in addition to religious beliefs) material things, consumer products, socio-spatial relationships, and political aspirations played a role in the organization of Ramadan festivities. In this chapter, we learn about the arcades that were built by the municipality to capture—and produce—the geographical connections between Eyüp and the Kaaba in order to bolster the religious spirit of visitors during Ramadan. While the “cheap imitation Kaaba” (129) was criticized by some locals, visitors were attracted to the offer of potential spiritual enrichment despite its artificiality.

This is an eye-opening work that engages with an impressive assortment of contemporary scholarship across multiple disciplines. While focused on the Turkish context, the book transcends this locality by discussing the meaning-making practices that individuals use to make sense of religious places and their own faith, as well as their material, spiritual, and social connections to the urban environment. Hammond’s monograph joins a growing body of stellar scholarship that privileges anthropological approaches to religion, highlighting how Islam is lived, negotiated, and reimagined by various actors on the ground. Hammond is to be commended for simultaneously demonstrating the role of human agency in telling stories about Islam, as well as the ways in which these stories are both enhanced and limited by the materiality of buildings: cemeteries, fountains, mosques, museums, neighborhoods, and tombs. The monograph also illustrates how piety is experienced in everyday life by attending to the multiplicity and fluidity of Islam. At a time when static and monolithic accounts of Islam continue to swarm public and academic discourse, such an analytic is more than welcome. 

Issues of heritage, religion, and modernity, combined with space-making and urbanity, weave the chapters together, while at the same time exposing the multiple imaginaries and interpretations that animate the cultural geography of Islam. Placing Islam will be of interest to academics spanning multiple fields, including religious studies, anthropology, geography, heritage studies, political science, urban geography, Islamic studies, and Middle East studies. It also constitutes appropriate reading for graduate-level or advanced undergraduate courses on geography, religion, and politics.  What is even more valuable about this book is that the author tells us about his own position, as an American academic with Turkish heritage, and his experience navigating the cultural geography of Islamic heritage in Eyüp. Whether by teaching English as a volunteer or participating in religious tours in the district, Hammond’s experience illustrates both the fragility and the power of seeking connections across difference.  

Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor of political science at Providence College.

Gizem Zencirci

Date Of Review:

February 24, 2024