Anyone who has spent an evening in Türkiye knows how loud the call to prayer is. The loudspeakers on the minarets do not so much invite as insist; the sound arrives from four directions at once and takes possession of the street.
And then it stops.
This was taken a few minutes after that—in the emptied lower town beneath the citadel of Van, with the loudspeakers asleep until morning. And in the silence they left behind, a thin crescent hung in the sky. As though it had not risen at all, but had simply cast off from the tip of the minaret, lifted lightly away from the stone and, without a backward glance, set sail into the blue. Not gone yet, but no longer here: like a quiet prayer let go into the heavens.
The thing it appears to have escaped from has a name of its own. The finial at a minaret’s summit is an alem, and its crescent is a good deal younger than one might suppose. Constantinople used the crescent as a civic emblem long before any Ottoman arrived to take the city; the conquerors inherited the symbol along with the walls, and it took several centuries more, and a good deal of nineteenth-century flag design, before it came to stand for Islam at large.
The word, though, is old, and it says something unexpected.
In Arabic the new crescent is hilāl—not the moon in general, which is qamar, but that first thin arc, the one whose sighting opens a lunar month and settles the date of Ramadan. Its root, h-l-l, does not mean ‘to shine.’ At bottom it means to raise the voice. The crescent is named for the shout that went up when somebody first caught sight of it.
And the same Semitic root, on the other side of the family, gives Hebrew its hallel, ‘praise’—and with it the word every European language has borrowed without troubling to translate: hallelujah.
So the arc above Van and the shout in the psalm are, distantly, one word. Which quietly corrects my first impression. I had the crescent down as a silent prayer; the language insists it is a noise.
And on reflection the evening had done both, in the proper order. First the shout, at maximum amplification, from every minaret in the city. Then the silence. And only then, when there was nobody left to hear it, the thing the shout was named after came up over the roofs and went about its business.
