Two dates in the month have a particular importance. On the earlier of these, the fifteenth, takes place the ceremony of kissing the Prophet’s mantle. It used to be one of the most picturesque spectacles of the city. It still must be for those fortunate enough to enter the Chamber of the Noble Robe in the Seraglio. I have never done so, nor has any other Christian unless in disguise. This is the place where the relics of the Prophet are kept—his cloak, his banner, his sword, his bow, his staff, one of his teeth, and several hairs of his beard. One of the last has occasionally been given away as a mark of the highest possible honour. The swords and other relics of the first three caliphs and of the companions of the Prophet are also preserved there, together with a silver key of the Kaaba. The most important are the Sacred Standard, which used to lead the Sultan’s armies to war, and the Sacred Mantle. This was given by Mohammed to a poet of his day, who composed the celebrated ode in honour of the Prophet entitled Al Borda—The Mantle. When, reciting it for the first time, he came to the verse, “For the Prophet is a sword, drawn from the scabbard of God,” Mohammed threw his own cloak over his shoulders. The poet religiously preserved the gift and handed it down to his descendants, who performed miracles with the water into which they dipped it.
To house these treasures Sultan Selim I, who captured them among the spoils of Cairo, built a pavilion in the grounds of the Seraglio, which was restored and enlarged at immense cost by Mahmoud I. Those who have seen it say that the Chamber of the Noble Robe is a great domed room lined with magnificent tiles, and that the sacred relics, under a sort of silver baldacchino, are kept behind a wrought-silver screen in a chest of beaten gold. The ceremony of opening them is performed by the Sultan in person, who is supposed to oversee the necessary preparations on the fourteenth, and who, on the morning of the fifteenth, goes in state to the Seraglio accompanied by the members of his family and the grandees of the empire. The mantle is said to be wrapped in forty silk covers. Whether all of them or any of them are removed for the ceremony I cannot say. At all events, those who attend it are given the privilege of kissing the relic, in order of rank. Each time the spot is wiped with a silk handkerchief inscribed with verses from the Koran, which is then presented to the person whose kiss it removed. At the end of the ceremony the part of the mantle or of its cover which received the homage of those present is washed in a silver basin, and the water is preserved in ornamental bottles for the Sultan and a few other privileged persons. A drop of this water is considered highly efficacious against all manner of ills, or is a much-prized addition to the drinking water of iftar. The ceremony is repeated for the benefit of the ladies of the palace and other great ladies. And a sort of replica of it takes place in the mosque of Hekim-zadeh Ali Pasha, in the back of Stamboul, where a second mantle of the Prophet is preserved.
Mohammedan doctors have greatly disagreed as to the most important date of Ramazan. The Turks, at all events, now celebrate it on the twenty-seventh. They then commemorate the night when the Koran was sent down from the highest heaven to the lowest and when Gabriel began to make revelation of it to the Prophet. Mohammedans also believe that on that night are issued the divine decrees for the following year. They call it the Night of Power, after the ninety-seventh chapter of the Koran, and keep it as one of the seven holy nights of the year. Consequently, there is little to be seen in the pleasure resorts of Stamboul on the Night of Power—which, as foreigners are inclined to forget, is the eve of the anniversary. Most people spend the evening in the mosques. A special service takes the place of the usual prayer, and after it the larger congregations break up into a series of groups around mollahs, who expound the events of the sacred day.
On that one night of the year the Sultan goes to prayer outside of his palace. The state with which he does so is a sight to be seen, being a survival of a curious corollary of the tradition of the day. An old custom made it obligatory upon the Sultan to take a new wife on the Night of Power, in the hope that, as the divine gift of the Koran had come down on that night to Mohammed, so to his Caliph would heaven send an heir. Despite the solemnity of the occasion, therefore, the imperial progress to the mosque partakes of the nature of a gala procession. This was particularly so in the time of Abd ül Hamid, who devoutly maintained the customs of his fathers. I happened to see the last of the processions with which he went out on the Night of Power. The short avenue leading from Yîldîz Palace to the Hamidieh mosque was lined with arches and loops of light, the mosque itself was outlined with little oil-lamps, and the dip beyond was illuminated by Arabic texts and architectural designs. The effect was fairylike against the dark background of the harbour and the city, twinkling with the dim gold of far-away masts and minarets. While the crowd was smaller than at the ordinary Friday selamlîk, the police precautions were even stricter. But Turkish police have their own way of enforcing regulations. I remember a young man in a fez who approached the mosque too closely. A gorgeous officer went up to him: “My bey, stand a little down the hill, I pray you.” The young man made an inaudible reply, evidently an objection. The gorgeous officer: “My brother, I do not reprimand you. I pray you to stand a little down the hill. It is the order. What can I do, my child?” The young man stood a little down the hill. Presently other young men came, to the sound of music, their bayonets glittering in the lamplight. Some of them were on horseback, and they carried long lances with red pennons. They lined the avenue. They blocked up the cross streets. They surrounded the mosque. Before the last of them were in place the Palace ladies, spectators of all pageants in which their lord takes part, drove down and waited in their carriages in the mosque yard. For some of them too, possibly, this was an anniversary. Finally, the voice of the müezin sounded from the ghostly minaret. In his shrill sweet minor he began to chant the ezan—the call to prayer. Then bands broke into the Hamidieh march, fireworks filled the sky with coloured stars and comets’ tails, and the imperial cortège poured from the palace gate—a mob of uniforms and caparisons and big white wedding lanterns, scintillating about a victoria drawn by two superb white horses. The man on the box, magnificent in scarlet and gold, was a more striking figure than the pale, bent, hook-nosed, grey-bearded man in a military overcoat behind him, who saluted in response to the soldiers’ “Padisha’m chok yasha!” The procession wheeled into the mosque yard, and majesty entered the mosque. For an hour fireworks exploded, horses pranced, and the crowd circulated very much at its will, while a high sweet chanting sounded at intervals from within. Then majesty reappeared, mob and wedding lanterns and all, the soldiers shouted again, and the tall white archway once more received the Caliph of Islam.
The imperial cortège poured from the palace gate
Drawn by E. M. Ashe
What takes place within the mosque, and, I suppose, within all mosques on the Night of Power, Christians are generally allowed to watch from the gallery of St. Sophia. The sight is most impressive when the spectators are most limited in number—as was the case the first time I went, ostensibly as a secretary of embassy. But I must add that I was considerably impressed by the fact that another spectator was pointed out to me as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Of course the place itself contributes chiefly to the effect. Its hugeness, its openness, its perfect proportion, its reaching of pillar into arch, of arch into vault, of vault into dome, make an interior that predisposes to solemnity. The gold mosaic that was once its splendour is now largely hidden under the colour wash of the modern restorer, but the Night of Power brings out another gold. The cornices of the three galleries, the arches of the first, the vast space of the nave, are illuminated by thousands of wicks whose soft clear burning in glass cups of oil is reflected by the precious marbles of the walls. You look down from the gallery through a haze of light diffused by the chandeliers swinging below. These, irregularly hung about three central chandeliers, are scalloped like flowers of six petals. They symbolise the macrocosm, I believe, but they might be great water-lilies, floating in their medium of dusky gold. Under them the nave is striated by lines of worshippers, their darkness varied by the white of turban or robe, men all, all shoeless, standing one close to the next with hands folded and heads down. There is not an exception to the universal attitude of devotion—save among the chattering spectators. The imam, from his high hooded pulpit with the sword and the banners of conquest, recites the prayers of the evening. Choirs, sitting cross-legged on raised platforms, chant responses from the Koran in a soaring minor that sounds like the very cry of the spirit. Every now and then a passionate “Allah!” breaks out or a deep “amin” reverberates from the standing thousands. The long lines bow, hands on knees, and straighten again. Once more they bow, drop to their knees, bend forward and touch their foreheads to the ground, with a long low thunder that rolls up into the dome. The Temple of the Divine Wisdom can rarely have witnessed a more moving spectacle of reverence and faith.