Recent subscribers may be surprised to learn this website once had an Israel correspondent. Or maybe it was a Bergen County (N.J.) correspondent – the difference was easily lost on me. Israel seemed to be, and for all I know is, suburbia, only farther away. Ricochet also had a Turkey correspondent. But that gig petered out. Last anybody heard, there was soon to be a book for sale, with perhaps not too much about Turkey but definitely a lot about "thought control." Soooo...if you read this site and you maintain for sentimental reasons some curiosity about Turkey, you're pretty much stuck with me.

Pursuant (however irregularly) to an interest in what foreigners think about other foreigners, I got to wondering how Saudi Arabia braces itself for the many people who want to visit Mecca. Saudis, or Arabians, or both, have got to have tart opinions about pilgrims. If I knew my business, or if Ricochet had an Arabic-reading correspondent, we'd get translated quips from the humor columnist (if there is one) of the Mecca newspaper (if there is one). But in the absence of such capability, I am going to do what little I can, and see what has been written in Turkish. Some of those pilgrims must be Turks. I looked up the relevant visa requirements. Annnnd...they don't seem especially onerous. They are neither warmly welcoming nor calculated to repel. You can come, but just because you're a Moslem, folks yonder aren't just going to wave you in.

I think to whomever wants to visit Saudi Arabia, the message is: show up, do what you have been permitted to do, get out.

For contrast, not that there seems to be much, you might inspect what's required of Americans. Except for the reminder about the death penalty, and the possible need to prove conversion to Islam – maybe consular personnel can tell just from your name that you were born Moslem? – it's pretty much the same for Turks and Americans. Turks are explicitly reminded, elsewhere on the site directed at them, that they better not have any Israeli stamps in their passports; I saw nothing similar for Americans, who perhaps can be assumed to know this already. There are age requirements, and sex requirements, and for groups who are ostensibly families, kinship requirements. For neither Turks nor Americans is there a tourism visa, although there is some Turkish talk of seeing, in the brief period allowed by a pilgrimage visa, places of historical interest. But basically you're coming to Saudi Arabia to do a specific thing; you ain't walking out of the airport and sticking out your thumb by the side of a road.

Something that caught my eye on the for-Turks site was Frequently Asked Questions. I did not know that the Turkish equivalent of this phrase would have the abbreviation SSS. Not that the Saudis used it. A casual online search tells me no Turk does. But the leading question was, What is Umrah? It seemed odd that a Turk, which is to say a Moslem, which just about all Turks are, would not know.

But then, I didn't know. I didn't know because I haven't studied Islam all that closely and contrary to popular expectations, Turks may not have either. Islamic countries are not necessarily saturated by Islam. People, or at least Turks, never ask, "What would Mohammed do?" Especially if they know (and surely even the dumbest Turk does know) that Mohammed was only the Prophet, never the Son of God. In any case, I am going to believe that the Saudi Consulate actually does get inquiries from people who think it's the Hadj or it's nothing. Nope: there is Mecca-Lite.

There are lots of Islamic countries, and some may be Islamicker than others, and in some of those perhaps every single citizen is a theologian, for whom scripture is a daily fascination, its reinterpretations keenly followed. "Whoa, it says we can't fly airplanes into office buildings? This is a total gamechanger!" I confidently assert that Turkey is not such a country.

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Turkey didn't exist when Islam started, but this topic does remind me of what little I did read of Twelve Against The Gods (1929). As much about Mecca as about Islam and its founder, the author wrote:

Whence that preoccupation, William Bolitho describes in the preceding two pages the dismal but enduring local institutions of clan, feud, and vendetta. Mecca had its attraction but the attractiveness depended on one's not yet having seen it; for people who saw it all the time because they lived there, the town's distinction, if any, was its ongoing unpleasantness.

There follows mention of a centuries-in-the-making local truce, one in which everybody agrees to cool it for four months, autumn in fact, when the date crop is coming in and pilgrims and everybody will have plenty to eat. But this was on the lunar calendar, and "to the baffled dismay of the Meccan people they saw the holy months each year falling later. In the time of Mahomet, they fell in high summer, when even water was scarce."

I don't know how knowledgeably or cynically Bolitho was writing but I think in any age, in Mecca, if you're a stranger in town, you probably don't want to do anything to change that – like stay. It is possible that in Mecca there is a cabdriver or a waiter who will testify to good experiences with Turks. That would not surprise me – Turks are easy to get along with, unless they've been unemployed for long periods, and even then they're just twitchy: their gloom has no venom. But I doubt Meccans spend a lot of time analyzing this. In a tourist town, the classification of tourists likely has a brisk finality.

(12/3/17)