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regard the first four caliphs as legitimate successors of Muhammad. The first four caliphs were Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, Uthman ibn Affan, and Ali ibn Abi Talib; they were friends and immediate successors of Muhammad. Shiis (or Shiites) regard Ali—the same Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of Muhammad—as the legitimate successor of Muhammad, and they disregard the first three caliphs who preceded him. Shiis take their name from Shiah i-Ali, or Partisans of Ali. (Ali was murdered in 661 by the Kharajites, who felt that the ruler of the Islamic community must be the most committed Muslim, not the most powerful.) Sunnis take their name from the word sunnah, meaning “custom” or, in the words of author Karen Armstrong, “the habits and religious practice of the Prophet Muhammed, which were recorded for posterity by his companions and family and are regarded as the ideal Islamic norm.” Sunnis stress the importance of sunnah as a basis for law. The majority of Muslims in the world today are Sunni, and according to Armstrong, the difference between Shiites and Sunnis is now purely political.

Turkey, as a secular state, is a moderate Muslim nation. Tom Brosnahan notes on his Web site that he has found Turkey to be the most moderate and tolerant of all Muslim nations. Non-Muslims are welcome to visit all mosques in Turkey. He also notes that about 20 percent of Turkish Muslims feel they are Muslims first and citizens of Turkey second. The other 80 percent see themselves as citizens first.

If you’ve never read the Koran (more properly Qur’an), or haven’t since your comparative religions class years ago, I encourage you to seize the day and pick up a copy. Becoming more familiar with this great spiritual (and literary) work is an enriching experience. The Koran is perfect companion reading for a trip to Turkey. According to David Roxburgh, in Writing the Word of God: Calligraphy and the Qur’an (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2007), Muslims believe that the Koran is the “written record of a series of divinely inspired revelations, the actual word of God, mediated through the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.” Muhammad thus became God’s messenger on earth, and as such he enjoys a place of centrality in Islam and is regarded as the “ideal” Muslim. Very strict Muslims hold that the Koran is untranslatable, which is why the art of translation is always an act of interpretation, and why a great number of translations are available. Roxburgh also notes that “there is evidence that the Prophet Muhammad started to make a physical copy of the revelations during his lifetime in Medina but that this project was incomplete at his death. Though the history of the editing of the Qur’an as a complete text is far from certain—how it was collected and arranged from a corpus of both written and oral sources, how it reached its final consonantal and vocalized form—the traditional belief is that it achieved full written form from a complete oral source during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime or shortly thereafter through the agency of his most trusted companions.”

One edition you may want to examine, which was recommended to me by two professors of Eastern religion (Bradley Clough and Jonathan Brockopp) is The Koran Interpreted, translated by H. A. Arberry (Macmillan, 1955), a standard edition in colleges and universities. Most scholars feel Arberry has struck a nice balance between a literal translation and one that captures the spirit of the text. Note the word “interpreted” in the title, the author’s nod of respect for the Koran and an indication of the personal nature of translation. Another popular but controversial edition is The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation, translated by Marmaduke Pickthall (Knopf, 1930; Everyman’s Library, 1992). Pickthall was an Englishman who became Muslim and worked for the Muslim ruler of Hyderabad, the nizam. Many scholars today feel that Pickthall strays too far from the literal and that he is ultimately misleading, but however he may be perceived, it is his version of the Koran that I