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We took our shoes off and the women put on head-scarves and we entered the Mosque. We saw only two men in its vast main hall. They were praying.
"In 13th Century, the ruling Shirvanshah who had a serious illness came and prayed at the grave of this lady and got well. He decided to move her body and build a mosque on her grave. She is buried in this mosque with some members of her family.” On the other side of the road from the Bi-bi Heybat Mosque was the cemetery our guide referred to, “the most ancient in the suburbs of Baku.”
Our guide now gave her version of how the shrine came to be: “This lady, whose original name was Hakima Khanum, was the oldest sister of the 8th Shiite Imam, Ali al-Redha. Their father was the 7th Imam of the Shiites.
“All the Shiites of Azerbaijan who go on pilgrimage to Mecca first come and pray at the shrine- grave of this lady, Bibi Heybat; then they go to Mashhad, Najaf and Medina and finish in Mecca. That is why this is a very special mosque.”
The mosques we saw in Baku’s Old Town were Shiites, our guide reminded us. “In Shaki, in the north, you will see a different design in mosques, because Shaki is one of Azerbaijan’s Sunni cities.” We did not have to wait until then, however, to see a Sunni mosque. Although “Baku is a center of Shiism,” the Turkish designed Shahidlar Mosque, a short distance from the Old Town, was a Sunni mosque. “In the 1990s Turkey brought the materials and everything and built this,” our guide told us.
It was only in the basement of a nondescript building a block away that we noticed the unusual sight of a crowd, sitting on the floor with an overflow of people outside, all listening to someone talking inside. The guide said there is usually a Muslim service here at 2 p.m., and this was “probably, a group having a conversation with the Mulla (clergy) after the prayers.”
Moving on in the Old Town, we saw a more elaborate stone facade of another mosque, the Cuma (community) Mosque, which was built “by a rich man 112 years ago,” with Arabic script at its portal.
We saw only a couple of people standing on its steps. Further along, we noted the simple wall of what our guide said “was a 14th Century domestic (private) mosque,” as distinguished from public mosques.
Not far from the Russian Church, we saw the Armenian Church of the Old Town, “another sign of our tolerance for all religions,” as our guide said. It looked unused. The door to the 14th Century Mohammed Mosque was also closed.
“This mosque was built over a Zoroastrian temple,” our guide said. It has since been rebuilt after an earthquake destroyed it many years ago. Its minaret, dating back to the 12th Century, however, survived the earthquake.
Next to the women, a man was skinning a lamb which had just been slaughtered. Our guide said “maybe this is a religious offering by the holy man’s visitors.”
On this morning, a few blocks away, women were waiting patiently to visit another house: that of a “holy man, called Olyia,” our guide explained.
In the Old Town’s hamams, as in the Middle Ages, the public bath is still used by women customers in the “first part of the day,” and men in the “second part,” our guide said.
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