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On a sunny weekday afternoon in the Sultanahmet district, a group of British men form a line outside the Blue Mosque. They are not at the mosque entrance alongside the groups of tourists from Japan, Spain and the US, who await the end of the afternoon prayer so that they can enter and take pictures, but are instead standing around the fountain in the mosque's courtyard, waiting for their turn to make ablutions so that they can join the prayer. The men are among a growing demographic of tourists visiting İstanbul, Muslims from Europe, the United States, Indonesia and beyond who elect to finish off their religious pilgrimages to Mecca in Saudi Arabia with a trip to İstanbul, the last center of the caliphate and the point from which the Muslim world was administrated for centuries.
Turkey can be an ideal location for Muslim tourists for many reasons. Outside of the universal attractions, several factors in Turkey appeal to Muslim considerations: the ready availability of meat that is halal (prepared according to Islamic guidelines, similar to kosher), restaurants that do not serve alcoholic beverages, mosques to pray in and the call to prayer that sounds through the streets five times a day. Though increasing numbers of Muslims are traveling to Turkey following Hajj or Umrah -- the greater and lesser Muslim pilgrimages, respectively, to Mecca -- there are few packages geared toward religiously focused tourism for such travelers.
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