The Tragic Politicization of Hagia Sophia

Final Friday, the Turkish Council of Thunder overturned the 1934 ruling that had allowed Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’s soaring cathedral-turned-mosque, to be converted into a museum. Minutes later, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decreed that the Huge Mosque of Ayasofya (its thoroughly different name) will initiate for Muslim prayer in leisurely July this 365 days, righting what he framed as an 85-365 days-broken-down compatible injustice. Hagia Sophia occurs to be Turkey’s most usual tourist attraction.

Erdoğan has been hinting at doing this since 2018, so it wasn’t exactly a shock. Secularism has been enshrined in Turkey’s Structure since its founding within the 1920s, however the (clearly politically motivated) court dedication is most productive essentially the most modern installment within the Justice and Pattern Celebration’s broader campaign to promote Islam in Turkish public existence. Erdoğan says he wishes to enhance “a pious technology” by introducing faith into colleges, having texts admire Pinocchio rewritten, and firing tens of thousands of lecturers. To waste this, he exploits a loophole within the notify’s secularity rule that lets in him to superfund the Non secular Affairs Directorate (the Diyanet), which administers and promotes Hanafi Sunni Islam in public existence and would possibly perhaps perhaps restful now support a watch on Hagia Sophia.

Nobody faith, let on my own one sect, can claim entire possession of this dispute building, then all once more. Appalled Christians luxuriate in considerable that Islam itself became once most productive founded within the seventh century, several hundred years after the cathedral became once first constructed. Muslims luxuriate in retorted, echoing the Turkish Thunder Council’s finding, that Sultan Mehmed II, who conquered the metropolis in 1453, won it honest and sq. and endowed it in his waqf as a mosque and not utilizing a sign of ending. It became once a church for the significant millennium of its existence, then a mosque for nearly as prolonged (despite the indisputable truth that no longer somewhat). It’s been a museum for no longer up to a century. Who has the strongest claim: the constructor, the conqueror, or the founders of the secular, up to the moment Turkish notify?

Complicating things yet further, Erdoğan said, “The revival of Hagia Sophia is the harbinger of freedom of Al-Aqsa and the footsteps of Muslims emerging from the technology of interregnum,” relating to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest build in Islam (identified as the Temple Mount to Jews), and suggesting that the Hagia Sophia is correct the significant domino in a longer chain of triumphs for Islam within the site.

Whether or no longer he meant to gesture in direction of an genuine pan-Muslim stand up or no longer, his speech restful hit dwelling. Erdoğan seeks to divide that which is actually fused collectively within the structure of Hagia Sophia. Esteem many very broken-down areas of adore all the contrivance by means of the Mediterranean—the Mosque-Cathedral of Córdoba, Spain, for example, or the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria, devoted first to John the Baptist and then to the martyr Husayn ibn Ali—Hagia Sophia is a jewel of blended origin. The Emperor Constantius II began building the significant church in A.D. 360, on a suite historians judge became once once a pagan temple. That wooden basilica rapidly burned down, and then its replacement burned down, too (riots luxuriate in been no longer uncommon in Istanbul’s history). The third building project began in 532 underneath the rule of Justinian the Huge, and Hagia Sophia became once performed in 537.

The novel stone basilica became once designed by Greek geometers, and its warm, fine internal appears admire an act of God. When it became once performed, Justinian said, “Solomon, I luxuriate in outdone thee!” The central dome is 55.6 meters huge. Marble arches in inexperienced and white and crimson scatter outward from the heart, studded with gold mosaic. Unless it became once outdone by Seville Cathedral in 1520, Hagia Sophia became once the ideal cathedral on this planet.

Over time it has been managed by thoroughly different regimes, which each contributed to its internal decoration (including doing considerable repairs), creating a marvelous historic and non secular mosaic. Crusaders turned it into a Roman Catholic church in 1204, however it reverted to an Japanese Orthodox church in 1261, when the metropolis returned to Byzantine rule. When the Ottoman Empire won Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II the Conqueror held his first Friday prayers within the temple and converted it into a mosque. Thus it remained unless 1931, when it closed, sooner than the novel Republic of Turkey reopened it as a secular museum in 1935. On the present time, 3.3 million people consult with it every 365 days.

Hagia Sophia’s eclectic waste makes it a a part of the combined, shining persona of the metropolis where it resides. What we now call Istanbul (formerly Byzantium and Constantinople) has been Thracian-, Greek-, and Roman-ruled and residential to Jews, Muslims, and Christians, the pious and the irreligious alike. Due to this of its considerable notify on trade routes, the spot we now call Turkey has for centuries been on the heart of cultural alternate between East and West, much less a borderland than a supercharged, sinful-pollinated cultural zone where all forms of art forms and ideas luxuriate in melded. Due to this, Istanbul boasts a cosmopolitan culture characterised by influences from all the contrivance by means of the field—the ideal instance of which is Hagia Sophia itself.

Skeptics peer Erdoğan’s decree as a closing-ditch call to his nationalist noxious for pork up as his political considerable person wanes amongst Turkey’s childhood. Even sooner than his disastrous Covid-19 response threatened to ruin the Turkish financial system (queasy about offending his non secular supporters, Erdoğan failed, for example, to impose quarantines on pilgrims strolling back from Mecca), he became once facing rising opposition over his crackdown on civil society and the judiciary and his disastrous facing of Turkey’s foreign affairs. After Russia’s killing of 33 Turkish troopers in February, he opened the border with Greece, deliberately upsetting violence between migrants and Greek locals. (Turkey became once battling a Russian offensive in northern Syria on the time, causing yet extra Syrian refugees to be displaced westward.) Within the fall of 2019, he led a disastrous attack on the Kurds in northern Syria, which Donald Trump helped mismanage into a chaotic bloodbath.

Erdoğan’s exploitation of Hagia Sophia—perhaps the ideal symbolic weapon in his arsenal—is therefore a bewitch at switching the political memoir, and it has worked. The pope is “deeply saddened,” as is the Armenian patriarch of Constantinople. The United Nations and Unesco are infected, their ire most productive matched by authorities spokespeople from Athens and Russia. Lecturers luxuriate in signed initiate letters. In a blunt response, Erdoğan’s deputy told Reuters that “the one real dedication-making authority in regards to the site of Hagia Sophia … belongs to Turkey. We waste no longer need anyone’s suggestion or suggestion on our own affairs.”

Possibly essentially the most attention-grabbing prognosis came from Japanese Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who noticed that the museum is a “symbolic spot of hit upon, dialogue, team spirit, and mutual view between Christianity and Islam,” and warned that its homogenization “will push thousands and thousands of Christians all the contrivance by means of the field against Islam.” It could be a execrable anachronism, he said, to raise a spot “in which East and West embody” and then forcibly “trigger a destroy between these two worlds.”

The museum’s closure is a loss to people in each spot, however unprecedented extra importantly, it’s a symptom of the no-holds-barred components Turkey’s premier is taking to his leadership. It is a call to non secular nationalism, of the an identical rabble-rousing strain that elected Trump within the U.S. It is also evidence that Erdoğan is working low on ways to present positive headlines—and reaching for closing resorts.