Giulio Meotti
Last week, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued an unprecedented decree converting Hagia Sophia once again into a mosque. Erdogan’s decree is a gesture of immense symbolism and historic meaning. “A threat against Hagia Sophia,” said the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, “is a threat for the whole of Christian civilization”.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated:
“We urge the Government of Turkey to continue to maintain the Hagia Sophia as a museum, as an exemplar of its commitment to respect the faith traditions and diverse history that contributed to the Republic of Turkey, and to ensure it remains accessible to all”.
By appropriating the building, the defenders of political Islam seem to be trying to “erase Turkey’s Christian past”. A century ago, Christians made up 20% of Turkey’s population, while now the figure is just 0.2%. According to Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, in their book, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924:
Turkey has more Biblical sites in it than any other region in the Middle East except Israel. Turks in occupied northern Cyprus since 1974 have already wiped out its Christian past.
Inside Turkey, Erdogan has similarly escalated his war on the Syriac Church by seizing 50 churches, monasteries, and religious properties.
He also evidently wanted to inflict humiliation on the West. The day before his announcement, he expelled Christian missionaries. By turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque, Erdogan has been able to embarrass Washington, mock Brussels and defy Moscow.
For Erdogan and the Islamists, Hagia Sophia is the prime symbol of Christianity’s subjugation to Islam. “Hagia Sophia is the symbol of conquest”, said Yunus Genç, who heads the Istanbul branch of the Anatolian Youth Association. “It belongs to us”.
Its current change of identity appears part of a long, deliberate project of re-Islamization. In 2016, for the first time in 81 years, Hagia Sophia got its own imam. Earlier, in 2012, in Iznik, another Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque. The location was significant: Iznik, the ancient Nicaea, is where bishops from all over the Roman Empire had gathered in 325 to craft the Christian creed. A year later, in Trabzon, another famous Hagia Sophia, a museum since 1961, was also turned into a mosque and its Byzantine mosaics “covered with curtains and carpets”.
When Erdogan was campaigning to become the mayor of Istanbul in 1994, he was already talking about “the second conquest of Istanbul” and even then had set his sights on taking back Hagia Sophia.
“Celebrating a conquest that took place more than five centuries ago may seem anachronistic, I would even say absurd, to European leaders”, wrote the Turkish novelist Nedim Gürsel. “For Erdogan, the capture of Constantinople is another pretext for challenging the West”.
According to Tugba Tanyeri Erdemir, a research associate at the University of Pittsburgh, the transformation of Hagia Sophia might also “embolden extremists to intensify their campaign of forced conversion and destruction of minority heritage sites”.
“To convert it back to a mosque,” said Turkey’s Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, “is to say to the rest of the world unfortunately we are not secular anymore”.
Political Islam is on the offensive on many fronts. Its advocates have been flooding Europe with mosques. The “largest mosque in Europe” will be a Turkish one in Strasbourg. In Germany, Turkey controls 900 mosques out of a total of 2,400. Extremists have also been imposing on Europe a new ideological crime, “Islamophobia”, and have been financing and witnessing the “extinction” of all that remains of the splendor of Eastern Christianity that used to glorify these lands six centuries before Islam. Now, Islamists are converting Hagia Sophia into a mosque. They are not doing it only in their countries. In France, they have also asked for churches to be converted into mosques.
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