By
Saeed Naqvi
25 July
2020
Saint
Sophia museum in Istanbul being reverted into a mosque has brought back, like a
powerful refrain, that couplet of Mir Taqi Mir which has been an emotional
crutch for me on such occasions. For instance, when I visited the great Cordoba
mosque built in Southern Spain, in 786 AD and which was converted in 1236 into
a live Church.
Saint Sophia museum in Istanbul
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Mir said:
“Mut ranja kar kisi ko, ke apne to aeteqaad,
Jee dhaaye ke jo kaaba banaya to kya kiya?”
(Never hurt
a human being. It is not worth building even the House of God or Kaaba, if the
project breaks human hearts.)
Mir’s
contemporary, Mirza Rafi Sauda, inverts Mir’s image:
“Kaaba agar che dhaya to kya jaae ghum hai Sheikh;
Yeh qasr e dil naheen ke banaya na jaa e ga.”
(Destruction
of Kaaba is not as catastrophic as the breaking of the heart, which is
irreparable)
yusuf.yilmaz / Shutterstock.com
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From the
Bosporus, the Istanbul skyline is exactly like its picture postcards, a skilful
contrast of domes and minarets, slim as thermometers. The brooding Ayasofya
Museum stands apart. The greatest Byzantine Cathedral, built at the edge of Europe
in 537 was designed to dominate the panorama of the Marmara Sea and the Asian
mainland beyond.
The first
Arab probe of Sindh by Mohammad bin Qasim was in 711Ad, exactly the date when
Tariq Ibne Ziad crossed over from Morocco to set up station at what he called
Jabal al Tariq or the Rock of Tariq which the British renamed Gibraltar in 1704
after the famous Spanish-British naval engagements including the “Spanish
Armada”.
Turkey's ancient Hagia Sophia, which has been a museum for decades, is
now being turned back into a mosque, causing religious and political divisions.
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Before the
Iberian Peninsula turned into a cauldron of intra-European conflict, 800 years
of Muslim rule was somewhat unevenly spread across Spain. To flavour this phase
of history, one has to read Maria Rosa Menocal’s masterly, Ornament of the
World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians created a Culture of Tolerance in
Medieval Spain. The title itself tells the story. It is astonishing that in the
past three decades of gruelling Islamophobia, not one of our liberals had the
width of vision to recall phases in history when robust multiculturalism
thrived under Muslim rule. After Reconquista in 1492 by the Christians, the
Inquisition was much harsher on the Jews who found refuge in Morocco and later
in the Ottoman Empire.
The glory
of the greatest Eastern Orthodox Cathedral came under partial eclipse when the
Roman Catholic Church occupied it for six decades. But it was Sultan Mehmet’s
establishment of the Ottoman Empire in 1453 which caused the Cathedral to face
a predictable total eclipse. It was transformed into a mosque.
From the
debris of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Mustafa Kemal Pasha
“Ataturk” resurrected what is modern Turkey. He was determined to take his
country from “backwardness” into “modernism”.
In other
words, he turned his back on “Muslim traditionalism” and dreamt of a secular
Turkey, custom made for Europe. He replaced the Arabian alphabet with Roman
script for the Turkish language. He banned the Fez cap, brought the practice of
Islam under a department of Religious affairs attached to the Prime Minister,
and so on. Little wonder the texture of life in Istanbul and Ankara was more European
than Islamic, rather like North Tehran under the Shah of Iran.
But what
was the ingredient that made Turkey’s secularism comparatively more durable? It
was the Turkish army which became the guarantor of the Republic’s secularism.
Ataturk divined, and quite rightly too, that Sophia mosque would be an eyesore
for Europe, in perpetuity. With one executive order in 1934, it was reinvented
as a museum of Byzantine history.
It was
western callousness which, in the ultimate analyses, made Turkey’s secular
edifice vulnerable. Western, mostly American, Israeli hostility to Arab
Socialism (Egypt), Ba’athism (Iraq, Syria), Libya’s cradle-to-grave welfare
system (details for the Afghan tumult are only slightly different) which
promoted Islamic extremism on an unspeakable scale.
Details for
Turkey’s upheaval need to be explained. With the breakup of former Yugoslavia,
Serbian and Croatian nationalisms turned upon Bosnian Muslims with vicious
brutality. Srebrenica is only one chapter in that bleak and shoddy history.
Briefings by the UN military commander, Gen. Sir Michael Rose, were laden with
more gruesome detail by the day particularly the four year long siege of
Sarajevo. Balkans, the turf for continuous conflict throughout history between
the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, became a wide open killing field
when Belgrade could not hold Yugoslavia together.
The
helplessness of the Bosnian Muslims was unbelievable. Europe’s reason for not
intervening rang hollow. Its intervention, it was argued, would cause
individual European countries to take sides in a conflict in which World War II
adversaries, Serbia and Croatia were fighting each other over the spoils of
Bosnia.
Europe
being sucked into the Bosnian war carried the risk of under mining the very
purpose for which EU was being forged – to avoid conflict between member
states. This was sophistry, said Salman Rushdie. Reverse the religious
affiliations of the combatants, and European troops would be in Bosnia within a
day.
Mornings
evenings and afternoons, the Turks watched the brutalization of Bosnia and
Sarajevo, both an evocative part of Turkish historical memory. A powerful
anti-West, Islamist party, Refah or Welfare took shape and spread like prairie
fire. Necmettin Erbakan, founder of Refah, became Prime Minister. Citing the
secular Constitution, the Army summarily dethroned the “Islamist” Prime
Minister.
Erbakan’s
protégés, Abdullah Gul and Tayyip Erdogan, dismantled “Refah” and reappeared in
a secular garb as leaders of AK or Justice and Development Party. As evidence
of their secular credentials, they kept alive their application for membership
of the EU, European callousness notwithstanding. In fact, French President
Giscard d’Estaing virtually slapped Turkey across its face. “European
civilization is Christian civilization.”
After his
mishandling of Syria, misreading of Europe, the US and Russia, his popularity
in serious question, Erdogan has fallen back on the oldest trick in the
politician’s book – religious extremism. “Look”, he will address Islamists,
“like Mehmet, the conqueror, I have restored for your supplications a great
mosque.”
Original
Headline: Erdogan Seeks Populism Through
Religious Fundamentalism
Source: The Citizen
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/erdogan-fallen-back-oldest-trick/d/122492