Hagia Sophia As A Mosque Was an Old Dream of Islamists Of Turkey Which Has Been Translated into Reality by Erdogan
By
Selim Koru
July 14,
2020
President
Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Friday issued a decree ordering the Hagia
Sophia, a majestic 65,000-square-foot stone structure from the sixth century in
Istanbul, to be opened for Muslim prayers. The same day, a top Turkish court
had revoked the 1934 decree by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the
Turkish republic, which had turned it into a museum.
A
19th-century illustration of the interior of the Hagia Sophia, before it became
a museum in 1935.
-----
The Hagia
Sophia was built as a cathedral and converted into a mosque, and then a museum.
It has for centuries been the object of fierce civilizational rivalry between
the Ottoman and Orthodox worlds.
The
reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was an old dream of Turkey’s
Islamists. In the Islamist political tradition of President Erdogan and his
Justice and Development Party, Ataturk’s experiment in secular republican
government was a foreign imposition on Turkey, and the Hagia Sophia’s status as
a museum a seal on the country’s spirit.
After
making the announcement, according to one report, Mr. Erdogan was so shaken
with emotion that he did not sleep until first light the next morning. What he
thought of as an era of humiliation had ended.
The
Hagia Sophia.
-----
After 1950,
when the Kemalist regime held the country’s first free elections, its political
enemies began to organize. Ataturk had died more than a decade before, and the
power of his memory was gradually waning.
Sections of
Islamist and pan-Turkic romanticists began campaigning for the reopening of the
Hagia Sophia. They believed that the secular republic, far from having saved
Turkey’s sovereignty, wounded it in the deepest sense possible: It had sold its
soul to Western modernity. The conversion of the Hagia Sophia was the symbol of
this humiliation.
The most
articulate expression of this view was delivered by Necip Fazil Kisakurek, Turkey’s
most prominent Islamist poet and polemicist of the time, on Dec. 29, 1965, at a
conference on the Hagia Sophia. Mr. Kisakurek said the decision to convert the
structure into a museum was to “put the Turks’ essential spirit inside a
museum.”
Referring
to Ataturk’s cabinet as a “clique,” Mr. Kisakurek accused them of committing an
act of unspeakable self-harm. “What the Western world has made us do inside,
through its agents among us, neither Crusaders, nor the Moskof [the Soviets]
nor the Hagia Sophia’s salacious coveters, the Greeks, have been able to do,”
he said.
The poet
said in that 1965 speech that the opening of the Hagia Sophia was a question of
time. “It shall be opened in such a way that all lost meaning, like the
bloodied and chained innocent, shall emerge from it weeping, in tatters,” he
said. “It shall be opened in such a way that in its cellars shall be found the
files of the evil ones who were thought to have done the nation good, and the
good ones who were thought to have done it evil.”
The dome of
the Hagia Sophia was erected by Emperor Justinian in the sixth century as the
central cathedral of Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire. In 1453, the
Ottomans launched a spectacular siege on the capital city of Constantinople and
consummated their victory by converting the Hagia Sophia, its main cathedral,
into a mosque, as was customary at the time.
It was this
moment of reversal — from Christian to Muslim — that fired imaginations across
Europe and the Middle East. Many dreamed of a day of reckoning as the Ottoman
Empire unravelled in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the World War I, Istanbul
was occupied by British, French, Italian and Greek forces, but even then,
Muslims did not give up the Hagia Sophia. When a group of Greeks wanted to
enter the building and install a cathedral bell, Ottoman soldiers drove them
away by threatening to blow up the entire structure.
Turkish
forces fought off the allied invaders under the leadership of a rebellious
Ottoman field marshal, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk), who went on to rebuild
modern Turkey. During his single-party rule, Ataturk abolished the sultanate
and set up a secular republic, enacting reforms to westernize the country by
decree.
There are
various myths about the reasons behind Ataturk’s decision to convert the Hagia
Sophia into a museum in 1934. What is certain is that he decided after
convening with Thomas Whittemore, a visiting American scholar of Byzantium, and
was interested in restoring the structure’s mosaics. Ataturk seemed to have
wanted to move the country past the medieval concepts of myth and holy
conquest.
When Mr.
Kisakurek, the powerful Islamist poet, raised the rallying cry for the
reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 1965, it is likely that Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, an 11-year-old boy in the working-class, religious
neighbourhood of Kasimpasa near the Golden Horn in Istanbul, would have heard
the poet’s call.
He would
also have heard how even Nihal Atsiz, a writer who advocated a pan-Turkic
identity over that of the Islamists, revered the Hagia Sophia and thought its
status a humiliation. And the young Erdogan might even have heard how Nazim
Hikmet, the great poet of the socialists, devoted stanzas to the Hagia Sophia’s
spirit in his youth.
As Turkey’s
prime minister between 2003 to 2014 and as the country’s president, Mr. Erdogan
has gradually dismantled all checks on his power and shifted the country’s
political center of gravity in his favour. The idea was always that opening the
Hagia Sophia for prayers would mark the maturation of Islamist power and cement
its gains. Do it too soon, however, and it could backfire, just as Ataturk’s
conversion had.
When Mr.
Erdogan addressed Turkey on July 10 after the court’s judgment, he cited Mr.
Kisakurek’s 1965 Hagia Sophia Conference and cited the other poets as well. The
Turkish president wanted the entire nation, not just the Islamists, to make the
spiritual journey with him.
In this
address to the nation, Mr. Erdogan did not mention Ataturk by name. He did not
have to. He quoted at length Mehmet the Conqueror’s will, which states that
whoever changes the status of the Hagia Sophia “has committed the most grave
sin of all” and that “the curse of God, the Prophet, the angels and all rulers
and all Muslims shall forever be upon him. May their suffering not lighten, may
none look at their face on the day of Hajj.”
A
visitor at the Hagia Sophia last week before it was turned back into a mosque.
Credit...Ozan Kose/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
-----
Various
authorities of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches voiced their
indignation, and the pope expressed “profound sadness.” The governments of the
European Union and the United States muttered their regrets. There are also
Christian extremists who care deeply about the Hagia Sophia and its symbolism.
These sentiments make the decision all the more exciting to many Turks.
The first
prayer at the Hagia Sophia mosque will take place on July 24, the anniversary
of the Treaty of Laussane, signed between the Allied powers and Turkey, which
drew the boundaries of modern Turkey. Mr. Erdogan will want the Western world
especially to watch closely, because the ceremony will represent what he
considers the reclamation of Turkish sovereignty from its clutches.
What comes
out of the Hagia Sophia’s gates today is a spirit that sees itself as
inherently good and its chosen enemies as inherently evil. It is the spirit of
revenge, and it has catching up to do.
Selim
Koru is an analyst at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara and a
writing fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Original
Headline: Turkey’s Islamist Dream Finally Becomes a Reality
Source: The New York Times
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/hagia-sophia-mosque-old-dream/d/122384
New
Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African
Muslim News, Arab
World News, South
Asia News, Indian
Muslim News, World
Muslim News, Women
in Islam, Islamic
Feminism, Arab
Women, Women
In Arab, Islamophobia
in America, Muslim
Women in West, Islam
Women and Feminism